January 25, 2024
3 min

Sachi Taulelei: Odd one out - embracing diversity in design and technology

It’s no secret - New Zealand has a diversity problem in design and technology. 

Throughout her career, Sachi often felt like the odd one out - the only woman, the only Pasifika person, the one who laughed too loud, the one who looked different and sounded different. But as a leader, Sachi has been able to create change.

Sachi Taulelei, Head of Design, ANZ, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, on how she is building a diverse team of designers at New Zealand’s largest bank.

In her talk, Sachi shares the challenges she’s faced as a Pasifika woman in design and technology; and how this has shaped her approach to leadership and her drive to create inclusive environments where individuals and teams thrive.

Background on Sachi Taulelei

Sachi is a creative strategist, a design leader, and a recovering people pleaser. She has worked in digital and design for over 25 years, spending most of her career creating and designing digital experiences centered on people.

As a proud Pasifika woman, she has a particular interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion. She has spoken out about the need for more diversity within design and technology and the impact it can have on the technology we create.

Sachi is passionate about giving back - when she's not running after her two kids, you'll find her mentoring Pasifika youth, cheering on young leaders through the Young Enterprise Scheme, judging awards for Women in AI, or volunteering at the local hospice.

Contact Details:

Email: sachi.taulelei@anz.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sachi-taulelei/

Odd one out: embracing diversity in design and technology ✨

Looking and sounding different from her peers, Sachi always felt like she was trying to find her place in the office. She always felt like she didn’t belong. 

Sachi has experienced all forms of racism and discrimination as a result of her heritage. These experiences aren’t spoken about and often go unnoticed by the majority. She has held equivalent jobs to male counterparts but received lower pay, and was advised to change her name from Sachi to Sacha on her job applications to improve her chances.  

Sachi’s response was to work hard and become great at what she does, which was recognized over time. Slowly, she began to rise through the ranks. However, having reached leadership roles, she struggled to be heard and participate, without knowing why. The advice was given freely by managers to “stick at it”, to “grow thicker skin”, and to grow through the “school of hard knocks”. Although this advice worked at face value and she flourished, Sachi began to feel like a fraud and constantly second-guessing herself. She began to “edit” herself to fit into an acceptable mold and, in doing so, felt like she lost part of who she was.

What is success? 🏆🎯💎

Success often comes in the form of our leaders who have already climbed the mountains of achievement. When you see success in this way, as someone who doesn’t fit the mold, there is pressure to conform to get ahead. Using the same tools and advice given to these leaders, she realized, would actually hold her back. 

Realizing true value through our uniqueness 🪐🦋

Sachi recounts the treatment of Japanese-American citizens in the U.S. in the years following Pearl Harbour, where Japanese-American citizens were moved to concentration camps. This happened despite an official report finding conclusively that there was no threat from this population. Even though Germany and Italy were also at war with the U.S., for example, citizens with Italian and German heritage were not treated this way. This caused immeasurable pain, shame, and fear for the victims, and fostered a head-down, work-hard mentality in order to try and forget the treatment they received. This attitude, Sachi believes, was passed down to her from her ancestors who experienced that reality. Sachi explains that while there are many things that can hold someone back in life, creating meaningful change starts with introspection. Often, that requires us to work through fear and shame.

Reflecting on her heritage, which is part Samoan and part Japanese, Sachi started to embrace her unique traits. In her case, she embraced the deep empathy and human compassion from her Japanese side and the deep sense of community and connection from her Samoan side. Her uniqueness is something to celebrate, not to hide behind. 

Becoming a leader and realizing this, Sachi wanted to create a team culture based on equity, openness, and a sense of belonging – all things that Sachi wished for herself on her journey.

Why it matters 💫

Once she understood herself and what she wanted for her team, Sachi set to work on building a new team culture. Sachi breaks down key learnings from how she turned this vision into reality.

Define

Define what diversity means for your team. You need to clearly understand what it is you want to achieve before you can achieve it. For Sachi’s team, they knew that they wanted to create a team that was representative of New Zealand. Sachi knew, for example, that she had a lack of Māori and Pacific representation within the team. Māori and Pasifika represent 25% of the population. So, an effort was made to increase ranks by hiring talent from these cultures. 

Additionally, Sachi focused on creating new role levels - from intern right through to graduates, juniors, and intermediate-level positions. This helped to acknowledge age differences within her team and also helped to manage career progression opportunities.

Effort 

It can be difficult to achieve diversity and inclusion and it requires a lot of work. For example, Sachi learned that posting an ad on job boards and expecting to receive hundreds of Māori and Pasifika applicants wasn’t realistic. Instead, partnerships were built with local design schools, and networking events were consistently attended. Job referrals from within the team were also leveraged, as well as establishing a strong direction for recruitment specialists within the organization.

Sachi also recognized that, as a leader, she needed to be more visible and more vocal about sharing her views of the world and what she was trying to achieve. It was important to be clear about the type of culture she was building within her team so that she could promote it.

In less than a year her team grew (from 11 to 40!) which meant a focus on building an inclusive team culture was required. The central theme throughout this time was, “You have to connect to yourself and your strengths first and foremost, before you can connect with others and as a team”. This meant that the team used tools like the Clifton Strength Finder, in order to learn about themselves and each other. Each designer was then encouraged to delve into their own natural working styles and were taught how to amplify their own strengths through various workshops. This approach also becomes handy when recruiting and strengthening potential weak spots.

Integrity

It’s important to have leaders who care - you can’t do it on your own. There can be pain points on the journey to creating diversity and inclusion, so it’s necessary to have leaders who listen, support, and work through some of the challenges that can arise.

Benefits of diversity and inclusion in design teams 👩🏼🤝👨🏿

Why push for diversity and inclusion? Sachi argues that the benefits are evident in the way that her team designs. 

For example, her team:

  • Insist that research is done with diverse customer groups
  • Advocates for accessibility when no one else will
  • Understand problems from different perspectives before diving into a project

Most importantly, the benefits show up in the way that each other is treated, and the relationships that are built with key stakeholders. Diversity and inclusion are wins for everyone - the team, the organization, and the customer.

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What’s the difference between UI and UX?

UI and UX are two terms that are often used interchangeably and confused for one another, but what do they actually mean? And is there a crossover between them?

These two terms have only grown in use in recent years, thanks largely to the exploding technology sector. This is great news. For organizations, effectively harnessing UX and UI enables them to build products and services that people will actually want to use – and continue using. For users, they’ll have access to products designed for them. 

What is UX? 🤳🎯

User experience (UX as it’s commonly called) refers to the experience that a person has with a product or service. 

We can determine whether a user experience is good or bad based on how easy (or difficult) it is for users to interact with the various elements of a product or service. Is the sign-up flow easy to use? Does the CTA button on the homepage encourage users to click? UX design exists to answer questions like these – and here’s how.

At the core of UX design is user research, which you can use to understand customer pain points and actually build products designed for the people using them. Typically, user research involves the use of a number of different research methods designed to answer specific questions. Card sorting, for example, can show you how people think the information on your website should be arranged.

Designer and information architect Peter Morville came up with the user experience honeycomb, which demonstrates the various components of UX design.

The UX honeycomb. Source.

Don Norman of Nielsen Norman Group defines UX as “[encompassing] all aspects of the end-users interaction with the company, its services, and its products”.

If this seems broad, that’s because it is. UX actually extends beyond just the digital products of an organization and can be used for areas like retail, customer service and more. In fact, there’s actually a growing movement to replace UX with customer experience (CX), as a way of encompassing all of these disparate elements.

What is UI? 🪄📲

User interface (UI), in the most stripped-back definition, is the interface by which a user and a computer system communicate with one another. This includes the touchscreen on your smartphone, the screen on your laptop, your mouse and keyboard and countless other mechanisms.

With this in mind, user interface design is focused on the elements that users will see on these interfaces, such as buttons, text and images. UI design is all about layout, look and feel. The objective of UI design is to visually guide users through an interface so they can complete their task. In a nutshell, you don’t want a user to think too hard about what they’re doing.

Shown here: The user interface of the Tesla Model S. Source.

UI has its origins in the 1980s, when Xerox developed the very first graphical user interface (GUI). Instead of needing to interact with a computer through a programming language, people could now use icons, menus and buttons. The rest, as they say, is history. Apple came along with the Macintosh computer in 1984 (bringing with it the first point and click mouse), and now we’re all carrying smartphones with touch screens that even a baby can operate.

Like UX, UI has grown significantly – going far beyond what you’ll see on a computer screen. Those involved in the field of UI design today will work as much on the interfaces of computer programs and apps as they will on the user interfaces of cars, wearable devices and technologies in the home. If current trends continue, UI design is likely to become an even bigger field in the years ahead.

What’s the difference between UX and UI? 👀

UX and UI are both essential components of a product or service. You can’t have one without the other, and, as we’ve explored, neglecting one could have serious consequences for your product’s success.

The difference between UX and UI is that UX is focused on the experience of using something and UI is focused on the look and feel of the interface. 

“User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) are some of the most confused and misused terms in our field. A UI without UX is like a painter slapping paint onto a canvas without thought; while UX without UI is like the frame of a sculpture with no paper mache on it. A great product experience starts with UX followed by UI. Both are essential for the product’s success”. - Rahul Varshney, co-creator of Foster.fm

The difference between UX and UI is that UX is focused on the experience of using something and UI is focused on the look and feel of the interface. 

Or, if you’d prefer a statement from venerable Nielsen Norman Group: “It’s important to distinguish the total user experience from the UI, even though the UI is obviously an extremely important part of the design. As an example, consider a website with movie reviews. Even if the UI for finding a film is perfect, the UX will be poor for a user who wants information about a small independent release if the underlying database only contains movies from the major studios”.

With this in mind, let’s now take a look at the people behind UX and UI. What do the roles look like in these fields? And, more importantly, what do they involve?

UX and UI jobs guide 📱🧑🏻💻

  • Visual designer: This role works with other design roles in the organization (brand, marketing, etc) to ensure designs match brand guidelines. Visual designers also work with UX designers to verify that designs meet accessibility and usability requirements.
  • UX strategist: At the core, a UX strategist should act as a champion of good UX. That is to say, work to ensure the principles of usability and human-centered design are well understood and utilized. They should also assume some of the responsibility of product-market fit, and work with product managers and the ‘business’ side of the organization to mesh business requirements with user requirements.
  • UX designer: The most common UX profession, UX designers should have a strong understanding of the principles of UX design as well as some research ability. Essentially a jack of all trades, the UX designer will float between all stages of the UX lifecycle, helping out with usability tests, putting together prototypes and working with other areas of the organization.
  • Service designer: The service designer looks at the entire end-to-end process and works with other designers, pulling them when required to liaise on visual designs and UI work. In a smaller organization, the responsibilities of this role will typically be absorbed by other roles, but eventually, there comes a time for the service designer. 

Wrap up 🎬

UX and UI as terms are only going to continue to grow, especially as technology and technology companies continue to proliferate across the globe. If you want to make sure that the user experience and user interfaces of your product or service are fit for the people using them, there’s no better place to start than with user research using powerful tools.

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1 min read

The importance of roles in making meaningful project experiences

In this post, Daniel Szuc describes why it’s important to go beyond how we may see our roles traditionally when only focusing on job titles. By exploring other roles, as outlined in the post that follows, we can all play a part in helping to glue a team together, making project work easier for all and creating a more positive environment to help in making meaningful project experiences.

Collaboration is hard and needs practice 🙂↔️

“Collaboration” is a term that gets thrown around in workplaces to encourage people to work together better. Sometimes, though, the people using the term may not understand the range of skills required to make collaboration work well, including (but not limited to) listening, expression, empathy, and curiosity.

Each of these skills requires practice.

So asking people to simply collaborate, without understanding the skills required nor the necessary spaces to practice these skills, may well frustrate people more than it helps.

Misalignment 😤

As work hums along in a team, it’s easy for misalignment to creep in. Misalignments are caused by a lack of communication, limited time, poor project management, and micro/macro issues that are addressed too late, causing friction between people. If specific roles are not put in place, these frictions can create difficult work environments, making coming to work unpleasant.

Teams may lack common artifacts to help them communicate with a shared language, which in turn helps connect a project and business narrative together. Importantly, this helps aggregate what a team learns together from customer interviews to help improve a product or service.In effect, there is no light leading the way, so people can get lost in details that have nothing to do with a common and well understood purpose.

Roles beyond a job title 👔

When we speak about roles, we are not referring to traditional job titles such as project manager, developer, and designer, for example. Rather, we mean roles that everyone can play at various points in a project, helping others do their job well and the team deliver on making meaningful experiences.Roles, beyond job titles or the tasks inherent in those titles, help people think in integrated and holistic ways beyond their official job title.

At times, our work requires that we delve deeply into design details; in other situations, we are required to step back and see how all the elements of our work connect in delivering solutions that are part of a broader narrative.As members of teams, we can work more effectively – whether it’s by advancing ideas or in recognizing when it’s time to consider alternative approaches.

Four roles for making meaningful experiences 🎢

We have identified four roles to encourage making meaningful experiences for the team and customers, as well as to encourage integrated ways of working:

  1. Facilitators can define approaches that guide the process of informing, sense-making, and evaluating. They can craft agendas for working sessions and identify what problems need attention. Facilitators can also manage interactions between functions, aggregate a team’s learnings, and map these learnings to shared artifacts. They identify themes that require further study and set goals for the team’s next sessions.
  1. Mentors need to be aware of approaches and skills that require ongoing development and practice, and organize safe spaces in which people can practice, using them over and over during working sessions and across projects. Mentors should work closely with facilitators and custodians to identify the knowledge that the team has captured and map it to a learning program for team members, with a focus on informing, sense-making, and evaluating.
  1. Connectors create artifacts that help bridge gaps and make interactions between people feel more fluid, connecting people’s skills and roles.
  1. Custodians maintain the knowledge base that forms over time and leverage it in creating approaches and courses that help our project teammates to improve at what they do.

Practicing shared skills within roles ⚙️

Independent of whether a person works in management, engineering, product management, design, user research, or some other function, there is a common set of skills of which people need to remain aware: skills that help make our project teams’ collective efforts better.Because there is an intention to integrate ways of working, collective learning makes teamwork effective and results in more meaningful experiences. Working sessions, in which people from different teams or functions come together to solve a problem, provide a common space to focus on that problem, define approaches to help solve the problem, and work through issues together.

A team can identify the skills they practice, reflect on any gaps that may require them to expand their practice, and aggregate their learnings in common artifacts. These then help form and guide a project narrative with which the team resonates or can critique.In understanding the ways in which we work together – in essence, developing empathy for each other – we may see other benefits in addition to the work we produce.One benefit could be to move away from a blind focus on just tools and processes towards a primary focus on how we approach our work together or how we think about problems within the context of a project.

The ways in which we interact with each other suggest that we should look at the following roles, again independent of function or job title:

  1. Informing a problem - What evidence or learnings have we gained to date? What outstanding questions do we need to answer? How would the answers inform the solution to a problem we’re solving now or over time?
  2. Making sense of the data we have - How can we make sense of our learnings as they pertain to specific questions or larger themes that we need to understand and for which we need to design solutions over time?
  3. Evaluating designs - How can we evaluate designs and iteratively improve a product or service and its positioning over time?

Questions for future consideration 💭

  • What roles resonate with you more?
  • What roles do you think are missing?
  • What skills do you need to practice in order to help your team make more meaningful experiences?
  • What skills do you think are missing?
  • What gaps, if any, do you recognize between roles on project teams?
  • What frictions exist on a team and why do you think they occur?
  • How can customer interviews – as one approach to understanding customer stories – encourage constant cycles of informing, sense-making and learning in the spirit of the learning organisation, so to help glue team practices together and create integrated ways of work?

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Josephine Wong for contributing to this piece. For more, see Integrated Approaches to Constant Personal Learning, Improvement, and Maturity.

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1 min read

Clara Kliman-Silver: AI & design: imagining the future of UX

In the last few years, the influence of AI has steadily been expanding into various aspects of design. In early 2023, that expansion exploded. AI tools and features are now everywhere, and there are two ways designers commonly react to it:

  • With enthusiasm for how they can use it to make their jobs easier
  • With skepticism over how reliable it is, or even fear that it could replace their jobs

Google UX researcher Clara Kliman-Silver is at the forefront of researching and understanding the potential impact of AI on design into the future. This is a hot topic that’s on the radar of many designers as they grapple with what the new normal is, and how it will change things in the coming years.

Clara’s background 

Clara Kliman-Silver spends her time studying design teams and systems, UX tools and designer-developer collaboration. She’s a specialist in participatory design and uses generative methods to investigate workflows, understand designer-developer experiences, and imagine ways to create UIs. In this work, Clara looks at how technology can be leveraged to help people make things, and do it more efficiently than they currently are.

In today’s context, that puts generative AI and machine learning right in her line of sight. The way this technology has boomed in recent times has many people scrambling to catch up - to identify the biggest opportunities and to understand the risks that come with it. Clara is a leader in assessing the implications of AI. She analyzes both the technology itself and the way people feel about it to forecast what it will mean into the future.

Contact Details:

You can find Clara in LinkedIn or on Twitter @cklimansilver

What role should artificial intelligence play in UX design process? 🤔

Clara’s expertise in understanding the role of AI in design comes from significant research and analysis of how the technology is being used currently and how industry experts feel about it. AI is everywhere in today’s world, from home devices to tech platforms and specific tools for various industries. In many cases, AI automation is used for productivity, where it can speed up processes with subtle, easy to use applications.

As mentioned above, the transformational capabilities of AI are met with equal parts of enthusiasm and skepticism. The way people use AI, and how they feel about it is important, because users need to be comfortable implementing the technology in order for it to make a difference. The question of what value AI brings to the design process is ongoing. On one hand, AI can help increase efficiency for systems and processes. On the other hand, it can exacerbate problems if the user's intentions are misunderstood.

Access for all 🦾

There’s no doubt that AI tools enable novices to perform tasks that, in years gone by, required a high level of expertise. For example, film editing was previously a manual task, where people would literally cut rolls of film and splice them together on a reel. It was something only a trained editor could do. Now, anyone with a smartphone has access to iMovie or a similar app, and they can edit film in seconds.

For film experts, digital technology allows them to speed up tedious tasks and focus on more sophisticated aspects of their work. Clara hypothesizes that AI is particularly valuable when it automates mundane tasks. AI enables more individuals to leverage digital technologies without requiring specialist training. Thus, AI has shifted the landscape of what it means to be an “expert” in a field. Expertise is about more than being able to simply do something - it includes having the knowledge and experience to do it for an informed reason. 

Research and testing 🔬

Clara performs a lot of concept testing, which involves recognizing the perceived value of an approach or method. Concept testing helps in scenarios where a solution may not address a problem or where the real problem is difficult to identify. In a recent survey, Clara describes two predominant benefits designers experienced from AI:

  1. Efficiency. Not only does AI expedite the problem solving process, it can also help efficiently identify problems. 
  2. Innovation. Generative AI can innovate on its own, developing ideas that designers themselves may not have thought of.

The design partnership 🤝🏽

Overall, Clara says UX designers tend to see AI as a creative partner. However, most users don’t yet trust AI enough to give it complete agency over the work it’s used for. The level of trust designers have exists on a continuum, where it depends on the nature of the work and the context of what they’re aiming to accomplish. Other factors such as where the tech comes from, who curated it and who’s training the model also influences trust. For now, AI is largely seen as a valued tool, and there is cautious optimism and tentative acceptance for its application. 

Why it matters 💡

AI presents as potentially one of the biggest game-changers to how people work in our generation. Although AI has widespread applications across sectors and systems, there are still many questions about it. In the design world, systems like DALL-E allow people to create AI-generated imagery, and auto layout in various tools allows designers to iterate more quickly and efficiently.

Like many other industries, designers are wondering where AI might go in the future and what it might look like. The answer to these questions has very real implications for the future of design jobs and whether they will exist. In practice, Clara describes the current mood towards AI as existing on a continuum between adherence and innovation:

  • Adherence is about how AI helps designers follow best practice
  • Innovation is at the other end of the spectrum, and involves using AI to figure out what’s possible

The current environment is extremely subjective, and there’s no agreed best practice. This makes it difficult to recommend a certain approach to adopting AI and creating permanent systems around it. Both the technology and the sentiment around it will evolve through time, and it’s something designers, like all people, will need to maintain good awareness of.

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