Design x Susan Wolfe
Educator, Mentor, and Strategist
Illustration by Bonnie Kate Wolf
Interview conducted by Tasnim Merlin on July 7, 2020
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you’re currently doing.
For over the past six years, I’ve spent most of my time teaching the User Experience (UX) Design Immersive program at General Assembly (GA). I’m just finishing my 23rd cohort! I’ve lived in Australia for the past 25 years, but since joining GA I’ve been going back and forth between San Francisco and Sydney, teaching in both places. My next class will be in Australia, so I’ll be heading back very soon.
Tell us a little bit more about your journey to becoming a designer. Where did it start?
I certainly never had a grand plan to become a designer. I’d envisioned a career in academia and was working on my PhD in Cognitive Psychology, but I was hating every minute of it. A colleague told me about her husband’s job at IBM in a field called Human Factors. They would hire interns who were specifically working on their PhDs in Psychology, because we knew how to do controlled research—specifically designing, conducting, and analyzing the results of experiments. I didn’t know it at the time because I had never heard of it, but I knew how to do usability testing!
So they hired me as an intern for a year. It was fabulous, as it gave concrete meaning to the skills I was developing, and I got paid well, to boot. Suddenly I was working in industry and realizing that instead of paying to be pushed around by my advisor, I could actually contribute, and people respected me! They respected my opinions, and I could make a difference. Once I tested enough systems, I began to see what the universal problems were, and I could begin to make recommendations for how to fix them. That’s when the designer in me came out. So it wasn’t like I woke up one day and said, “I want to do design.” I literally fell into it.
The irony in this was that I’d barely touched a computer at that point, apart from one undergrad programming class at UC Berkeley, but that involved punch cards. (Yes, it was a long time ago!) The interaction was certainly not what we think of today when we think of the UX design of digital systems.
But I realized it wasn’t domain knowledge that was important. It was my ability to do research.
Do you think that research is a skill that stays no matter how technology changes?
One hundred percent. That’s one of the things that makes our field so interesting, because it also means that it’s not just the research into what’s working and what isn’t, but taking a step back and assessing what’s going on. Most importantly, our research leads us to make sure that we understand what the real problem is before we focus on the solution.
When we do start thinking about the solution, the technology has little to do with whether something is or is not going to work. It’s fundamentally not going to work if it doesn’t support the way users think, if it’s inconsistent or inefficient. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a computer system or a washing machine or even a service like renewing your driver’s license. It’s the same sort of thing that makes things work or not. So this means that we can jump around. You can be working on a project in financial services one day, and on healthcare or education the next.
In my case, after the internship, I decided to leave the PhD program. I then spent close to four years working at the NASA Ames Research Center, where we were building their first supercomputing facility for numerical aerodynamic simulations, which would replace the giant wind tunnels that are massively complex to operate. But I wasn’t designing the actual software for those kinds of scientific calculations. Instead, I focused on the experience of working in the facility. My job involved not only the software interfaces of the tools that run the facility, but also things like the way the space was organized and how people would use the facility. That made me really focus on the employee experience, and it started to broaden my horizons about the importance of UX.
I then went to work at Tandem Computers as the sole UX person. Tandem is known for fault-tolerant systems, where the hardware is architected so that it does not fail, especially when running mission-critical systems like air traffic control systems and the stock exchange. I was hired for a major project to design the interface for systems administrators to the Tandem systems. It was revolutionary because it was going to be the first graphical interface for Tandem systems. This was back when graphical interfaces were brand new.
While doing that, I made a case for the importance of user experience on everything that we were doing, and I started the UX group there. I aligned myself with the Industrial Designers group, which cared about the experience from the hardware, or the physical perspective, and I was adding the software component to it. I built a usability testing lab, built and ran the UX team, and created a group to develop and manage the design system so that the products would be easy to use and consistent.
Our customers didn’t necessarily think about it from the users’ perspective, so they were designing systems that had working hardware but lousy interfaces for the software. So Tandem sent me to interesting, far-flung places, one of those being Australia!
What is your work with consultancies like?
When I got to Australia, UX was in its infancy there. There was one consultancy—the Hiser Group—that was just starting up. Instead of me hiring them to work with me on that Tandem project, they hired me, and I stayed for 11 years, ultimately ending up as the Managing Director of a 40-person consultancy. 25 years ago, design thinking was not rolling off people’s tongues. We did a lot of consulting (not just designing interfaces, but also strategies) and mentoring, and we taught a lot of public and in-house courses. The clients we worked with were the equivalent of Fortune 500 companies—the banks, telecommunications companies, the government, and so forth. We definitely put UX on the map in Australia.
After Hiser, I went on to start another consultancy, Optimal Experience, where we continued more of the strategic work. I sold it right before I began teaching at GA. Any consulting that I do now, I do through my boutique agency, OE Strategy. That work is usually about designing for social impact.
What’s an example of the importance of the service design for social good?
When we talk about typical consumer products, we often talk about “reducing friction.” For social impact, it’s not always about reducing friction—it might be about adding friction to start thinking about things differently, or reframing the problems and things like that. It allows us to start thinking about system problems and how to better tackle their complexities. Unfortunately, so much of what Silicon Valley works on is not for social good. I love to use the example of the stupid robotic coffee shop that used to be across the street from GA’s San Francisco campus. Why should money be spent on that when we could better use the money to address solutions to help the huge homeless population?
Do you work with other businesses and on projects and implement design thinking through General Assembly?
Fortunately, I am able to get involved in a few interesting projects on behalf of GA. One that I’m currently involved with is called Corona Diaries, where people can leave stories about their experiences during the pandemic, people can listen to the stories, and journalists and other curators can utilize the content in meaningful ways.
I’m also, of course, on the fringes of lots of other interesting projects, as students in the UX Design Immersive program do real client work for their capstone projects.
Can you tell more about your current role on the Product Advisory Board at General Assembly?
There are a handful of us who are on the UX Product Advisory Board. We work with the business to help roll out the best content and help instructors around the globe with resources to successfully teach their courses. That doesn’t mean I designed the entire curriculum. What it does mean, though, is that a lot of the curriculum that I designed ended up being part of the core curriculum, given that I’ve been evolving it over the past six years.
There’s a lot that goes on to ensure that we’re in sync with what the industry needs, by working with other industry leaders, hiring managers, and GA partners, to ensure that we teach the most relevant skills for our grads to be successful in industry.
What are the main skills that you hope students will walk away with?
There are so many, but one of the first is to understand that knowing the tools (like Sketch, Figma, or Adobe XD) does not make you a UX designer, any more so than knowing Microsoft Word makes you a great writer. A pencil is the most important tool that a UX designer has. UX is all about collaboration, communication, and critique.
It’s about knowing that it’s not a formula. UX really is about balancing the needs of the business with that of the users. Successful UX is about the sweet spot—the intersection of desirability, viability, and feasibility.
Otherwise, anything we’re doing is just writing a fairytale. We used to call them “deliverables,” if we were just designing stuff that was cool, just for the sake of being cool. We’d then pass the work off to the client, and the client couldn’t implement them.
What are some important qualities when hiring someone?
I’m really supportive of people. I’m looking to hire people who are flexible, curious, and collaborative. For a junior designer, I would say, “Come, let me train you the same way I learned at IBM.” In more senior people, I’m looking for more leadership and facilitation skills.
I need to be able to trust them with the clients. Communication is key. Writing skills are really high on my list, because we do have to do so much writing. However, even more important than that is just good storytelling. If they can’t tell their own story, they’re probably not going to be able to tell the story of the project very well. If you have the best ideas in the world and you know how to solve the problem, but you can’t bring the clients along on the journey and you can’t communicate your ideas, the ideas will just stay in your head.
What are some of the most difficult things about the UX industry?
One of the most difficult things about our field is that everyone has a different opinion of what it is. As professionals, we constantly have philosophical and semantic debates, but more importantly, this spills over to our clients. They don’t know what they really need—they focus on symptoms, not the real problems. Furthermore, since we all use the terms differently, we also don’t necessarily speak the same language when talking about what it is that we’re going to do and why.
What this means is that there are so many projects where a client will pay us big bucks to do some work for them, and they don’t use it. Or they take what we’ve done and they totally do something else. It can be disheartening. This is why communication is so important, as is making sure we really are balancing desirability, viability, and feasibility.
What’s something you’re excited about?
I’m in the process of writing a book. I’m provisionally calling it Make Me Think. Perhaps you’re familiar with Steve Krug’s popular book, Don’t Make Me Think, about how you need to design things that are so simple that people don’t have to think about how to use them. While I love his book, the premise of my book is that often people expect UX to be a formula (if we follow this exact process, out will come a beautiful solution), but unfortunately, it doesn’t work this way. People do have to think if you want the UX process to do its magic.
This book stems from something that I do in my classes, where I collect maxims from students about what they’re internalizing through their journeys of learning about UX. Although I originally started collecting these six years ago when I started teaching, it’s not just about my students, but also about all of my clients coming to grips with thinking about UX. I’ve distilled all of this into 12 high-level rules to live by.
I’ve been chipping away at it for a while, but I’m planning to get the first draft completed very soon. I’m about to have two weeks of solitary confinement because I’m heading back to Australia. When I get off the plane, I’m not allowed to go home—instead I’m going to be whisked directly to a facility that’s been converted from a five-star hotel to a quarantine center. Wow, I’ll be locked in a room for 14 days. I’m going to miss the long walks on the beach that I’ve been taking every day after work since we’ve been working from home. But I’m going to get the book done! Wish me luck!
