E213 - What do Flying Cars Mean for the Future of Transportation?

Welcome to human factors yeah your weekly podcast for human factors psychology and design. Hey what's up everybody it is absurd 213 and after a month long hiatus we're back we're recording this live on 8/8/2021 this is human factors cast I'm your host Nick Roman I'm joined today by my good friend and yours Mr Blake are in store for how's everybody doing it's a good good time to be back I'm glad to be back to I was telling you in the pre show it's been you know not too long since you and I talked I mean we talk every week. But it's been a month since we recorded a podcast there were a couple planned absences there and then and not planned absence last week but we're back you know and if you haven't already check out last week's human factors hang out we actually caught up with them. With that rose Figueroa who is on the show last for our agency has 2020 recap. And we talked about the billionaire space race what it means for human factors and some forensic human factors topics it was it was good time it was a lot of fun we might do more of those in the future so stick around pay attention to all of our social stuff. And you might be tuned in to win those actually happen speaking of socials we only have one new story here on the show each week but if you want to be informed of what other cool interesting stories are going on around the human factors world we started posting a little bit more on those channels for some other news stories don't quite make the cut so. Be sure to check us out over there and I also mentioned HF yes in terms of upcoming conference coverage I think we we will have some coverage of this year's event. In what capacity we're still deciding I think for me with an end Blake to I think you know with some of these covert variants out their land delta delta plus the new subscription circuit service. I don't know if it makes a whole lot of sense for us to go I mean you know I have a young son whose son vaccinated because it can't be and so I'm. I don't know how much sense it makes to go in person but there is a virtual components so we will provide some coverage at least I think. But it with that I mean it's human factors news that's why you're here. That's right this is a part of a show all about human factors news this is where we talk about everything related to the field of human factors this week we got some aviation and transportation in their Blake what is the story this week well it's literally about a flying car so the certain flying car is definitely a bit of a misnomer in order to meet regulation guidelines many other vehicles currently in development are more like Manda drones are vertical takeoff and landing aircraft or beetle aircraft but the prototype just achieved a major milestone that actually fits the description of a flying car so Slovakia in company known as Klein vision recently completed its inaugural inner city flight between Detroit and brought slob up airports so with over 142 successful landings and 40 hours of test flights under its belt Klein is convinced that this third prototype is going to take a leap into the concept stage so the car prototype is equipped with 160 horsepower BMW engine awesome with a fixed propeller M. and a ballistic parachute what else do you need a flying car I guess in reality getting to the very end of being able to actually have these cars flying in every day life is still gonna be a big challenge the company will have to tread a fine line between being a light aircraft in a more substantial vehicle with health and safety precautions built in and however there are signs that regulators are coming around to the idea of flying cars in the US alone the FAA or Federal Aviation Administration recently granted terra for igas rode a bull airplane a special certificate in the light sport category take making it legal for actual little flights so it Nick this is pretty wild because when I saw the the name of the story like okay cool air car maybe just you know something different for a flood of flying car concept but this looks so much like a car with wing. Things it's kind of insane to look at. This is what I think of when I think of a flying car and I will kind of preface this conversation that if you are listening along or watching us live open up another tab and check out the video from Klein vision I this is an unseen video were you can crunch this car literally take flight and transform from a card to a plane and it hides it pretty well I mean you can still tell but like it's drivable on the road to it's kind of insane how how compact they can get this thing and so yeah I think this story should act as a springboard for us talk about the future transportation what it means for flying vehicles. And what this means for transportation in general I mean we talked about last time you and I met Blake we talked about transportation as it pertains to speed and how that impacts of various levels of socio economic status and how varying levels of sprawl are influenced by speed and I think this goes perfectly like kind of dovetails nicely with that right definitely does yeah yeah so there's a lot going on with the story. I think first let's just get I mean we kind of already got our reactions here this thing is awesome I want 1 is that is that a reaction I also obviously the part that I was so stoked about it in the video it's L. trying to do my best to describe it but I was really interested in what is it actually look like to have car controls plus I know if you know different controls for your aircraft it's even got lake in the car mode it's got you know the typical stuff you see in most a lot of modern cars so anything that's like you know come out from 2020 on has like a video camera set up so it's got you know cameras and all side which if you think about it makes a whole lot of sense for a driver that now has you know a much different type of roof and less of an ability to see what's exactly behind them because you're not really look you don't really have any kind of rear view mirror in the same sense you've now got you know airport parts of an airplane and a single propeller in the back and then in the case of like how does that translate to being an aircraft it looks like there's a lot of different gauges and even almost what looks like an iPad for navigation and things like that that are paying inside the the cockpit slash just you know regular everyday driver car so the design inside looks really sleek and seems like they've really taken a lot of care in terms of the components they knew they had to have probably for like safety and regulation compliance but also by bringing some modern feel that's you find in most you know drivers today. Yeah we'll talk about the the safety aspect of it in a minute here I'm trying to pull this up for anyone who's watching along with us. I'm just so that way they can kind of see what this is so we're looking at the flying car. What Blake said there's a lot of things that look different about it in the sense that you're not getting that rear view that you might get in a car because you got plane parts back there although it does resemble a car and with the displays you can see there's very streamlined. I'm and you know we can talk about this place too because they're different displays that are necessary for flight then there are 4. Just bike. Being on the road right for for the road you need the speedometer you need very very little information actually to make a informed decision about driving. With flight you add a third dimension to that mix and so you need an ultimate you need various status warnings for collision detection you need. A systems on board and this all comes of classification of aircraft to right I think they're going for a light aircraft class so they're they're held to different standards than something like you know a jet airplane. So I I I I love the design I love the the the. I wish I could show you the maiden flight but I think this thing is so slick looking and that's that's a concept but this is the actual thing you can see it in the thumbnail for this episode you can kind of see what it looks like. Yeah absolutely insane I don't know what he wanted what this is a wide open discussion Blake we wrote a couple notes here it's fairly open what do you want to talk about so I think the thing is really interesting to me is I don't understand you know the the in goal for the company because I think the way this is kind of coming off in the in the article it maybe this is the intent I'm not really sure but it feels like you're good like people are going to be able by flying cars we're in the reality is is it's it's still probably a rated pilot that was flying this thing and so it sounds like it's more likely to be some kind of service that allows you to use these kind of things like maybe they'll they'll take you know for people instead of 2 or whatever it is because one thing to know it and and if you watch the video you'll see this they don't showcases as much on their website but once you like see the pilot in the cockpit setting so they're getting ready to take off you'll notice like they got a headset on because I gotta stay in some kind of constant contact with some you know ATC and in wherever they are fly too now this case you're flying from airport to airport to you definitely understand you know pretty close contact with whatever ATC's you're going in between. But it the end of the day this is not like something you're gonna have a daily driver necessarily unless you become a pilot in some sense but the concept is really cool because I I think for a long time I assumed like flying cars would never really be a thing that you would just be it would turn into something else and this is literally a flying car. This is a plane with 4 wheels yeah it turns into a car I mean. Yeah it's it's kind of insane to like get that cockpit view from behind the pilot. And yeah they are controlling this fully. Manually right there's no automation are there's probably automated systems on board but it looks like this fight itself is not on auto pilot if not itself take off the cell I'm not automated take off and landing it is the part of this pilot is doing it so I'm. Yeah I don't know I think I think an interesting bit that you brought up was the constant communication with air traffic control I think there's got to be some like major restructuring and we talk about this a little bit with drones to write like. Rooms that occupy certain airspace made need to communicate with other systems like air traffic control or other supervisory control systems that are that are kept talking and communicating with all these things that are in the air so that way they don't collide with each other and injure anybody on board or anybody on the ground right and I think that goes for this too there's going to be some new level of. If if this became commonplace they'll be some new level of air traffic control because you have the surge of people who want to get their pilot's license so that way they can afford one of these and it seems like you know it. It's expensive but affordable for some. And talk about the socio economic. Implications here like we did last week but let's talk about the control I mean that would be cool ray because he be calling with being a pilot being trained you're gonna have to figure out how to interact appropriately with air traffic control and so you're gonna have to go through that to even get your your name your pilot's license so it I think in that regard almost still keeps things pretty safe unlike. Unlike the introduction of the drone we are now dealing with kind of more automated systems and then you have potentially somebody controlling multiple drugs at once and all the kind of chaos that can come with that now it's been solved pretty well in some instances either the FAA's worked a long time on regulations for different classes of airspace and drones but in this specific instance I think there's a lot of value. Potentially for it because it's going to keep you know that human in the loop the whole time and it's still gonna be the same thing now the problem that comes is like you said although like the classes of airspace definitely exist you're going to now have a lot more traffic in those lower classes of airspace. I'm assuming because this is talking about like an inner city flight between 2 really small airport so now you have you know airplanes like spy planes and things like that they're doing commuter traffic all the time and now we're talking about you know potentially a bunch of cars that are also taking off at the same time. Which brings its own kind of risks I guess because now you have to make sure that everybody is following all the same rules within the airport's guidelines as well so it does it does lend itself to not really being a consumer product if you will but some kind of service driven product which to me in some ways and I'd love to get your opinion on this neck it begs the question of really why do this because it's it's not necessarily going to just be something most people can use and DO it's going to have to become nearly like an airplane yeah and I even if it's democratizing. The flight right I think. With. I I'm I'm trying to wrap in so Matteo in our chat right now posted an article about how cars will flying cars will undermine democracy in environment to go into these points about scale right about if if billionaires get their hands on these than. You know it's just another toy however if this becomes more of a of a widespread thing then you're gonna have to be some serious structural issues that need to occur to help mitigate the you know like air traffic lanes and regulations so that way you don't fly too close to somebody well you could take a long time to do that because I know like how the struggle a lot of drone stuff has been they just like it just takes a lot of time to test the stuff and get it right because it it can cost lives if you get a wrong in a in a pretty large scale way yeah I met in these flying cars colliding in the middle of the sky and just coming down. Raining was that raining planes that well that's the part that I think is the most scary right so an accident with an airplane there's few overlooked their sphere of them in the sky it doesn't happen as often but now if we scale it up and they're smaller in their cars in lower classes of airspace it's it's not even just like the accident happening being bad but it's more of like that the kind of collateral damage that happens from a car falling out this guy. Even the you know over the middle of anywhere like an interstate or anything like that so it has a lot of lot of work to be done in terms of figuring out the logistics of it which I thought was really interesting that in the U. S. there there there seems to be some company that's getting a little bit of a legal leeway it's like in terms of like the light sport category that tear for you guys put together for this like Wrobel plane of theirs. But that seems hyper specific for a purpose not necessarily like potentially a commercial utility which I think is really what Klein's vision is because I want to keep building on this prototype concept. Yeah I mean what's interesting is that we're in a space right now where this is not commonplace. And you know the first automobiles were a luxury item and you know everyone else horse drawn carriage. And so I think that. If this does become more commonplace it will be a billionaire story to begin with however I feel like we know enough now at this point about aviation about automation. About safety in general that we can implement. Things from human factors perspective that will help reduce the likelihood that you know anything bad will happen like let's just say. For example. You have some automated systems on board the take care a lot of the pilot things for you right like let's say you have an auto pilot mode you go to a an error airport and you basically put in auto pilot mode that takes off and lands for you you do nothing and flight all the controls are disabled unless you need to hit emergency switch for like a parachute or something. I think doing it that way relinquishing your control to an automated system that can do it better than human. In some cases right there are some pretty outstanding issues with automation and how if you're not kept in the loop or of automation interpret something poorly like the how the F. 18 killed pilot almost go listen to that episode it was a rapist wild story ever so with that thing there are certainly instances in which automation can backfire and misfire and. In a poorly however generally once those things are ironed out I feel like point a to point B. flight is going to be much more easily accessible for the common person so long as they can afford it and then you know you have that like it it might even open it up to a different role right like let's say you don't have your pilot's license and in order to use these automated systems you need to relinquish your control to somebody that maybe you pay a service for right like Hey you pay another operator to control your vehicle from the air traffic control tower while you're taking off and it puts it on automated path and then somebody else lands it for you you pay service and somebody who's trained can do it with the on board systems almost like them flying a drone. And of course they would probably have to get certified in different ways because they are then responsible for human lives on a drone. And it gets messy but if we build for that infrastructure in the future it could be really promising for safety right I think I I don't think it's. Impossible to implement something like this I just think that if we do it we have to do it right and we have to think about all the human factors implications from. From the point of purchase purchasing this thing. 2 you know that the end of their final flight. Absolutely yeah I think well I think what's really interesting about the whole concept is aviation is a great test bed for this kind of like automation right and you know and keeping humans in the loop of it and even letting them be a little bit outside of it depending on the type of pilot operations you're dealing with and so there's probably a lot of great existing technology now we just brought up or you just brought up a an instance of course of automation going wrong in the F. 18 there's plenty of those that exist that stick out like a sore thumb because of the reality of how horrific they can be but adult at scale it seems like there's a lot of great automation already cooked into a lot of giant aircraft so it's a great opportunity to continue using what what's been learned from the lessons learned perspective of engineering human factors and also just you know CRM so crew resource management studies and things like that. I love the idea maybe it's because I want to see more kind of like drone operations are like how operation centers can work with drones amid the challenges that brings from a tech standpoint and from the human factor standpoint but I think providing services for people like that that allows them to if they can if they can afford to get the car or the service great but then it keeps them safe and also keep everybody else safe it should they make a mistake or should something go wrong in the air and they're not you know aviation trained for you know handling an emergency or whatever it may be. I said I love the idea of this becoming some sort of service then if it if it caters to the older rich at the beginning I think ultimately it that will change over time with if we'll see it I don't know but it's just like what you brought up with cars cars were originally some luxury item and now it's kind of a ubiquitous thing in some ways. But I don't know I didn't I have a hard time really seeing the utility of this I love the concept because I think it's fun to put a BMW engine in a car and then make it fly but from it like well how does it you know change the landscape of you know technology to the world I'm unsure of its impact well I I hear here's one impact for you. You live in a metropolitan area we both do where you know flight is not as crucial to us right like. Maybe I could fly down to San Diego. With one of these things I don't know what the ranges. But you know like that might be one thing is it makes it easier to see family makes it easier to conduct business it makes it easier to personalize your trips so like think of the person in rural Utah who like. Is it takes forever to get to the Salt Lake City airport. And they have family in another state where it might be inconvenient to drive that far right like from Utah to I don't know Georgia or something. You know without them getting to I guess maybe even even less than that right let's say you try to Montana right and if you're unfamiliar with geography look at the U. S. map they're pretty close but far enough to where it's inconvenient to drive and to close to fly if you have family there might be worth it especially if you have a field where you could take off and land at each location which is kind of crucial in this case for this specific type of car they were they need that space yeah for this type of car and I do want to touch on that too right we know of 2 different types one is basically a glorified drone that has you know quad copters on it or multiple. Rotary coppers on it that that basically acts as a helicopter brings you up put you down this one seems like it could be more longer distance flight. And so that's why I'm kind of mentioning these further distances right where like a drone might be inter city travel and so anyway I I can think of that as a use case right where you may be. Maybe you live on a farm and you have an animal emergency and you know the there's no doctors around and you need to fly to someplace close right you put your sheep in the passenger seat and then let go right. I don't know a little bit and just call in a helicopter that point but. I don't I can think of a couple of use cases where this might be useful for people it would it would certainly help close the gap between rural country you know. Areas in the city area because then it becomes that much easier to get to if he doesn't land on the tarmac and pull right off of it into the city. You know you have to compete with all the passenger planes and you probably won't get priority but you know if your feet landed a municipal airport yeah and that's the beauty of this is that you could kind of take off and land as long as there's space and a municipal airport there's it depends on the municipal airport but. You could probably find some availability in one of those right or if there's an opening somewhere that's why communication with ATC is crucial because they can help get you to where you need to be. Mmhm and it kind of opens up you know different different pathways that you can take. Yeah I don't know I'm. Is there any are there any there's. I'm trying to think here so there's a ton of different points that we can make about this. Mmhm. Are there any other ones you wanna touch on before we move on. Sorry I do love the idea you did break up which is this it could be a way of making things more connected because we talked a little bit about that in the past and I mean that the rural to city kind of flight that could be a kind of a large impact on people's lives. Both end up in the positive and the negative but a bead if you could imagine instead of building a giant airport and or like trying to connect an airport with like a small municipal one or something like that if you could just throw tarmac down with you know fire these cars they can fly back and forth that could you know change a lot of people's lives or make you know services more accessible to them. And it also could be test beds for you nope technology companies like this that want to get into more of like the flying car game if you will. And I'm sure there are different types of services like this that would be you know useful and interesting to go through I think one part of it that would be hard to keep track of it maybe this is getting a little too outside the realm but one thing that I know when you're a pilot I don't yes Sir I don't know the exact hours but there's some limitation to when you can fly and like if you flown like X. amount in the in the most recent future tracking that way if people could be hard to do with some of these like if the especially this is a car that belongs to someone it's not necessarily like up a pilot that has that our service that has it so like the fatigue aspect of trying to fly one of these if you're like really tired could have a really big you know big impact on how somebody's able to operate it because I mean I I know it's silly that we're talking about flying cars and that kind of like seems so Jetsons like is dated as that makes me sound but at the end of the day like this is something with the wings that you're having to you know take down strap on and then go into the air and I mean it's attached with a ballistic parachute so there's just not there's still like a lot of training aspects it would have to go into getting this thing ready because you can you imagine showing up the tarmac this is the first you bought this car let's say and that you've got to attach the wings and make sure that the rotors are all ready to go for on the propeller and everything I would have no idea how to make sure this thing was safe before I started trying to fly and read the instruction manual you got it yeah right I doubt it's. I mean yeah right now it seems like a hobbyist game right like it it seems like unless there's somebody regularly maintaining these. Then it's it's going to be a hobbyist type thing where you own this this device the vehicle that could take you from point a to point B. I want to talk about because I think a lot of the stuff that we're talking about here kind of dances around this question I wanna talk about it. You know there's ride sharing services. And I see this as a great. A great way to democratize flight. No we talked about sort of the accessibility of rural to city and if all you need is like a little landing strip for these types of aircraft you could have 5 or 6 in an area have an uber or lift competitor or something like that you know. Regularly maintaining them. And so. The if if you have some sort of regular maintenance and I would imagine it's kind of to. Mandated by the FAA and some we were here regard right. Add to where you are regularly checking these things out. Then you could have you know flights from from basically anywhere in the country to anywhere in the country with. You know it it's that last mile travel that we. Talk about a lot of time at some you know when you land in a major city to get from the airport to your destination. It takes a lot of effort to get the rental car and and go to the hotel and purchase parking and get into the hotel. But what about the other way right what if you need to go what if you need to go rural. Then it becomes not last mile but it then becomes last 20 miles and if you were to just hop into one of these ride sharing services that took off from that same airport that you just landed at throw your cargo in the trunk take off and land in the country like that would be life changing for a lot and you know you might see more development around some of these tarmac that pop up you know in the country and then you might have more cities more more spread out. Country you know I like I don't know it it just seems like it's right before the ride sharing kind of experience because then you have not only you don't you have like the automation taking care of everything. You have somebody regularly maintaining these things. And it kind of absolves you of responsibility if anything goes wrong. You'll be dead absolutely yeah but you're not responsible for it I mean that's kind of like I don't I don't know how I mean how sick would be if you did it like let's say Nick needed to go to San Diego for just a day it F. like these bird scooters you go just hopping one cars and it was just like you could drive the car maybe the cars even got automation at it but the flight part is all automated I mean you're from take off to landing you're just you're Chillin and then you can drive your every need to go through with it all depending whatever airport you land in and then do the things you need to do throughout the day get back in the car let it fly you home in the drive to drive into your last mile home like it there could be a lot of really cool opportunity for events like that like having a parking lot full of these cars that you can just let people rent and of course there's a lot of technology issues you have to resolve and and a fair amount of trust you be putting in these you know giant flying cars. But you're you're right there could be I don't know I could provide you know. Bening's for just different like business things that you want to do or like lucky I don't know meeting people you don't see all the time right so it has a lot of interesting aspects to it for sure and I I love the brought the last mile back into it because yeah could change how people you know went about their day because I know my old band he spent most of his life you know on an airplane and then having to go get a rental car and then driving to a hotel and then doing it all over again every day in so doing something like this now I mean it's still a lot of you know work on the human and like stress on your body but having kind of like so they cut out or cutting out the middle man if you will at the very beginning and end could save a lot of time and stress and things like that. Look man you and I could sit here and talk about this for ever I wanna leave our listeners with a couple of like prompts about this right and then and then we gotta move on. Because we only have so much time in the show I would I would just mention these and these are like questions to leave you with right how would this impact traffic or ride sharing services we kind of talked about that a little bit how would this impact wildlife how would this impact commercial flying industry if at all. How environmentally friendly is this type of thing yeah that's we can consider safety feature what kind of safety features all we need to make sure are in there. What about the inequality that we talked about last episode with sprawl and affordability of transportation options. Mmhm you know how how fast do these things travel. It thinking thinking about the speed implications that we talked about last episode. I'm. And then city planning how would this impact city planning I mean we talked a little bit about it with putting a tarmac in the middle of the country and maybe having a city built around it how would impact other places so I just think about those that's that's what we'll leave you with on these I just want to thank our patrons for choosing this topic and thank you to our friends over at Klein vision and gadget for news story this week you wanna follow along join me on office hours worked on Tuesdays where I find these news stories and we do post the links to all of our regional articles on our weekly round ups on our blog so go check those out you also join us on a slack or discord for more discussion on the stories of you if you have answers to any of those questions I left you with please join us over there and let us know how we're gonna take a quick break and we're gonna see what's going on in the human factors community right after this human factors cast brings you the best in human factors news interviews conference coverage and overall fun conversations into each and every episode we produce but we can't do it without you. The human factors 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part of the show we like to call came. Just getting that's me I did that and it down. I did say that I would change it though it so I am on the hook for that what you love that graphic that's your favorite I like little slide in and everything I love to hate it how about that let's switch gears get to it came from this week it's all over reddit I just want to show research all over the internet to bring you topics the community is talking about any topic really is fair game as long as it relates to the field of human factors you X. design psychology that type of thing and it encourages discussion among us so we have 3 tonight I'm. All those is real long one of this is real long while they're all from the user experience sub reddit will get to the the super long one first because I think this is an interesting perspective that not all of us get to the 3 it says how much you access to much and this is by Adam lentil on the user experience I brought it. I'm. I'm gonna truncate as I read this so this is a project manager looking for user experience professionals perspective. They've recently brought on board a U. acts lead on to their team they're starting to get to the point where they feel that there is an expense excessive amount of. You express the seas and U. S. related activities being introduced to the way we work I'm starting to question it. If all the U. X. process these are worth the time and budget and it's really making a positive impact to the user we do have KPI set but sometimes product changes take a long time to impact KPIs so it's hard to tell if our process is really making an impact to users before the you actually joined there was a researcher and 2 designers on the team I would fill the role the team lead for all them. Let's see here they have some experience with graphic design and you access so they felt comfortable guiding that team. Church talking about their experience here. They'd run surveys when they lacked insights from the user yet do brainstorming workshops they're basically saying they didn't do as much as this you actually does after the U. X. lead has joined now the average of 2 weeks is starting to become 8 weeks and a lot more additional you activate you X. activities are being introduced as mandatory steps otherwise quote we don't know if we're just solving the right thing end quote we're working on hunches or your own guesses we don't have X. evidence of how Axel impact the user experience these are all quotes from the user experience lead. Mmhm. So basically this project manager product manager is asking how much you X. is too much is this you actually justified in doing all this stuff. So the last point I make here is there the product manager they personally feel invested in the project wanna be part of the solution. But if they don't accept the proposed solution. Even if it's considered a change request they go back to step one they're stuck in this debate. I'm. So basically bottom line anyway this post is getting a bit long now but I hope this paints a picture of my situation. What do I do do I accept the solution that's given to me because the U. X. process been followed we don't know for sure if it's right or wrong until the developers build it and it's in the hands of the users or what what what is what's going on here Blake wow this this there's a lot happening it seems like and I think it goes back to what this like this PM that was previously you X. designer said in the beginning in the in the case of the way they're doing things in the thank key performance indicators or KPIs they're measuring it takes a lot of time you can't just release something and tomorrow you know did it have a great impact the thing I'm not quite understanding is I think that it it does sound like what the U. X. practitioner you ex person is putting into place may ultimately be helpful and may help things over time but there has been enough time in place where they've actually you know executed the process it's made it into development and now they're witnessing how users are interacting with it and you know how key metrics they have on the application R. I'm a little confused about what math what methods are being put in place though that they they're not rapidly understanding the decisions they're making in a like user interaction with that context like if they're not doing you know lo fi usability task or you know cognitive walkthroughs or any of that stuff it sounds like there's a lot of process he's going on to keep them away from the users I'm not understanding here I mean maybe why it could be why this PMC was frustrated because they may be feeling like well. You're putting processes in place but you're making judgments you know based off of your own experience more so than like our users our user experience our product but I do think there is a key point here I mean it there is a difference between the 2 roles and I think at some point this PM was much more involved in the solutions that the team is coming up with and I think now they've got kind of a different role and so it that can be a hard adjustment to kind of make too but at the end of the day I don't think there's really a not off I don't know what the time lines look girl like right so it may be that they just need to let the process run out and see what the impacts are be ready to measure that stuff when when it makes it into development so they can actually make an assessment of is this process working is it not it may be that there needs to be a discussion have between the PM and the U. acts lead to say like okay I understand that there's a need for some different ways of approaching our design problems got it but they they have to fall within a you know a specific time line we can't be going outside a budget because if it's if it's really like gone from 2 to 2 to 8 weeks in terms of just getting designs done and we're not really interacting with development throughout that and it's like up almost sounds very stove piped that could be problematic and sometimes you have to real people and and be like okay we only have limited time one of the best methods we can use to help us give them both get the most out of the time that we have available to us in the budget that we have. But Dick from your perspective like what what do you think in here what what do you think it this person should do or could do to kind of correct the situation they're in so if you're familiar with reddit there's a sub reddit called am I the **** and basically it's. Paints a picture of a situation and then the users respond if they are in fact an **** or not and the that that there's a middle ground where everything is shitty here and that is what I am that's what I'm going to respond with on this one I feel like there's a lot of miscommunication going on between the U. acts. Factional and there's a lot of. Misunderstanding by the product manager so I feel like the product manager doesn't quite understand that that is the U. S. professionals. Job is to gather user research however that user experience professional should be communicating what the return on investment is for some of these. These processes that they're implementing right say Hey if we do this methodology this is what we will get out of it and this is how it will impact our system. I think that that level of communication is not happening right now I think. It seems like this user experience professionals is going on and doing the things that they know but they're not communicating what the outcomes are or how it will impact the product and it seems like they're just kind of going through these. These hoops to make sure to check the boxes and say yes we've done this we've done that. And so I think there's a lack of understanding on both sides and so what I will say in response to this very lengthy question is to focus on communication I think communication is a huge deal in the professional environment and if one person is not on board with what the role of somebody else is doing then there's going to be these types of posts on reddit where we have to try our best to understand what's going on in this situation but to me as an outsider looking in there's a lack of communication between these 2 roles and it's causing doubt from the product managers perspective. And it sounds like the U. S. professional is not communicating what they're doing right I'm obviously as a human factors professional and giving you extra federal probably a little bit more leeway here they probably know what they're doing they probably. Have a plan but they're not communicating it and so what's the deal they could just also be doing too much I don't know right that's kind of the trick with the situation is we don't know we don't have the insight into that situation we can't tell. But yeah I subtle reminder or not so subtle reminder from neck to communicate and to make sure that not only what you're doing is communicated but why you're doing it is communicated and also what you will get out of it is communicated there's 5 what question 5 questions that you can ask who what when they're where why make sure your answering all of them when you're communicating with people on your team I don't know anything else Blake. Yeah it's it's a rock and a hard place right because you know that there is there's a lot of methods in the toolbox you axe HF and there you know that there's a Best golden path like I could do all these cool things I got a whole I got to have a whole lot of impact it seems like that's what this new you actually just trying to do trying to implement real design process season trying to make sure that from end to end the U. X. process is done right and X. successful for the product. But like you're saying the communication is just not bear on top of it it I would take if I'm taking a gas looking at this from you know 100 feet back they're trying to do too many things in a limited amount of scope into making a gold and this is the best way to do U. acts type of process where really you need something quicker and dirtier so you can keep doing it faster show utility get the PM off your back type of thing so it's a it's a tough situation for both people I would imagine all right I'm gonna get into this next one here because I promise you that first one is very long but these next 2 are pretty short so this next one here is from acco Aizenman 9 on the user experience I've read it this is so I need real world experience but I'm having trouble getting it where do I find places to do free work for people in U. acts design or for that matter human factors are there any sub reddits or websites I can gain real life experience with I want to do an internship but I can't get hired to do any internships yet because I don't have a lot of real world experience so I was told that the best thing to do is work for free for various people and companies build my portfolio up and then seek out internship later when I have at least 2 years of experience. So if there are any places or sub reddits that allow free work to be posted I would really appreciate it sorry if this is a stupid question no questions are stupid. Thank you very much to anyone who takes the time to answer this you're very welcome I appreciate it Blake thank you for taking the time to answer this what do you think okay I got 4 things wow I can do I said make it short I'm just gonna go so you can get you can scour read the U. X. sub reddit I got my first ever job as you access signers working with a mobile app developer that way just doing the work and saying Hey I did this thing let's talk about it. There is a. Doug.are a nonprofit called designing gigs for good.org and it is literally a place that nonprofits post job offerings for doing design work or getting involved in design stuff they have a slack it's a great place to go for that kind of stuff there is another really great kind of slack community for designers specifically called the design X. community it's just another place you can go and try and get people to you know help you out figuring out getting your first design job getting some experience the last thing that I will mention is it's called amazing design people's list AT PLS.org it's an organization that again let you get connected with a lot more designers and I've had a lot of success with students being able to find people to work with on collaborative projects so it's there's a lot of different resources out there read it is a great one and then there's we just listed 3 more they can help you. If not find that first gig start building that network they could you know help you find that first free job or whatever it may be let me jump in with a networking thing because that's what I was gonna lead with yet networking is huge if you go to a conference and mention the somebody that you're looking for work chances are they'll know somebody who can put you in touch with somebody else that maybe you don't need that extra work to get hired you might even be able to bypass the whole process second. I was going to mention to re frame what you've already done as experience I'm sure you've worked on something in the classroom for a project as a team those skills transfer outside of the classroom make sure that you're communicating that when you go up for one of these internships and say look I've done a project like this in a classroom setting but here the skills that I learned from it and these are the outcomes you know and and. I think you know everything the Blake said is is good too I'm gonna keep this answer short but I I think networking so you can bypass this entire process because I think 2 years of experience with real world thing it's that whole why why do free work I don't know it's anyway. It's not a stupid question I think you know re framing your current experience could help a lot with that too. Okay one more Blake you ready let's go all right how to go through an absurd amount of qualitative material this is by suspicious asking on the user experience sub reddit hello everyone after crawling through some reviews on some competitors and one of the code understand key words most frequent complaints and overall feelings of users but how I found myself. Now I found myself with more than 5000 lines of content on sheets and all of them have somewhat long comments was searching through some tools and was wondering if any of you have any tips of software methods to go through all this content thank you Blake. Wow yeah if you've already got key words and stuff like that that might be helpful just to analyze you know that'll loan done did give you an understanding if you can start chunking the data because if you owe 5000 lines of content to deal with if you've already got some stuff like key words are most frequent complaints and stuff that's already chunk for you finding some patterns within there is gonna be the easiest thing I'm a big fan of just excel for this kind of stuff I don't really use any kind of fancy tools or anything like that but ultimately the deal becomes you want to probably work with more than just one researcher if you have access to them because 5000 pieces of content it's a lot to go through I would divvy it up between other researchers and other teammates and be looking for themes that you bought you all can come up with based off of what is important to either your users your product goals or your business goals and again use what you already have your disposal to get you some idea of what all the data is related to. Yeah I would say this kind of goes back to the other question that we answered of how much you access too much and I think understanding what the R. O. Y. return on investment is for. This specific task of looking through all this data what are you going to get out of it how important is it if it is very important you can take that to management and have them justify a fancy tool that will go through and look and analyze these things for word bubbles although I will second Blake's opinion that I usually use excel for this too I don't typically analyze things bit by bit 5000 lines it seems like a lot but honestly if you're pouring through data that's not that much. If they're looking if you're looking for just the comment section hopefully if you've created this you set it up to where you can understand the comments in the context of something otherwise if they're just general comments it's a little bit more difficult. But if you're looking through them then you can start to pull out themes and that's what I do is I I look through comment sections first off when I build surveys or build usability studies I build in comments for everything so that way if they have any additional comments they can comment there so I know the context of that comment and then I leave a general thing at the very end if there's anything catch all right and so if you're looking for specific things then you have the least those categories that you can start with. And look for themes within those categories but if you're just going off of one column then just just glance over it and you'll start to see themes emerge ready quickly if you read it you know every tenth thing or. Every long comment and if they're all along then just read a couple of them I mean you'll start to see themes and then you just go through and categorize a couple to where you seen enough and go okay yes these are my themes got it. Anything else like that's perfect man that's exactly what they would have to do all right let's get in one more thing it's been a minute since you and I talked I want to know what's going on in Blake's world what's one more thing oh man one more thing I've finally like kind of cracked the code on how I learned stuff and I I stole it from house somebody taught me to learn how to code so I've been struggling for a long time understanding guitar theory I'd like bees like they're in general but based mainly how it applies to the guitar. I didn't really know how to go about learning it I've had various guitar teachers and stuff like that it's not been super successful for me but what I kind of like happened upon is when I was learning to code it was a lot about like yeah I I took like a coding boot camp but it was more about building when I found a platform that I liked it was the fact that I got to the point where I didn't need to watch whatever video I could just see what the prompt was for the code I could build the thing and then if I did that and I want to do something else with it taking the time in like pushing the course of siding going and doing something extra and then going up and looking up documentation for something else I wanted to do so like taking the basic skills and then expanding upon them has been something that's really helped me become a better front end developer so I started doing that with 8 with learning guitar music and guitar theory basically and one thing to help me do that was building a small application that was up it's basically a random note generator the gives me exercises to do every day and so it's finally allowed me to understand because I know all the notes on the fretboard and I like spend a lot of time coding it and have like the at the circle of fords and all that kind of stuffing it integrated into it it combine 2 ways that I learned using tack and performing an action to really just give me another way to appreciate music and appreciate technology together so it's been a fun couple of weeks I guess for me it while we have been podcasting awesome dude I could go on and on and on about how moving sucks I'll talk about some else because I forgot about that last time I'll talk about gap blockers so gap blockers are these little. Like plastic shields that. You put in a gap so think about like your couch where you might not want your toddler to. Roll the car underneath it or you don't want your cats getting under your bed or you don't want dirt and food to get under your couch or something like that you buy these gap walkers. That you sit in about you know 3 inches or so just behind. The feet of whatever it is that you're trying to block and a block things from going in so we we you know my son has these cars that you wind up and they go right and you know we have to frequently like unhook the couch and pull it out and sweep under the couch because all of his goldfish and stuff are down there and then like you know pull out the cars and all the toys we install these things on Monday night and now there's no gap in between the the there's a gap in between the floor on the couch and we blocked it so that way if anything tries to get under there we just pick it out it's like 3 inches it's it's life changing ourselves amazing life changing and it keeps like depending on how tightly you make the connections right it keeps like dust and trash and everything out from underneath so theoretically you shouldn't need to you know get under them unless you're deep cleaning getting out all the dust right and you'll probably need to do that once every couple months especially if nothing's getting under there it's fan tastic I can't go on about it enough. That sounds amazing that could change my life with the amount of dog care that you you she adds yeah scapes under the couch in the tree goes up 3 months later like another dog no no kidding all right well that's gonna be it for today everyone let us know what you guys think of the new story this week you can hang out with us on our slack or discord get to us on any of our social channels like I said we do post other news stories there you can visit our website sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date with all the latest human factors news like what you hear you will support the show there's a couple ways you can do that one leave us a 5 star review it's free for you to do that really helps the show like comment subscribe to whatever thing you're watching us on right now follow do all that it really helps the algorithms can help other people like you find the show tooth speaking of other people finding the show tell your friends about us that really helps word of mouth I can't tell you how many people said they heard the show heard about the show from somebody else please tell your friends and 3 if you like what we're doing and want to support us financially consider supporting us on Patreon actually you're supporting us but you're also helping others listen and enjoy the show for those who maybe can't listen you know transcribing this podcast takes a lot it's always leaks all over social and website are in the description this episode I don't think Mr Blake ours are for me on the show today we're kind of listeners go and find you they wanna talk about flying aircraft. You guys can always find me in the human factors caste discord or slack at Blake and preachers what it is and then across social media at don't panic you axe as for me I've been your host if world you can find the streaming on twitch Tuesdays at 1:00 Pacific that might change profits hours and across social media at Nick _ Rome thanks again for tuning in human factors cast until next time it depends.