E292 - Twitter, X, and Trust

[00:00:00] Nick Roome: hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Human Factors Cast. I can't believe tomorrow is September. By the time you're listening to this, it's probably September. , we're recording this live on August 31st, 2023. Like I said, this is Human Factors Cast. I'm your host, Nick Rome. I'm joined today by Mr.

Barry Kirby. Hello. And Kate Preston is back to join us since we didn't scare her away last time. Hello. It's good to be back. Good to have you, Kate. We got a fantastic show for you all lined up tonight. We're gonna be diving into Twitter, X, whatever you wanna call it, and how trust is a finite resource in human factors.

Plus, we'll be tracking down some burning questions from the community such as artifacts you can use in your portfolio. We'll also be discussing how to convince stakeholders to let you do your job, and we'll also explore how to incorporate research into the early stages of product development.

Some riveting questions, but first we got some programming notes. Hey we have some stuff I guess here that I will read out. Episode three of Safe and Effective is out now. So please go listen to that if you can. You have a long weekend to do so I would appreciate that Heidi would appreciate that.

It's a great episode. Encourage y'all to go to listen to it. Wherever you're at right now, if you wanna leave us a review, that'd be really nice of you, and we'd be eternally grateful. And you know what? If you wanna become a Patreon member too, you can do that and influence the show. We can always talk about that later.

But Barry, I have to know what's going on over at 1202

[00:01:25] Barry Kirby: 1202, we talked about the di differences in the balance between academia industry. We, in the interview with Dr. Mark Young. Mark is the current president, elector of the Charter Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors. But he's recently after a number of years in industries, he's moved back into academia.

And so therefore, I take the time to ask him what's the difference and what do we think the different drivers are for both sides, and how do we get to, how do we get to understand each other better? As usual, probably well worth, rather than me trying to explain it, you're gonna have a listen.

Find out what you think and hit me up with it, with your comments afterwards. Yeah,

[00:01:58] Nick Roome: give, really give it to him. I really want you to give him the hard questions. Alright. Let's get into the news.

That's right. This is part of the show all about human factors news. Barry, what is our story this week?

[00:02:09] Barry Kirby: So this week we're talking about the Twitter X dilemma trust as a finite resource in ux. So a recent article titled the Twitter X Dilemma Trust as an As a finite resource in UX highlighted the importance of trust in user experience.

Trust is sacred because it plays a vital role in how users perceive and interact with a product or a platform like Twitter or X. When Twitter's, when users trust a platform, they're more than likely to engage with it and rely on it as a source of information. On the other hand, when trust is eroded, users may become hesitant to use the platform or view the information provided with skepticism.

This article emphasizes the need for proper design and ethical practices to build and maintain trust. It breaks it down into a hierarchy of trust building elements, including user control, transparency, ease of use, consistency and accessibility. Conversely, lack of control, lack of transparency, and an unfriendly interface can erode trust.

As practitioners in the field of human factors, it's crucial for us to understand the impact of trust on user experience and design products and systems that prioritize trust building elements. This article also highlights the importance of human-centric design and the role of practitioners in enhancing user trust through thoughtful design choices and ethical practices.

So Kate, taking all that into account, what are your thoughts on the wonderful way X is evolving?

[00:03:30] Kate Preston: Okay. My initial reaction is it's a real shame. So I have used Twitter since it first started. I remember getting it, it was what, 2013? Something like that. And it's all the tweets are still there.

I haven't deleted them. So if you go back and off, it's really embarrassing and no, please don't though. But it is embarrassing. But I also now use it a lot for my work and I spent ages like curating my followers and getting a good group of people and I always enjoy my feed. And I also use it to recruit lots of participants for our PhD work.

Really useful. And then suddenly one morning I woke up and it was an ex and I didn't know what was going on. And I would like to say before I start on, I don't hate or dislike Elon Musk 'cause I know a lot of people do. I do think SpaceX is great. I think what he's done there and with Tesla is fantastic.

And he is clearly quite smart because he did the oh, PayPal as well. But the guy should not be allowed to tweet or X is what it's called. You sent Xs? Is that it? I dunno. And I also wouldn't like to put my finances on a everything app. But anyway my biggest problem I have with it is just the fact that he just took over Twitter.

And suddenly changed it into a platform he wanted to develop and create instead of going the right way and starting from scratch using his influence to get people to join in with this app. And I think that's what produced my trust. And I think it will probably be the same for a lot of people.

I think the minute he starts changing it into this everything app, it would just drop off. I generally do believe that he would've had a lot more people trusting his work and what he's doing if he had started from scratch. But he wasn't very transparent about it. And you can see that he only tweet once or something about it.

And I didn't know about it until I read the article. But we and other human factors, people do understand that this is important, that we have to get the users to trust what we make and what we create. But as we've all probably found people don't agree or they don't know. And I think that's might be what the problem is here.

But what do you think, Nick?

[00:05:38] Nick Roome: This is a really interesting piece to me for a variety of reasons. And I think the one thing that I'm gonna question, the sort of premise of this article here is that users trust is being eroded. I don't know if that's necessarily true without the bird getting changed to an x I I think what's happening behind the scenes is much more sinister than what's happening at surface value.

So my first initial thoughts is, this platform is changing radically. We're pretty plugged in people. And so we understand the changes that are happening from reinstating, banned users accounts from people who were proliferating lies and hostile language towards others. And so for that reason, it's already a platform that is questionable for reinstating those people.

But if you don't follow those people, if those people don't show up in your circles, then does it matter? People that you follow might see that stuff and they might echo some of that. And so from that perspective, it can be impacted. But I think at face value, when you talk about users' trust, I don't know if it's necessarily eroded.

I don't know if they see as much difference behind this as people plugged in, like we see it. Because the other thing that is the the bigger questionable thing we had a whole episode on this is the verification status. Oh, now you can be paid to be verified. And previously this was held for like public officials like celebrities that were verified accounts or anything like that.

Some reason that you as a public figure might need to be verified on that platform. Thus, I trust that is, an actual account that is saying the things that are representing that brand, that person that whatever. And I think that is a, ultimately, I think the thesis is that maybe the users aren't the trust that the users are giving to this platform is not being eroded, but all these changes behind the scenes are taking advantage of that trust.

And I think that's where I wanna focus on from my perspective. But Barry I'm curious what you're thinking about all this.

[00:08:04] Barry Kirby: So I think, okay let's get the apology out the way. I'm gonna try and call it X, but I'm not, I'm gonna call it Twitter. So that's a, sorry, not sorry type of thing. I think this is, this might be two or three episodes worth of content here.

There's so many different ways we can go. Are we just gonna spend an hour laying into Elon Musk himself about what he's done to an iconic brand, because there's a lot of personal behavior and elements here that we could just go and just. Do that, but perhaps let's, can we be a bit more professional, perhaps, maybe a bit more systematic and do a fully referenced human factors based roast of el of us, because that might be better.

I think it's really legitimate, and I think what we should possibly do is explore the branded Twitter. Because what it was and what it is it's a pioneer. It absolutely was a pioneer. We take it for granted now. But when it first started out, there was not really many platforms doing what it did.

There was platforms that came before like MySpace and things like that. There were pioneered the the social networking element. And obviously Facebook is a big player in that, but Twitter very much came and did the, it was the short form. It was the short, sharp focus messaging and then it had to build tools as it went as problems were found.

So the ability to block lockup accounts lock messages, private accounts, blocking people out, the user base was growing and diverse and didn't really know what he was targeting. And it's managed to evolve into a current, what is the best non-offensive term, is a chaotic situation that we.

Another good thing, which is just bewildering, is the taking away accounts of longtime users has been longtime users there. That because Elon wanted somebody else to have a particular account handle that they just took it away from this longtime user who'd who had it for since Twitter's inception and is now.

And they said, oh, by the way, we've taken that away from you, but actually you can have this other one instead. Or you had to pick from these five. And apparently three outta the five were other people's accounts as well, that they were just go to shove along. It was like, that was mad. But when you think of that from a business perspective Ollie, people who've maybe had businesses or podcasts or something named, already named a new print your literature with your Twitter handle on it all, anything that's now printed with a Twitter logo on it now is defunct.

Anyway. Thanks for that. I'm gonna have to get all my stuff redone. It's the reliance and the where it stands in society now, it's more than just a simple Business endeavor. It's it is part of a fabric. You have films that are, they've got it as a centerpiece chef being a brilliant example, brilliant film.

So rather me ranting on, should we do this whole slightly more systematic viewpoint? Do we think, where would we like to start? Nick, where would you like to go?

[00:10:47] Nick Roome: Oh man, that's my question for you all. I like there's a lot of places that we can go, but let's, I think we start at the surface value and then we get deep because we can start just at the whole mismanagement around, what the heck do we call this thing?

'cause we're referring to it as Twitter as x. And the fact that we don't know how to refer to this thing is already just a big like you were saying before the, in the pre-show that we were that you saw this like cracked icon on your screen and weren't quite sure what it was. I'd been keeping up, so I kinda knew what it was.

It was in the same place as my Twitter app, so I figured okay, that there it is. And I got a heads up on it bef a couple days before my app icon actually changed. I still refer to it as Twitter. It is Twitter. But I don't understand the need. To change it. And if there was a change, then why not do it slowly over time?

And it feels like all these changes, these drastic changes in some cases are being not staggered out. And that is eroding trust. My trust anyway from the, and so it doesn't matter who's heading this, it's just that Elon's the dumb ass doing it. And that it doesn't matter who's doing it, it's just a bunch of poor decisions.

And I think those poor decisions are widely agreed by everybody that these are bad decisions being made on the platform. It doesn't take a genius to understand that these changes are not good. And I think that's, this is an interesting thing that we can bring up too, is that the trust aspect is getting mainstream attention right now that human factors, practitioners, UX folks can jump on and say, look, trust is important.

Look at Twitter, look at X, whatever it is, look at it because this is what's happening. Trust is being eroded. Or people are noticing things that are going to over time have a larger impact on that platform. And people who have been saying it's slowly being killed, fine, there's still a lot of users on it.

Is it the thing that it wants to be probably not. I. Will it be, I don't know. The way that the employees are treated behind the scenes is entirely different thing. But the fact that no one wants to work on this thing either is just it the whole thing's really poorly mismanaged. So surface value, then dig down.

I don't know. What do you guys think?

[00:13:13] Kate Preston: Sounds good. I would like to know though, did he have focus groups before this? Was he like, he sat people in a room, was like, if I just rebranded slowly, would that be better? Or should I just do a quick sharp Elon way? Because I don't know, I just, I would like to know these things.

And that might just be me. That might just be the fact that's like what interests me, but like just a wee bit of understanding of what he's thought and why he thought this was a good idea.

[00:13:40] Barry Kirby: I think he might have sat in front of a mirror and done that. But I think, so I think wind it back slightly because I think it is, there's a bit of context that's probably important to the conversation around where the state, where the state of Twitter was when Elon took over.

Because you right around the the people management and all that sort of stuff, but Twitter was not a profit making enterprise. It was spiraling debt. And so they ha there, there was a need for radical change, which is why I believe, they. Pursued Elon. And Elon was very open to doing the takeover because he thought he could make something better out of it.

He thought he could rescue it or whatever. Then there was the whole bit around the valuation and that sort of stuff. So when he finally took over we knew, or I guess anybody who's seen what he's done to other things, that there was always gonna be radical change and he had to do a or as far as he saw, there's the whole silly fiery hire process where they got, he seemed to just slash everybody and then retain a couple of interns at the, to keep the thing from completely falling down.

Obviously there's a lot more people employed than that, so something had to happen. Something had to do that. And it seems to have been that the key people he got rid of were the ones who were pulling that platform together. And then I think, Kate, you made a really good point around is the ulterior motive that perhaps nobody saw, that he's had this desire to generate this one-up that does everything as we like to call it Facebook the, this app that, that controls, everything from your life.

And this is his mechanism for doing that. And I have to agree with what you said around is, was that just cheating? Does he see this as a legitimate stepping stone? The other viewpoint that there's been expressed now that actually he just wants to see the whole thing burn because it's been such a negative experience.

Whereas he's had with SpaceX, with PayPal, with his other ventures, with Tesla he's been largely lauded as a as a savior. He's going, literally going places that nobody's ever gone before, which he thought I, I would guess he thought he could then bring into social media.

And boy is he got that one wrong. I think the, it's worth exploring why its itself twi Twitter's such a phenomenon. The, what is it around, around it? So I guess there's some elements here around. Up until the point of Twitter in particular, everybody's had their news presented to them by a third party.

So you've had newspapers, you've had news channels, all that sort of stuff. Your knowledge about what's going on in the going on in the world is curated by other people and fed to you through papers, through so through only one or two different mediums. Whereas with Twitter coming online, people could talk direct to an audience.

Is that now something we just take for granted, do you think, Kate?

[00:16:39] Kate Preston: Yeah, I think so. I think we like being able to see the news quickly. I always think about Covid and Twitter. I know, I don't wanna bring up Covid 'cause that was a long time ago, but it was when it was, especially here in the uk, you'd have that six o'clock, someone would come on some, politician would come and tell you what the plan is, whether we're still locked down, how much longer we're gonna be locked down.

And you would go straight to Twitter, I would anyway, and you'd watch it on the tv, but you'd also be having like all these people's like thoughts on it, other politicians, other experts. And they would be tweeting about it. And Nicholas Sturgeon up here in Scotland would be tweeting at the same time being like, actually we're gonna go do complete opposite.

But you would know about it and each like immediately. And I think that's something really useful. And you'd also get other people's reactions and you'd have a bit of a. They shouldn't still be locking us down. And you'd be like, oh yeah, everybody else thinks that as well. So at least I'm not alone.

You'd have that sense of community, like immediately rather than waiting to talk to your neighbor the next day. So I do think we take that for take that for granted these days. I don't know, I just think I'd rather he was trying to make it burn now than make his own app though. Like

[00:17:55] Nick Roome: I think that there's a really interesting element that you're bringing up here and that's the confirmation bias that we all experience when we use social media and the fact that it's built into these information sources now that if something's trending on Twitter, you can see that, oh, this is newsworthy based on the number, strictly the number of people talking about it in, in your region or your country, your area, whatever it is that, that they're using behind the scenes for that algorithm.

It varies by social media platform, but the interesting thing there is that you can see a lot of different opinions and false opinions and factual information about something very quickly and pick and choose which ones of those things you want to pay attention to and confirm your bias by either blocking the people that you don't agree with or giving some sort of interaction to the things that you do agree with.

And there's like a whole metagame about. How to correctly ratio things on the platform, right? So like they say, screenshot your enemies and retweet your friends, or whatever it is. Because if you screenshot, then it, then that original thing doesn't get proliferated in the same way. And so there's all these strategies being employed.

And I, this is not unique to Twitter the misinformation the bubbles, the echo chambers. But it is an interesting thing to think about that his goal has been to make this a free speech app that is, everybody's there. So you have people like politicians who are spouting lies on the platform getting reinstated when they had a very good reason to be taken off the platform.

Especially in politicians cases, because they are presumably they should be trusted people that are in elected office. And so the fact that we're going back on that and that there's the whole conversation of do we deserve that? Because then if we've elected them, then we've dug our own grave in some ways.

But then not everybody elected them. They're representative of a part of the world, right? And so that's ultimately, Does. It's so tricky. It's so tricky to think about because there's just a million different ways in which you can go about this, but I think the interesting thing about the confirmation bias is when you start to see all these different opinions about something, you're only paying attention to the ones that resonate with you.

And so you're right, there's no longer a, and I hate this term, both sides approach towards looking at the news when it comes to social media sites because you are getting it fast and by a lot of different sources. A lot of times things will not be confirmed as fact as they get out there. And so you'll see this like misinformation.

And so there's already a whole bunch of issues with trust and the fact that there's a lot more things going on behind the scenes rather than just an an app icon change that are actually happening to undermine that trust, or I shouldn't say undermine because really it's take advantage of, I think.

[00:21:06] Barry Kirby: So I guess the biggest thing for me that you highlighted there wa, was the speed. Because in the grand scheme of things, we've always had people. Playing fast and loose with the truth through media. Just look at the different newspapers that you get. Look at the different news channels.

America is great example where you've got so many news organizations, and some of them, some you can get two very different interpretations of an event that is broadcast through, through a number of different channels. So really it's the, what has always been a problem is understanding whether Twitter itself is a is a publisher or is it just a vehicle?

Because actually all these different people are are mini publishers in a way and be, and that's governments have struggled with that view. So we've had to deal with that. But it's, I guess looking at some of the things that we've had to learn because of social media. So we're talking about some of the mechanisms that are perhaps being rolled back.

Just the need to block people, the, you don't walk down the street or go into a perb or a sports thing and say you go and stand over there. I'm not talking to you because I just don't wanna see you in my social bubble.

[00:22:19] Nick Roome: But you would if you could.

You would, if you would. I might, I'd tell my

[00:22:22] Barry Kirby: back at the moment.

[00:22:23] Nick Roome: Yeah, just

[00:22:25] Kate Preston: think of Black Mirror, then that'll, it'll happen.

[00:22:28] Barry Kirby: Yeah. But the, so the need to block people got suddenly got very serious because they could be there in your feed with the same level of attention from yourself as good people.

So we are not just talking about just people you just don't dislike though that might be there, but it could be trolls, it could be more serious. It could be like stalkers it, domestic perpetrators of domestic violence, coercive control. It's a massive vehicle for that because of that type of thing.

Bullying. And we're not just talking about children, but adults too, and so they've had to bring in these tools, like blocking them. And this is where again, we are now losing trust because they, Ilan is now talking about taking that away. So the ability to block people, the ability to curate your own bubble is perhaps one of the strongest mechanisms you can have in there for your own personal safety or personal physical and mental health.

And they're about throwing that away just because he can, just because it's on his own private whim that either doesn't think we should be blocking I

[00:23:28] Kate Preston: hadn't realized he was blocking that. Who was blocking.

[00:23:31] Nick Roome: And that block option,

[00:23:34] Barry Kirby: some, somebody else was commenting on him blocking that, but they couldn't pull him in directly 'cause he'd already blocked them anyway.

But then, so there's things like that. We mentioned verification earlier as well. Now verification I thought is a really interesting thing because historically verification through Twitter was, yes, it was free, but it was also very hyper selective. You could apply for verification and if they didn't think you were worthy, they'd just say, no, we won't bother.

And so you'd have some people who would get verified and go with that. But then you'd have other people who they maybe, either just didn't apply for it or would apply for it and get turned down like me. Not that I'm bitter but you'll get turned down from for verification.

Now, I think personally verification is a very good thing because it shows that you are you are who you say you are. So I, when they come up with the paid verification, I was like, actually, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I. What I didn't like was them then them turning around and saying, actually what you're paying for is the tick.

What you're paying for is the go is the blue badge. You, we are not actually verifying you as such. Really. You could still scam it through and you could still have a name that doesn't mean anything, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, that's where they've ruined it by bad implementation. Yeah. And I think it goes back

[00:24:49] Kate Preston: to what you said about publication, whether it's publication or someone is just saying something.

If you had the blue tick, it could be seen as publication 'cause you knew it was coming from a proper source. Like you could take what politician was saying as seriously as you can take what politicians say seriously, because you know that they were actually the politician rather than just some random are pretending to be them.

But now it's like you can't trust anything unless you know them.

[00:25:17] Nick Roome: I will jump in here too we actually had a whole discussion about this when the verification system just came out. Too hard to believe that was nine months ago. That episode is from December 1st, 2022. So almost 10 months ago.

I'm gonna plug it at the end. But we had a whole conversation about the verification system, but the, there's been so many more changes to the platform since then. And you're right, like the whole idea of who owns these check marks and who is presenting the information goes against what we would expect historically from journalistic integrity, which I.

Hang on. I Googled it. Look it's to, to seek truth and report it. And now even truth is being questioned. This includes fact checking. Not only intentionally dis not intentionally distorting information, identifying sources, avoiding stereotypes and supporting the open exchange of opinions.

I think that last piece is being taken to the extreme there in some cases with some of these journalistic outlets, entertainment outlets that pass as journalism. But I think that's really important to, to consider because now you're getting all these hot takes from everybody, including podcasts like our own, where we are giving our own thoughts on this matter, but from our own perspective.

And that is what makes some of this thing that is social media nice, is because you actually have voices out there who come from different perspectives or perspectives that align with yours. If you wanted to hear a human factors take on Twitter and you wanted to listen to that whole conversation, you could listen to this podcast and you can argue whether or not the things that we're talking about here are truly human factors.

I believe that anything that interacts with the human is, we might get a little bit more Phil philosophical at times, but I think you know that's our background. That is where we're coming from. And so our thoughts are likely to align with people who are. Watching or viewing this program. And so when you have that same thing that's happening from other types of dimensions, either political beliefs, spiritual beliefs anything else like that where socioeconomical background there's a lot of different ways in which you can slice and dice people and their demographics and having factual information being presented in a way that is truthful and honest and not intentionally distorting information where, whose sources are identified, avoiding stereotypes, all that stuff.

It's really important. And that's the key to trust here. When you are presenting something as factual, when you haven't done all these things, then that's a problem.

[00:27:56] Barry Kirby: It's interest. So it linked with that, the, those, there's a couple of concepts and a couple of other concepts that came up around the use of, particularly around Twitter because of the speedy that happened that we now take for granted.

So viral messaging. So a message that goes viral, that wasn't, that just wasn't a thing before this. Whereas then there's now been so much research into this idea of what was initially called a viral maven. So who was that trusted individual that if you got your news from them, that actually they were they, that was a credible source.

So they, now that's where we got the idea of like celebrity influencers and then just people then be becoming influencers. But that whole piece now, people are now making a a lot of money of just being an influencer. Yeah. Rather than being, a a so is that's just another way of curating news.

That if there's one person says it that they don't have journalistic training or anything like that, but they are a a decent source. Yeah.

[00:28:55] Kate Preston: Is a joy.

[00:28:56] Barry Kirby: Oh yeah. TikTok is great. Anyway

[00:29:00] Nick Roome: on next week's episode,

[00:29:03] Barry Kirby: but then, so this whole thing of virality has then been taken steps further because it's so open to subversion.

And this is where yes, we've mentioned about a certain very senior. Politician, but actually that's not the only politician to get involved in this sort of chisel. All politicians are now trained in the art of social media and how to do it. And there's positive comms around that, but there's also election games as well.

There's various, re you know, it used to be, if you retweeted somebody, you were just retweeting somebody. Now your actually retweet is retweeting positive, negative. You can like things, but there's only one way of liking it. So you might be just marking it for future reference, but actually that's you liking it and then get you into trouble.

And that's even before we get into State Act display with it. So let's, throw out their Russian reelections. That's all done through, through this medium. And so if we aren't about banning one politician for having Dubus views what about, how do we, is the problem so widespread that actually Twitter X going down the pan might be the best thing that could happen to democracy?

Could be, but but it's also, I guess the final, my final bit on here would be the use of social media to deliver soft persuasion, soft power has changed the way that nation states spend money. So whereas a lot of, let's say, poorer states who wouldn't be able to afford your traditional six generation multifaceted fighter, jet your tanks that do X, Y, Z, they'll pour it into cyber and cyber influence, cyber messaging through primarily these type of platforms and this type of platform.

So has all that money now been wasted? Et cetera, et cetera. So I think there is a whole, there's a whole mechanism here that Twitter started and or certainly was very strongly in, in developing that's made us really think differently. Twitter was to crash and burn. Then where would we go next for trusted news?

Because you, I think now we do trust our sources on Twitter because you curate them as Kate, you mentioned at the start you curated your your listener your followership, and quite frank, quite frankly. Anybody can follow me. I don't care. I'm just, I'd just to see the numbers. But again, that, that's the way that some of the some of the younger people take it now, so know how the how many followers they've got, comparing, following numbers at school on these different platforms.

We used

[00:31:29] Kate Preston: to do that, not so much now, but we did used to look at our followers. Yeah. It's an interesting one. I always go back to this bias thing, I think like confirmation bias and also like bias that you didn't know you had. So like even today I was looking on X, see I got it right. And all this Prince Harry stuff came up and we all know how controversial Prince Harry is.

And I was looking through all this stuff and I was like, oh, prince Harry. I did not have an opinion on him before I did, but not on that day, but just that sort of stuff, that kind of bias has brought to us without us even like really thinking about it and like without us even wanting that. 'cause I was getting really angry at Prince Harry and I'm like, why?

He's just living his life like it might be. Yeah. I won't get into him. But like I was just like, this whole opinion was brought on by these couple of Princess Diana, prince Harry tweets and I didn't have that before. And that just riled me up for the day. And that's just a different level of trust.

I don't know, it's something other than confirmation bias that comes from being on Twitter. I'm sorry.

[00:32:39] Nick Roome: Sorry. X you almost got it right. I think there's, from a human factors perspective, UX perspective, there's other things going on here, right? Other than like confirmation bias that there's this whole When you think about trust and things like cognitive load where you are constantly evaluating whether or not these things that you see on the platform are true or bullshit. And you're trying to figure out all the time, is this truth? Is this not? Is this something I agree with? Is this not? There's a lot more cognitive load when you come to it from that perspective.

And then when you think about even the interaction methods, the controls and displays from a human factors perspective, when you think about it from that, like if you think about actions on that platform and how they have predictable outcomes somebody says something I don't like. I go to the ellipses and hit block user.

When I go to that ellipses and no longer see block user, I'm thinking, what happened? What did I do? It is eroding my trust in my ability to do the thing when they've just flat out removed that. And so if it goes undergoes these like changes without any communication, they might the end users ultimately might feel like they're less in control over things.

And control is a huge aspect of trust when it comes down to it because the more control you're perceived to have, The more in, the more trust you have in a system. So like you can see this in automated vehicle literature automated systems for aircraft, anything like that. The more in control the operator feels, they're more likely to trust that system.

So I think that's my final thoughts. I wanna do one more round just in case anyone had any last nails in the coffin for Elon Barry. We'll start with you.

[00:34:31] Barry Kirby: Rounding's terrible. I think you the fact that Dave, that he's gone, that there was a whole ecosystem, almost a whole vocabulary around you.

You went you tweeted, you read tweets, you you were on Twitter, you all this sort of stuff was all set up. And he is the way that he's now, he tried to generate it by saying, you are on X, you are x-ing all, and I can't even remember the rest of it. It just makes people now unsure about what it is they're actually doing.

They've taken, some activities that people were used to doing, tried to reformat them and it's now made people apologetic for not knowing quite how to get it right. And it's making you feel like you are the one who is wrong and therefore eroding the fund. Fundamental trust in not so much the platform, but your use of the platform which is then just a natural Natural line for you to then take a step back, say I'm not doing it properly.

I'm not. I am. I can't be, I can't trust myself to do this properly, therefore I'm not going to use it. So that's my final thing. Kate, what about you? What's your final nail in LAN's? Coughing

[00:35:38] Kate Preston: again, just reiterate. Branding is terrible. But I was thinking like, just through these conversations, I don't know why he didn't do something similar to what Meta did with Facebook.

You put it under a brand that's new, but you keep it the same. 'cause no one, Facebook used to be Facebook and then was Meta, wasn't it? That was the right way. But then he changed that, but he kept the Facebook name. So I'm not sure whether that would've been a better way of doing it. And then making people get used to the idea that Twitter is no longer Twitter, but part of this larger X thing.

I don't know whether that would've been a better way, and maybe that would've come up if he had done any sort of testing before he did all this. But my final thought is that we'll probably just end up using LinkedIn now. Yay.

[00:36:27] Nick Roome: Ordinary tale. Alright, next week. TikTok, LinkedIn. No, I, I do wanna highlight this one.

Tweet X, whatever you wanna call it as a reaction because I thought it was just spot on and this is what I'll end with. Tweets should now be called 2 cents now that is what the X brand is worth. Alright, with that we'll be just wanna thank let's see here. Who are we thinking today? Tell I'm not prepared.

Thank you to our patrons and everyone for selecting the topic. And thank you to our friends over at UX Collective for our news story this week. If you wanna follow along, we do post links to the original articles on our weekly roundups in our blog. You can also join us in our discord for more discussion on these stories and much more.

If you wanna be in charge of the news, you can always visit us on Patreon. Anyone can vote in those polls. We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be back to see what's going on in the human factors community right after this.

Yes. Huge thank you as always. To our patrons, we especially wanna thank our human factors, cast all access, and v i p patrons, Michelle Tripp, Neil Gainey. You guys truly make this show something that we can do every week. Hey, did you all know that we have a discord that you can join in you can get involved talking with other human factors, professionals from all over the world, get access to some of the resources we got our hands on over the last couple years.

There's a bunch of different discussions going on in there. I'm on a detox right now from social, but hey, if you tag me, I'm there. You can chat with others in the Live Voice channels and it's how we do a lot of stuff over there. So if you want to go post your questions, chat with others, and it's a good, it's a good community.

But why don't we go ahead and switch gears in getting into this next part of the show. We simply call,

it came from

That's right. It's the part of the show where we get bad questions from Reddit. This is where we, if you find any of the answers to this, will give us a I don't know, since we're talking about tweets and Xs and just, and all the socials, that really helps the algorithms, right?

There's a little button down there. Just give us a alright, we have three up tonight. This first one's from the UX Research Subreddit. This is by Lu Susu. What kinds of artifacts and information is safe to include in a portfolio they write? What types of artifacts can I safely include in my portfolio?

How do you usually maintain your public portfolios? Can I share things like qualitative insights, churn numbers, diagrams, designs? Should I remove my company name and edit screenshots? How do you manage? This is a lot of questions. This is meant to be one question. Any examples? I don't know. Kate, do you have any thoughts on sharing things publicly?

[00:40:42] Kate Preston: Yeah. Firstly, artifacts makes me think of outer wildes, the game, if you've not played it, play it. Just my little plug portfolio. I have never had a portfolio because academia so I'm coming from outside perspective, but I feel like getting people's approvals on you, putting stuff is always important, whether it's clients or your work.

I feel like that would be an important thing to do. My idea and something that I would probably do is work up your own version. So you might have made something for a client or whatever, and you like the design, but you could work up your own version That kind of takes elements of that and be like, this is an example of the type of work that I have done, rather than having to go through all the permission stuff in case you have a boss that isn't particularly happy with you doing that sort of stuff.

But, As I said, never really had a portfolio. So I'll hand over to Barry and see whether he can add anything else.

[00:41:38] Barry Kirby: I wanna say what Kate said because I've never really had to have a portfolio either. Given that most of my work is defense related then on that sort of thing. That's not necessarily strictly true.

So there's fundamentally asking ask permission. This is where you ask permission rather than seek forgiveness later on because if you've done work for a client and you want to show it off, so we do this quite often now that if we run some trials or we get media or we do whatever we ask the clients if they're happy for us to share the fact that we've been engaged with them, the, if we can share the media that we've used.

So we ran some trials recently where where I put some of the pictures out on LinkedIn, couldn't put any of the actual product that we were testing on there because of their, because of confidentiality reasons, but they were happy for us to do the wider thing. That would've been, that was much better approach than me trucking it out there, than them firing us at mid job.

And this is a kind of same thing. If you've done some work either ask them if they can do it, it's in, in the entirety or if they want to protect their either certain elements of the design because of Proprie for proprietary reasons or just their name, logo and things like that. You can blur this sort of stuff out.

You can block it, you can make scrub versions. Do. So what? So working up that type of thing works, but fundamentally ask permission. Most people will, if you've done a decent job. Most people will say yes because they, it's a inadvertent advertising for them as well. Except for proprietary stuff, all things that are for for reasons of national security.

Nick, what about you? Have you got any Insights

[00:43:04] Nick Roome: into this. Yeah, there's interesting there's interesting drawbacks to this, right? So there's two approaches that I might take. If you have a public record of something that you've worked on that's public record I feel it's like completely within your right to point to that website, point to that product and say, I've worked on this and say I've worked on these elements of it because it is public.

Check your NDAs. But I think, for the most part, you should be good to point at that thing and say, I worked on that. The specific process related stuff is what, at least from my perspective, is a little bit more important rather than the design of things. When it comes to a portfolio piece, I'm much more looking at how does somebody think about things, how do they approach problems?

That's a lot easier to get around than something like a design portfolio. But if you need to show something that is a work in progress that might not be cleared, absolutely ask for permission. I think what you both said is right. Get that permission first, and if you can't get permission, scrub as much of it as you can.

And and if at the end of scrubbing that thing, if it is not necessarily the same if it doesn't carry that same impact, then don't show it. That's the drawback that you get with the the scrubbing piece. Although there was a story on Reddit one time of somebody who worked on an adult website and instead of putting thumbnails of all the videos, they put pictures of cats.

And so it was just a, it was a cat video website. So there's that. You can always replace the data. It's true. Alright, next question. How do you convince stakeholders to let you do your job? This is a event by clumsy Magic Girl 1 0 1 on the UX research subreddit. They write, how do I this much longer, but we truncated it.

How do I convince stakeholders to let me do my job effectively As a UX research freelancer for a mental health startup, they have provided a lengthy and overwhelming recruitment email for a four week study, but I believe it should be concise and not reveal all the study details upfront. I'm unsure if they want advice on the user research or just want me to follow their instructions completely.

What do you all think of this? Kate, I'm gonna go to you first.

[00:45:06] Kate Preston: I'm just laughing at the show notes. I think ask them initially and if they are funny about it and they don't really know, I would probably write up my own version of what I think is right or at least bullet point it for them being like, I think you should include this, and this, and then take it back to 'em and be like, this looks nicer.

This is much easier for people to read. It's a four week research project like, quick to the point and then be like, if someone is interested in like having the job or anything, you can always send over those extra long notes to them and then at least that person is interested, isn't just scared off by a really lengthy description.

But that's what I would do. I don't know about you Barry.

[00:45:50] Barry Kirby: cause you are going into this as a freelance, then if you are doing a short-term piece of work, you've got to come to your, you've gotta come to a net evaluation there. Is it worth, is the juice worth a squeeze? Because you either just for that bit of work you crack on, do the job and crack get onto the next one.

Or you do what I do. 'cause I like to make sure that we are promoting what we do, particularly in an HF world. Shout with them, shout them loudly, tell them how great you are. But funda, get your part of our job is putting across what, why we do what we do and why it's why we provide value. So the value here is that if the, if they're providing a a recruitment email that is too much, rewrite it for them.

Show them the example of what it could be and why you would do that. Put that in front of them and say, look, this is what I would do in you've hired me as a freelancer to come and do this. And help you do this. This is the value I'm adding, and this is why. And this is the improvement it will get you.

That's all you can do, really. You can lead the horse to water. They have to drink the Kool-Aid. If they still turn around after your best advice and say, actually, we wanna do it the way we've done it, that's their choice. Let them get on with it. They're gonna pay you and crack onto the next job.

Nick what about you? Have you got any a nugget information here that would solve all

[00:47:08] Nick Roome: of the problems? Yes. You put a smiley face in your emoji and I put claps in mine. Do your job, had to offset it for the audio. Look, here's the thing. There's two approaches to this. There's, I am going to take this job and I'm going to do this job at a short term.

And rather than get into a fight, let's get a good relationship going and continue that work. And that might be a time to push back after you've gotten secured longer term research contract. That's one way of viewing it. The other way of viewing it is a mix of what you said, Barry is do the work, but also push back and say, look, this is, these are the reasons why x, y, and Z is a better approach.

Let's work collaboratively on this together. So that way you can understand the human factors, the UX piece of it coming forward. If they don't listen to that, just do your job. Just do your job. Like you don't wanna burn bridges. You don't want to ruin relationships by pushing too hard. And I.

And making sure that they never hire you again. So that's where I feel is like pushback. Do your job. But then if they say no, do your job, then you do your job. See how I, that's show notes. It says, do your job. Do the job. Okay. Last question here. How do you all do discovery research that actually influences product level decisions?

Before work heads off to design and we're left with validation. This is by robo Paula on the UX research subreddit. They write, how can I incorporate research into the early stages of product development to influence decisions before design work starts. Who has successfully done this? Alright, Kate? I have,

[00:48:47] Kate Preston: No kind of as much as a PhD student can.

I did this for my field work phase where I went and took a, an interview schedule to people who work in critical care and asked them what they would need to be able to use the ai. And I got some really useful stuff and some stuff that really showed me what has to be done. And that's a lot before you can actually use it.

But all useful stuff. And I think there's a lot of approaches you can use for this like requirement analysis workflow analysis, so you understand how the project will fit in with what they're doing currently. And there is a lot of articles out there on this, so I didn't. Snatch this idea out of the world and claim it as mine.

I did look at the research, so I think getting people on board is really difficult, but the best way about going about it is building a case for it. So finding articles, examples, and writing that up. You could even add in good and bad examples. So for example, this person didn't do a use a requirement analysis and look how crap the project is, or like the end goal, but this person did and look how great it is.

And they didn't have any problems or anything. And then what you do is you write it up in some sort of case study or unite, make a nice presentation, sit everybody down and be like, this is what you should do. We are doing this from now on. We can have a discussion about it, but this is what's happening and this is why.

That's what I would do and have kinder done in the past. But let's Barry add in from a more, industry side.

[00:50:23] Barry Kirby: I go back to my earlier example what she said. I think it is that lead by example piece. It's that lead the horses to the water. Because if you can show them where the value is, show them why you do what you do.

What I tend to do now when we go with new clients is we go along with the process and say, this is the process. You are going to get the whole process. The first part of that process is effectively the discovery phase. And we call it something slightly different, but it's effectively the same thing and the, in that it's important because we are coming to your business, your organization, your product.

We know nothing about it. We know an awful lot about human factors. We know an awful lot about different domains, but specifically your organization and the particular instance that you are wanting to impose us in, you are the expert in that, not me. So we need to learn about that in order to do it.

And part of that is gonna be internal, part of that's gonna be external. Part of that is gonna be out with the literature. And it's important because if we get that and then I will generally throw in the, for every dollar you spend at this phase saves a hundred dollars down the line as well, because that tends to go down well with people who hold the money.

But you've gotta show them value. And if you can show them value, brilliant. I've worked a bunch of jobs where you haven't been able to do that, and you are effectively along for the ride. And it's not only difficult, but it's heart wrenching. When you know you could be doing really good things yet you know that the product is just gonna go to market anyway, or it's going to do whatever it's gonna do.

So if you can lead by example, great. And it's the best thing that you can do and keep fighting for that. Nick. What's your perspective? Oh,

[00:51:57] Nick Roome: it's so clear that both of you have never worked at a company with limited to emergent UX maturity. So here's the thing. It's like there's there are different stages of UX maturity at a lot of different companies and some are very user-driven companies that incorporate user research at every stage along the way, including discovery.

There are other companies that have an absent level of user consideration where they are just building something and just do it. That UX is ignored, not existent, all that stuff. You can look up the stages of UX maturity, but ultimately I think the way that you should approach this is trying to get to that next step of UX maturity by proving, in so many ways that UX is effective.

And once you start to even get to that point of where they start to understand that UX is an effective way to change the product, you can then say, look, if we were involved earlier on in the process, we can reduce the risk of building the wrong thing by, investigating way earlier on. So that way we don't spend all this time and resource into the wrong thing.

And it all does come back to that r o i If you can say we are going to build the wrong thing and invest all this time and money into our employees to build this thing, then that no one's gonna use. That's an incredible stat that you can point to. And you don't even need to. Necessarily have the exact numbers, ballpark numbers will do it.

And that's another really compelling argument. Okay. With that said, let's get into this last part of the show. It's just called One More Thing. Barry, what is your one more thing this week?

[00:53:32] Barry Kirby: Last week I highlighted that we'd moved into our new offices. Today I got this thing about feature walls, and there's got, you've gotta have a wall that that now we, so we've got this one, one large meeting room where we've painted one of the walls blue, so I can now put the logo on the wall and it will look effective.

And it now, whilst we've been living in living working in this office now for the past week or so, now that we've got that done, it now feels like home. Oh my, my business home. Anyway, so I was very pleased by that. So this weekend he's gonna be putting the logo on the wall and then getting some bits of wiring in, but it now feels like that's a room we can go and use and proudly show off.

Yeah, it's amazing what a little bit of a paint can do. Kate, what about you? What's your one more thing?

[00:54:15] Kate Preston: Last time I was on this, I was telling you about slugs and how you can use beer. But I thought I'd get the other side of it that my artichokes are ready for harvest. So artichokes are funny looking things, but I looked out this morning, it has to be the size of a golf ball.

So I, they are right now, so the weekend or maybe tomorrow, evening's plan. Or maybe while I procrastinate tomorrow will be to go in and cut the artichokes and preserve them and make those kind of oily artichoke hearts that you put on pizza. So I, yeah, I'm just very excited about my artichokes being ready for a harvest.

Love my garden. Anyway, Nick, what's yours?

[00:54:57] Nick Roome: In a rare instance, I haven't actually wrote anything down in the show notes, and that's for a very, personal reason that I'm burned out on a lot of things. I don't find a lot of joy in a lot of the things that I used to do. And I don't want to end this on a super bummer note.

I guess it's more of a call for how do you snap out of it, or what have you done as a listener that has snapped you out of that thing or has rekindled a spark in your life? And I don't want anybody to worry about me. I'm fine. It's just that, there, we were talking about this before the show where very tequila talking about this before the show where the, like the whole AI buzz came around and I was really excited about it.

Incorporated a lot of it into our workflow. And there are some things, there's some personal markers for me with respect to the podcast and where we're at and what we should be doing for the next couple months, especially since there's a high profile event coming up that I have just not felt the need or spark to even Start on all that anyway.

Lots of burnout with everything. And so I guess my, it's more of a question. How do you reignite the spark for the things that you like? Lost passion for? Not lost, that's the wrong word for it. It's just our feeling burnout from, I don't know. That's it. And again, I don't mean to stress you all out or end on a bad note, but that's it for today, everyone.

If you like this episode and Joyce outta the discussion about Elon Musk having a much worse day than I am, I'll encourage you all to go to listen to episode 2 65, why Twitter's new verification system is a total disaster. Comment wherever you're listening with what you think of the story this week for more in-depth discussion, like I said earlier, you can always join us on our Discord community.

Visit our official website, sign up for our newsletter, stay up to date with all the latest human factors news. If you like what you hear and feel so inclined to support the show, there's three things that you can do right now. One, you can leave us a five star review wherever you're watching or listening, that really helps the show.

Two, you can tell your friends about us. That's how we grow and that's how more people find the show and support us in their own way. Or three, if you have a financial means to and you wanna support us financially, you can do that too. Over at Patreon, we're always giving back to those folks more than everybody else.

They are part of a privileged class of folks that support the show and we give back to them because of that. As always, links to all of our socials on our website are in the description of this episode. Kate Preston, thank you for coming back on the show. We didn't scare you away last time.

Where can our listeners go and find you if they wanna talk about artichokes,

[00:57:19] Kate Preston: Only artichokes Twitter, or x that's where my people go, unless you wanna add me on LinkedIn. It's X like, unfortunately, so yeah, go to Twitter. That's where I'm at. I think it's like Kate Preston, 96 or something like that.

[00:57:35] Nick Roome: Excellent. Barry Kirby, thank you for being on the show. Where can our listeners go and find you if they wanna talk about painting on the

[00:57:41] Barry Kirby: walls? If you wanna see my wonderful painting job that I supervise or the people painting the wall, Kay, not getting back into that conversation. If you wanna go and find about that, then find me on X Twitter k or around other social media profiles.

But if you want to come and listen to me, have discussions with awesome people in the HF community about what they do what inspires them and get them going, then come to 1202 the Human Factors podcast, which is oh two podcast.com.

[00:58:08] Nick Roome: As I've been your host, Nick Rome, if you wanna talk to me about star Wars parenting, burnout mental health, neurodivergence, ai, whatever it is, I'm across our Discord and across social media at Nick underscore Rome.

Thanks again for tuning into Human Factors Cast. Until next time, it depends.