Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters inside our buildings and out.
This Podcast is about Indoor Air Quality, Outdoor Air Quality, Ventilation, and Health in our homes, workplaces, and education settings.
And we already have many of the tools we need to make a difference.
The conversations we have and how we share this knowledge is the key to our success.
We speak with the leaders at the heart of this sector about them and their work, innovation and where this is all going.
Air quality is the single most significant environmental risk we face to our health and wellbeing, and its impacts on us, our friends, our families, and society are profound.
From housing to the workplace, education to healthcare, the quality of the air we breathe matters.
Air Quality Matters
Air Quality Matters
#19 - Dan Hyde: Impact of User Experience in the Built Environment, Ventilation and Air Quality
Dan Hyde
Dan is a UX strategist, researcher, co-host of the Zero Ambitions Podcast (a podcast about sustainability and the built environment), and co-founder of the magazine that ultimately evolved into Passive House Plus.
At Everything is User Experience, Dan and Alex his co-founder develop the strategy that underpins everything from apps and websites, to bid writing, service design, and corporate sustainability communications.
Working in the built environment, finance, and healthcare sectors, they carry out practical research that can be turned into simple, strategic packages that enable their clients to create experiences that work for all users.
In a full circle, Dan is a partner in a spin-off of the Zero Ambitions podcast, the Zero Ambitions Partnership offering much of the same strategy advice around UX, but focused specifically on the built environment, with Alex and Jeff Colley, the editor and owner of Passive House Plus and co-host of the podcast of the same name.
I wanted Dan on because he is just a great value to talk to anyway. One of his many skills.
However, beyond the performance gap in IAQ and ventilation in general, we have a significant communications gap, both with users of spaces and the stakeholders who deliver and manage them.
Good UX and design in how we structure strategy, communicate it, and provide ongoing support are everything. This chat scratches at some of these ideas.
EIUX website - https://www.everythingisuserexperience.com
EIUX LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/everythingisuserexperience/
Dan’s LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-hyde-61863112/
Futurebuild panel on YouTube (Does deep retrofit = deep impact Insights) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUIf45yc0wc
ZAP LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/zero-ambitions-podcast
ZAP episodes - https://feeds.transistor.fm/zero-ambitions
Check out the Air Quality Matters website for more information, updates and more.
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21 Degrees
Lindab
Aico
Ultra Protect
InBiot
All great companies that share the podcast's passion for better air quality in the built environment. Supporting them helps support the show.
Welcome back to Air Quality Matters, and this is a conversation with Dan Hyde. Dan Hyde, dan is a UX strategist, researcher and co-host of the Zero Ambitions podcast, a podcast about sustainability in the built environment, and co-founder of the magazine that ultimately evolved into Passive House Plus. At Everything Is User Experience, dan and Alex, his co-founder, developed the strategy that underpins everything from apps and websites to bid writing, service design and corporate sustainability communications. Working in the built environment, finance and healthcare sectors, they carry out practical research that can be turned into simple strategic packages that enable their clients to create experiences that work for all their users and in full circle. Dan is a partner in a spinoff of the Zero Ambitions podcast called Zero Ambitions Partnership. That offers much of the same strategy that everything as user experience does, but this time specifically focused on the built environment. In partnership with Alex and Jeff Colley, the editor and owner of Passive House Plus and co-host on the podcast of the same name, they offer services now specifically focused at this sector.
Simon:The reason I wanted to have Dan on other than the fact he's just great value to talk to anyway, one of his many skills is that, beyond the performance gap in indoor air quality and ventilation in general, we have a significant communications gap, both with users of spaces but also the stakeholders that deliver them. Good UX, good design in how we structure strategy, communicate it and provide ongoing support is everything, and this is a chat that really scratches at some of those ideas. I hope you enjoy it, as always. Thanks for listening. This is a conversation with dan hyde. The first question I had for you, dan, basically was uh, for listeners that might not be familiar with the term ux, what is ux and what is it to the built environment per se? Oh, man.
Dan:Um, when user experience is a design discipline that's grown up subsequent to, like the, the birth of the internet and the ubiquity of websites, um, ux, really. So user experience is a term that, like conventionally, is used to describe our attitudes and emotions when we use any product, system or service. So you can imagine, intuitively, like it. It's really useful for websites because, uh, you are, a website, is a, a system, a product that you're trying to get someone to do something. So either consume some content, engage with content so you get to serve up advertising to them, or help them to buy something In terms of the built environment. So one of the misleading things about user experience as a term is it's just good design. That's what it used to be called before the internet, when the internet arose, because if you rebrand something, you can make it more valuable, so you can charge more money, and there was in a zero interest rate environment. There was lots of money going towards things like websites and apps and digital products, and it became more valuable valuable in terms of the built environment.
Dan:So, like architects, not all of them are ux designers. In many ways, they design spaces for people to do stuff, like the, possibly the most obvious instance of ux design is, uh, wayfinding. So helping people make their way around a building or a town or a country like that is a set of design choices to help people navigate places. It is as simple as that. But you can get down to much more granular levels. If you have a pull handle on a push door. That is appalling user experience design. You send a sign that the pull handle on the push door suggests that you need to pull this door to open it. You reach out, you grab the handle, you pull, you look like a mug because nothing moves and you feel stupid. And then you push your way through and you get on with your day but, like, the design sent you all the wrong signals and made your experience of the interaction with the thing much more complicated than it needed to be.
Simon:The thing about.
Dan:UX is. Lots of people think it's about websites and really UX is just about people. So the way we are framing it now is ux strategy. So our agency is called everything is user experience. And we call it that because well, because we get the value proposition in the name, like, uh, everything around you is derived of or contributing to some kind of user experience, like where we're selling this in corporate circles. How we are framing it is that uh, ux strategy.
Dan:So the ideas, the concepts, the, the well, the strategy underpinning the achievement of a goal. It's about aligning an organizational goal with the needs of all the stakeholders in the value chain. So, basic website example you want to sell product but you need to make sure. So the the website itself needs to enable a swift journey from having an interest in a thing to finding the thing you want, to getting to the checkout, to making the purchase. But there are all sorts of other people involved in that value chain. So there's the people running the website, the people making the product, the people shipping the product, the people fulfilling the order, the people facilitating the financial transaction.
Dan:Now, if you transpose that to a situation like the built environment you have so in the creation of a building, like you've got all sorts of people involved in that value chain.
Dan:We're, in fact, we're we're working on a project with energy sprung at the moment, which is is doing resident research for social housing tenants who've been through a deep retrofit project, and that's been a fascinating exercise because the experience of the process is fundamentally determined by the performance of the people, the actors in that value chain. The organizational goal at Iggy Sprung is bill reduction, demand reduction, decarbonization. The goals of the tenants are health, comfort and demand reduction, which results in cost reduction, like in terms of their bills. And then you've got all these people involved in the value chain the people providing the technology, the people facilitating the residents, people installing the technology, and you've all sorts of interactions that go on that determine whether these projects are perceived as successes or failures by all the different people in the process. If you want the project to be a great success, you need to make sure everyone's happy all the time, or as close as damn it.
Simon:It sounds like with user experience, the one of the big challenges is defining the scope that, trying to understand what frame or boundary conditions you're trying to determine that user experience under um. Because, to use your internet analogy or website analogy, I think most people can make the mental leap with user experience that there's a physical user experience of using a website and how you understand users, their flow through that website, what those calls to actions are, how clear that information is presented, whether the buttons even work properly on the website, all of these things. You can see how UX design was born out of that world. And equally, with digital marketing and digital media, we were able to collect data to understand the metrics of people's flow through those types of platforms or websites. So there was contextual information that we had that we may not have had before with traditional marketing, say.
Simon:But as you say, there's the boundary condition of the website. But actually somebody's user experience, if you're just company, will include both the website and their experience of the product, the customer service, the billing and all of the other things that go into that ring fence or boundary condition of their user experience. So I guess you have the same challenges in the built environment. So I guess you have the same challenges in the built environment. You can look at UX, from a use of a door handle experience to the use of a space within a building, to a building, to a workplace or to a public space. You know like it can become quite broad yeah.
Dan:Yeah, oh, man, space, you know, like that it can become quite broad. Yeah, yeah, oh man, so like, so what we we haven't addressed there is like, uh, what we haven't addressed yet, rather, is like so much of it is about setting up expectations. So, like that journey prior to purchase through a website, prior to purchasing a thing through a website, at some some point someone creates an expectation in the mind's eye of the user that this thing or a thing of this type is going to fulfill a need that they have, hence them looking for it. You have set up an expectation that needs to be met and or managed throughout the rest of the value chain and, as you said, or as you alluded to, what happens afterwards once the sale's been made. And you have the same issue with buildings.
Dan:We had a chat with Adrian Lehman and Bill Bordas a while ago, the Usable Buildings guys. So usablebuildingscouk. If you don't know them already, check it. It's an amazing site. It's incredibly rudimentary but a brilliant user experience in terms of they just give you the information straight away. But they are the guys who came up with Neighbours, the I can't remember what it stands for. It's the Australian Building Performance Standard or Assessment Standard. They came up with soft landings. That's their baby, the bus methodology.
Dan:Those guys have been UX designers for the built environment for decades. Like long before such a thing, uh, had this particular name. Like so when we say ux is about people, not websites, so like just getting away from websites altogether, like the strategy that we develop is all driven by user research, so it means we just talk to people and that's what those guys have been doing for decades like assessing a thing, a challenge, so developing the boundaries that you described earlier, like what are we looking at? What are we interested in? What do we want to find out? Why do we want to find it out? And then they away and talk to people, analyze the results and use that to make recommendations.
Simon:So as a practitioner of ux. Are you a designer or a social scientist?
Dan:oh, you flatter no man. Um, I'm an account man, like, so my background is uh. So jeff colley, editor of passive s plus, and I went to university together. I broke up with a girlfriend and in uh, my woes, he reached out and said come to Dublin, I'll get you a job on the magazine I'm working on selling advertising and we'll get a flat and we'll have a great time. And so I said, yeah, all right, went over to Dublin, saw the advertising for a bit. You don't need all the details. But what happened out of that was he and I realized that the magazine that we were working for was never going to publish and was committing perpetual fraud. So we quit and decided, well, if they can do it, like, oh, we could do it. And then we ended up setting up a magazine called Construct Ireland for a sustainable future. So like sneaking in the sustainability aspect to a conservative, uh, construction industry that eventually became passive house plus. But like I did that publishing. And then I went. I've worked in demolition, landscape gardening, uh, I worked.
Dan:I moved to london, carried on working in publishing for local lifestyle publications, which which are essentially real estate adverts that's what their function is and then eventually wound up in agency land as an account man, so the account manager, account director, so helping a client work out what they need and giving them what they want and making money out of it for the agency. So I was the facilitator between the client, the designers, the developers, the copywriters, the strategists. And, as a consequence of doing that for the best part of a decade working within the financial services sector, like, I became a brand strategist. I was doing messaging strategy, campaign strategy, because I've got a weird existence where I've touched all sorts of things, like it was easy to make a transition into those things. And so there I worked with my co-founder, uh, alex blondin. He, he was our head of digital there and he and I working on website projects for our clients. We started hiring in heavyweight ux strategists, like because we realized, well, we need to get someone to work out what this website needs to do. And we worked with these guys and we realised, oh, this is what we're doing, but this guy calls it UX strategy. And I realised that I've been applying, instinctively, I've been applying some, uh, these ideas and methods to other things.
Dan:I was doing, like, uh, campaign planning, like coming up with advertising or working out what to do with video content. A client says to you they want a video and I can't be bothered making more videos that people aren't going to watch, so like, all right. Well, what do you want to do with it? How are you going to maximize the value out of it? What, what channels do you want it to go into? How can we build it so it's going to work in a variety of circumstances to fulfill the variety needs for a bunch of different stakeholders within your organization? Give him his three minutes on camera. We can do that, but why don't we? Because no one ever watches those three minute.
Dan:Talking of videos, uh, why don't we think about it strategically, do something a bit more interesting and break it down into chunks that you can use on social media. That uh, mean that people will actually see it and use it all to lay a breadcrumb trail. How can we do the interrogation during the interview part and turn it into copywriting Like verbatim quote making to make it seem more vital, more interesting, more human and all sorts of stuff like that, and we did the same for animation, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, realized I was doing UX, but from the strategy side rather than the delivery side, so I don't tend to do wireframing or stuff like that.
Dan:I do the side where we get the brief right, where we seek to get the brief right up front. By that I mean people often have a sense of what they want to achieve, but they don't know how to achieve it. So, getting back to property, people know they want to put a building on a piece of land so they don't just draw a picture of the building and say away and build that. They get in surveyors, they get in lawyers, they get in building designers, architects, specifiers, all sorts of people. But in order to do a good job, you have to know what's the purpose of the building. Who's going to be using the building? How are they going to be using the building? How long does this building need to last? Is it going to have that purpose for its whole lifespan or is it going to change?
Simon:and we were doing that for, like, corporate projects, from marketing to communications, uh and now we're doing it in the, the built environment, in all sorts of strange and unexpected ways yeah, and that's what I want you know, and I suppose that's what the initial question is about is what is UX to the built environment? Because the interesting thing is that we build buildings for people as we make products for people, and so you can see the place that user experience and design has in that and, from what you're saying, a lot of your work is about defining those boundary conditions, understanding and creating the structure and the conditions to understand and deliver what good looks like in whatever environment that UX is operating in. And one of the challenges we know we have in the built environment are these gaps. We've struggled with the performance gap. We're trying to deal with carbon emissions and embodied carbon, the technical problems, but one of the big pieces is the use of those spaces and how they deliver for the, the consumer that was intended for and that is the user of that building, and that that's what's fascinating to me broadly about ux is how it closes that gap, how it starts to make that more successful, and for me personally, coming from something as esoteric as air quality, it's very analogous to that in a lot of ways. You have the physical challenges and the technical challenges of delivering good ventilation, whatever that is, and the products, the design, the skills and label all of the same things we have in the broader built environment context. But one of the key pillars to success of good ventilation and air quality outcomes is the user, and what we haven't been able to answer anywhere near well enough yet is how we create a good user experience when it comes to ventilation and air quality, especially as it is so esoteric and long term.
Simon:You know whatever about poor design meaning every time you go and try and push the door open you realize it's a pull handle and vice versa, and that you get lost in buildings and those those immediate, acute poor user experiences, often with and even perhaps with thermal comfort. That can be quite a an acute, immediate experience. If you get the building thermal design wrong, people will be cold or uncomfortable or experience drafts right, but with air quality, so much of it is long term and chronic that we really struggle to join the dots. For organizations that's whether it's new build, delivering new houses or social housing that you and I work with an awful lot trying to deliver good outcomes. Whether that's damp and mold or better air quality and so on, user experience is such a critical pillar. The user of that space is such a critical pillar, but we just haven't managed to join that dot. And that's what I'm fascinated about this UX conversation is what that brings to the table, because we haven't done that yet, not even close.
Dan:Yeah, well, the thing is in the built environment we don't tend to. The forces driving the built environment don't really care about people. Couldn't care less. Because, if you think about it so you reference, like air quality, thermal comfort. Man, speaking from a uk perspective, we do not expect comfort in our homes, particularly like our homes are badly built, like I don't need to offer you any particular examples because, like, folk can google them Like we've all heard enough.
Dan:Like the parlour state of the new build market. Like the dearth of quality that's available. Like the reliance on drafty, old sorry, not the reliance the desire for older built homes because they are felt to be more reliable in terms of the build quality, even though they're leaky, drafty and they've been changed in use to an extent, which may be causing the systems to fail in some regards. Like you know, you've no open fireplaces, uh, anymore. So the ventilation quality is that the ventilation system is fundamentally broken. It doesn't exist anymore. There's no, nothing drawing heat through the house, nothing drawing air through the house. Like that system is gone.
Dan:Yeah, we live in the same one, uh, yeah, we don't really care about people. Like the built environment is, by and large, assets, the creation of assets to be bought and sold. The people are incidental, like there are rare occurrences where people are at the heart of the creation of a building, but like they are few and far between, and this has been like referencing uh, bill and adrian, like this has been one of the the themes of their work for a long, long time the lack of consideration of people. That is a fundamental issue. Until we overcome that to one extent, and that is, as you point out, that is where we have an awful lot of value to bring.
Simon:And when we talk about boundary conditions as well, there's the breadth of the boundary, so how much and how many stakeholders you bring into that user experience, but also there's the longitudinal element of it.
Simon:I mean, I'm reaching for words here, but what I mean by that, I guess, is if you're dealing with a major UK house builder, for example, if you're dealing with a major UK house builder, for example, their interest effectively finishes, arguably, with the land acquisition, never mind the construction of the buildings, right, but let's just say their interest ends when they sell the building.
Simon:We'll give them some credit, we'll give them some credit. Yeah, um, the the challenge in that is how you build a, a user experience structure that extends beyond that sale point. So it's so in that environment. If you were, if you were working with a, let's say, a house builder which I know you do with some very forward thinking ones, for example um, they'll be thinking a little bit more long-term and out beyond the experience of just passing it on to the estate agents. But if you're dealing with a social housing body, as another example, they have a very different longitudinal boundary to user experience because they not only are interested in what they take on from the built environment perspective. They have a long-term management and and also social deliverable to deliver with their product as well.
Dan:So it's a I imagine it's a very different conversation in that type of environment, much less consumer based and more service and social good based user experience yeah, I think with social housing, like, what's interesting about that is, within the social housing uh entities, there are loads of people trying to do great work, but what actually gets done, the work that actually gets put into place, is often driven by risk management rather than helping people. Again, the people are almost incidental, like, if people really mattered, you wouldn't have a man like Quajo Tenobar, like the Twitter and instagram figurehead who is a social housing campaigner or a quality of housing campaigner, like he wouldn't exist if those organizations were really focused on helping people, like. Unfortunately, like and you know I'm not trying to damn everyone with this statement, but the truth is that what motivates those organizations is into acting is risk management rather than making their customers happy.
Simon:Is that a nature of scale rather than intent, though, do you think?
Dan:Those organizations are full of amazing people doing amazing work, trying really hard to make stuff work, but the political and economic structures surrounding them don't facilitate that. They facilitate something else, and this is where all right. So this is where what I said earlier about like the alignment of an organizational goal with the needs of all the stakeholders in the value chain. So what is the organizational goal? Often, so to your point about scale it's about protecting the institution. That's what happens when you reach a certain scale, and the organizational goal is not about creating happy tenants, it's about protecting the institution, which means that you have a lack of alignment between stakeholders in the value chain. So the people, the asset managers, are trying to protect the assets the CLOs, the customer liaison officers or the resident liaison officers they have a different set of priorities.
Dan:Then you have like fragmentation, like woeful fragmentation, within these organizations. So, like your damp and mold team, they might barely be speaking to your asset managers. Like they, they will be working from separate budgets that aren't connected. Like, something that I'm forever banging on about is the lack of alignment between the people who control capital budgets with those who control operational budgets, like CapEx and OpEx. They mix like oil and water, which beggars belief, because if you make an upfront capital investment that can lower your operational expenditure specifically in terms of something like air quality, you invest upfront and you improve the. You invest in air quality, upfront ventilation, you will improve the integrity of the fabric over a long timeline, which will reduce your operational expenditure. In terms of things like rot works have we talked about rot works on the podcast before? Like?
Dan:in social housing, that's so for anyone who's unfamiliar with the phrase, that's where the home is falling to pieces or damaged through a lack of maintenance, care, attention, and I think you're dealing with all these sorts of contradictions. So there might be within the corporation's brand. Their value proposition will be about making nice homes for happy people and improving quality of life, but the way it actually works does not facilitate that necessarily because, like, the stated goal is not the actual motivating goal and, I think, trying to work out how to align those things.
Dan:This isn't just me doom saying this is just observate, observing and having been working with organizations like this. These contradictions are rife everywhere. It's I'm not just picking on social housing. It's the same in uh domestic housing, for like a consumer market. It's the same in uh commercial property it's I mean, it's the same in all the industries, everywhere.
Simon:To be perfectly frank, it's always a challenge of enterprise is that the bigger organizations get, the more split incentives naturally uh, build into that structure. Because organizations get, the more split incentives naturally build into that structure. Because, you know, the more focus an asset management team is on asset management, the less focus they are on um, housing care or tenant care, because there's a there's a team for that, you know. Or the dump and mold team doesn't see the capital replacement team. I mean, you know it's my biggest complaint is that you can spend years developing a new ventilation strategy in a housing organisation, develop some groundbreaking projects on the ground that deliver amazing results, and then the kitchen replacement team comes around and replaces the fan with the same old fan they've always put in because that's what goes in with their new kitchens. And so you find yourself back there four or five years later wondering how it happened.
Simon:And you know there's any number of examples like that. The bigger the organization gets, the more chances there are of that happening, not helped probably by the incestuous nature of housing and how people move around so much that it's very difficult to build up that knowledge and expertise in one area and it's stick, which is why strategy is so important. This is what I think is interesting about UX and perhaps as a thought experiment how does UX work strategically in one of those larger tier one type organizations? What's the ideal conversation that Dan has with a head of assets, say?
Simon:as an entry point into that organization. What does the perfect tier one housing organization look like? How does that process manifest to define who is the user, and how do we embed something that delivers a good outcome across such a behemoth of an organization?
Dan:Oh, thank you for gifting me a magnificent segue like that. So I've got one. So we're working with a tier one contractor in Ireland who is changing their development strategy. So from traditional high-density apartment building to a much more progressive form of building strategy which will reduce demand, energy demand. So it's part of what's motivating them is they see the landscape, like the broader political landscape, and they're a big player in the market and they recognize that building regs are going to be changing over the next few months. The way building performances areised is going to change.
Dan:This new, this recast that's come through the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, which I don't know when that comes into effect. We're doing an episode, I think, on that this week, jeff and I. That's going to change the whole landscape, like it's going to change things. It's going to change things. It's going to shake things up quite significantly in terms of measuring and monitoring of energy performance beyond just the stated design parts. It's going to incorporate a bit of embodied carbon. These things are going to be coming thick and fast over the next 10 years as we observe climate catastrophe like really impacting our lives and the lives of our neighbors.
Dan:So what this tier one contractor has done is they've recognized the risk and they've thought how can we insulate ourselves against this risk? Let's just build better houses Like. That's what I sort of mean with like the, the organizational motivation. It's not magnanimous. Now there are people within the organization who are thinking in those terms, like they want to do good by people and this isn't to decry the ceo like and suggest he doesn't want to do good by people, but the bit that forces him forces that enables him to choose to put his finger on the green button is the risk Like oh yeah, no, I can make this decision easily, like my shareholders will be in agreement on that, and so that's a dream client. Somebody who's thinking about doing good for a selfish reason, like having come from a finance background, like working with the investment industry, I'm sort of I've been conditioned to think in those terms because it's the easiest way to get a decision out of someone, the most reliable way to get a decision out of someone turn it into money. Then they start listening, um, and so this is like going to be a sea change within the organization and it's going to require everyone in that value chain to think differently about what they do. So we've been working with them to get the messaging right, the internal messaging, so they know what they want to achieve Instinctively, emotionally, they're very clear on what it can achieve Within a regulatory framework. They know what's driving it. However, all of those things they're not necessarily going to fly with all of the different stakeholders in the organization.
Dan:So what we are doing first is thinking strategically about the user experience of undergoing a massive change, and the first step is UX for communication. How do we get the right information in front of the right people in a way that they can remember, that they're able to retain and then recount to their peers? And so how do we? How do we turn? Uh, how do we create an organization of evangelists for this particular cause?
Dan:And when you're talking about better building, like people who work on building sites, they, they live in a state of perpetual frustration, you know, because they often find themselves not being able to do the job that they want to the quality that they would prefer, like they're just in and out working to whatever targets or deadlines they've been given and it's really hard work and with so many competing priorities and difficulties and pressures on cost, like to be able to say to a workforce to be able to communicate to a workforce like here. We actually want you to build better homes, like, and we're going to give you the support and means to do that and then, at the end of the day, you're not going to be proud of the number of things you've done. You're going to be proud of the quality of your work, first and foremost. And so first thing we've done is, uh, work with them in terms of designing a presentation which was delivered to senior stakeholders from across the value chain. So, as a tier one contractor, you've got all your internal personnel, like from marketing and sales to your architects and the people, your contract managers, the CEO, and you've got your contractors, the people who do the actual work, and your site managers, who are sort of that one foot in, one foot out, and they all need to be brought on board and given information that's going to convince them, convert them and enable them to become evangelists.
Dan:So that's the first piece of work we did, and it's not necessarily I was going to say it's not necessarily I was going to say it's not necessarily successful immediately. Uh, you can't know how these things are going to fly, like. Uh, when you first do them, like something that I say a lot is getting things wrong is part of the process. Get the same thing wrong consistently, that's not not it, but like within user experience. But you see, people try things all the time and change them.
Dan:Websites evolve because they need to, because you, you come up with an idea, you test it out, you observe the response and you adapt and you move forward, and so that's what we've done with this first phase of communication. Now we're moving into something much more substantial, which is going to be long term, it's a really dense piece of research. Short term, it's building up a set of messaging that works for a variety of audiences, through which we can communicate with the influencers within an organization and give them the tools to communicate the value of what the organization is doing to everyone and show them the benefit of engaging with the process. Show them the benefit to them, specifically to them, like the builders on the site, site manager, whoever um, sorry yeah, I mean it strikes me what you're saying, dan, that there's a.
Simon:There's quite a strong element here of organizational change management that user experience isn't just about what's on the surface, the, the brochures that you produce and the presentations. Quite often there's a lot of systemic change embedded in within user experience. So I'm guessing the successful customer relationships are not short-term relationships for you. You have the same kind of relationships that an organizational change management consultant would have, in that there's a, there's a plan to get a different outcome, and that may require, yes, how you present things, how things are communicated and so on, as you'd expect with user experience.
Dan:But there's a real structural element to this as well yeah, yeah, well, I mean the that instance is a change driven uh example. I mean we do much more pedestrian stuff as well. We do do websites and apps and things like that. Like we help people, uh, just do the things they've always done, but better, like because we've even applied. So that was just like ux strategy, uh, for communication and change management within an organization. I mean we've done ux strategy for bid writing in the past, where? So, to your boundary concern, uh, we want to. We've got a set of criteria that we know we need to communicate about and we're going to be scored marks out of 10 for each one, and there's going to be three different user types, uh, client side, who are judging us and our work against what? 10, 20 other submissions over across a three-day period? We know that these three different user types.
Dan:So, like for the sake of argument, it's like a, the person managing the bid process, a representative of the design or contract or site management team and someone involved in sustainability or procurement. Like there's a couple of different people. They all have different needs from the information that you're putting in front of them. You've got a bunch of arbitrary criteria that are imposed on you, so like a font size, a number of pages or a word count, and you've got to communicate and you've been given a list of criteria against which you will be judged your submission, and so I don't know if you've been given a list of criteria about against which you will be judged your submission, and so I don't know if you've done any bid assessment in the past or bid writing. But like they're generally written to a really appalling quality and produced to a woeful standard because like the people doing the work they're not.
Dan:They're not comms people often like the let's not say everyone's the same, like, there are professional uh bid writing organizations that help people. But what we did for this this company was, uh, we help them recognise the motivations, or we hypothesise the motivations and the needs of the readers. We recognise that they don't want to be reading this stuff. Certainly when they get to the fifth one they're bored. So what's their need at that point? The need that is unspoken. Well, we need to make it easy for them to find the information so they can check it off and give us the best possible score in the quickest amount of time. If we give them a positive emotional experience in those terms, at the end of it this company will be more memorable as compared to the others. So when it comes to a qualitative judgment rather than a numbers quantitative judgment, they will be viewed favorably.
Dan:So, like we did that, we, we, uh, we developed themes, we copy wrote the whole document so it was readable. So, like, it wasn't hard to read. So the information was delivered in a structured, sensible, ordered manner and was signposted so you could just read. You could read the subheadings that we included to find the bits of information you wanted. So, whether it was about communicating social value or technical competence, like it was easy for them to use the document. And it's the same strategy. It's just a different motivation that's guiding it. Like we want to win this tender, we want to make it easy for the reader, like the other one it's. We want to convert people to a new way of thinking and make them feel comfortable.
Simon:Um, with the energy sprung project and good, good design yeah sorry, we must come back onto the energy sprung project. And good, good design yeah sorry, we must come back onto the energy sprung project. But just just to pick up on your point there, because a lot of this is about good design, you've got to understand the personas of the people that are using that product or service or going through that experience. So I'm guessing a very fundamental part of so I'm guessing a very fundamental part of good.
Simon:UX design is understanding the user. How do you typically go about that, Because I'm guessing that doesn't come about easily. This isn't three people within an organization sitting down and having a guess at what they think people are going to want and like.
Dan:There's a much more sophisticated normally, yeah, I know for sure but.
Simon:But if you're running the show, I'm guessing it's not right that there's a there's a much more sophisticated approach to doing surveys of people, doing interviews, understanding the drivers behind people's choices.
Simon:We probably don't do nearly enough of that within the built environment. A lot and a lot of the reasons there's a performance gap is often because we assume people are going to use something in a certain way or understand how it works in a certain way. You know that one of the big challenges at the moment in retrofit is moving people across to heat pumps and, all of a sudden, everybody who's used to combination boilers and instantaneous hot water now having to have a hot water cylinder for the first time in their life. So their user experience of both the information they've been given, what they've been understanding about how this is going to work, the pros and cons of running out of hot water for the first time in their life versus energy efficiency there's a huge piece of user experience there that's failing when it comes to heat pump deliverables because we haven't thought through how people are going to interpret and use and what their experience of that entire process is.
Simon:That would be a good, solid example. I'm guessing of missing the point that.
Dan:That absolutely rings true, like what we found. So, having done worked in a corporate environment, we do. We do a bunch of pro bono work with impact startups as well. Uh, so, like people who are on the beginning of their business journey, possibly a couple of businesses into their career. But uh, with young companies and within the built environment at all levels, like product level and like a developer level. What we have found is that, consistently, no one has any clue about their customers, really like no one knows anything about them. They've never done any research, they've done lots of guessing and they've relied heavily on anecdotes and the uh, the loudest voice in the room, like they are the ones who get to decide what happens and who we heed. So what we do now so you're absolutely right what we do is we talk to people, we interview people. So a basic process is uh, we will all right, so using the thegiesprong case study. So we're just wrapping up the first phase of that project. So that was Energiesprong are working on a comfort plan proposition.
Dan:So the comfort plan is like an ESCO, an energy service company. So the idea is Energiesprong deep retro retrofit a social housing, tenant's home. Then by reducing the energy demand, they reduce the cost of their energy bills. The differential in cost is then used to service the debt that was accrued to pay for the deep retrofit. So effectively, the tenant, the resident, gets slightly cheaper bills but a warmer, more comfortable, healthier home, and this is supposed to be. I mean, it is the proverbial no-brainer. However, it's always more complicated than that. We did a. If anyone's interested in seeing more, check our LinkedIn channel. Everything is User Experience or Zero Ambitions podcast, or myself. We presented the first round of work at FutureBuild a few weeks back, a month ago. Whenever doesn't matter.
Simon:I'll stick some links in the show notes, Dan, for people as well.
Dan:The way the process works is. We, energiesprong, wanted to know more about how to develop this proposition, to turn it into something viable. So, is it affordable? Do the tenants consider it to have been a valuable process? What did they value? Blah, blah, blah. So we do the way any of these processes work and this is a standard process, whether we're doing a website, an app, whether we're coming up with product or we are assessing the, the broader value of a, like an actual physical product. We we did that recently.
Dan:Um, we do workshop with the client to assess the brief. So we interrogate the brief so, like, really, why are you asking this question? Like what's really important? All right, so this sounds really important, but why is it important? Like what's motivating that? And so we distill the brief into its most. We prioritize the, the various asks, and sometimes we rewrite it completely, because this in interrogation process reveals that what the client is asking for isn't actually what they want.
Dan:And clients come to people like us because they don't know how to resolve the challenges that are in front of them. We are specialists. That's why they come to us, so there's no reason they have to have all the answers. If they did, they'd just be doing the work, wouldn't they? So we do a workshop with them. Then we develop a hypothesis based on the brief, and then we do a workshop with internal teams, and so the standard form is we do a workshop with and when I say workshop, it's just a conversation uh, we have a chat with senior leadership team and we have a chat with people who are more boots on the ground call face, client facing, um, because there is often a significant dissonance in opinion or understanding or assessment of what the challenges actually are. And then we report back on this internal perspective so conflict, dissonance, agreement and where we see the way forward, so what strategy we think we need to fulfill. Then we agree the goals for a research phase with the client.
Dan:So we work with the client to develop a structured questionnaire which will enable us to find out all the information that we want, and so this is like a bunch of territories for a conversation that we have with their residents, their users, their customers, whoever. A bunch of specific questions, and then we decide what kinds of users we want to speak with, and that's where we develop the profile. So we work from the client's perception. They might be more informed. Some are more informed than others. They might have developed their own profiles, which were conjured out of thin air, or they might have data about their customers which they can lean on directly. We've had instances where a hypothesized customer type or user type just absolutely doesn't exist. We couldn't find them anywhere within the system, which is fascinating. Well, fascinating to us, probably quite boring to everyone else, yeah.
Simon:So an assumption by the organization that there was a persona of some description as a customer of theirs that actually, when you scratch the surface, wasn't apparent.
Simon:Yeah, yeah think, yeah, yeah, that's what happens when an engineer invents a persona, or a salesperson invents a persona, or, you know, those three or four people sit in the room. Go right, jesus, we've got to figure out who we're selling this to, or who who this is for, right. Who is it? Well, I met susan last week. She was a right pain in the neck this is this is what she said to me and bang, you know, your persona is basically derived from, from your latest experience with a tenant. You know, and all of a sudden, that's informed, that informs an entire process and structure within the organization. That then, surprise, surprise, doesn't deliver.
Dan:Yeah, yeah, and then we, then we just away and do the interviews and so it's a chat. I mean it's just like this. To be perfectly frank, the questionnaire we don't use. I I mean we use it as a checklist, but like it's important. So we are a bit different in this, in the research that we do, like of course I'm going to say it's like highly skilled and all that sort of stuff, but like we are weird in the way we go about it.
Dan:We just have a chat with folk and we lead. We lead people through a conversation, but we allow them to take the reins and tell us what is important. So if we ask a specific question and the the subject doesn't want to answer it, like they answer a different question, we let them. We don't correct them because there's something interesting. Like they're telling us that what we're asking isn't important to them or not as important as this thing. They, they change the terms of the conversation and we interrogate why, and eventually we'll get back to asking our question. We'll get an answer to it because we haven't ticked that one off, but it it's incredibly revealing what people want to tell you and I know you, dan, you are skilled.
Simon:But how does something like that scale with consistency when you have to rely on someone of your skill set to understand the context of the, the questions that they're asking, and interpret and let people run away with responses? Can that be?
Simon:trained uh, effectively so that you can get consistency in results back. Because I imagine, academically, all the academics are running around with their hair on fire at the moment wondering why this isn't being done under the bus methodology or something else that that there's a, there's an analogy piece to this and a kind of a context piece to this that your experience and skill set um derives. Yet if you were to hand that over to a 22-year-old postgraduate kid and say, look, you've got to go and interview 50 people as part of this project, how does something like that deliver consistency for a customer?
Dan:So we've developed a methodology for just this, because because we work with impact startups, they haven't got much money yeah like.
Dan:So, where they like this sort of customer research, it's often perceived as a cost, when in reality is an investment in learning what your actual job is or what your company actually does. So we've got a method for developing a customer research strategy that can be run by the entity. There is an acknowledgement that if we hand it over, it's not going to be done as well, but if we can control the conditions under which it's carried out. So like we are qualitative researchers, not quantitative, so we don't do surveys, we do interviews and we do do surveys as well, because the qualitative work that we do creates the benchmark. The quantitative work that can be done is used to assess the benchmark.
Dan:Now, if we can deliver a research strategy up front and say this is what you need to research this is why we do the interviews internally to a greater or lesser extent. We narrow the number of personas that we think we need to interrogate to the minimum. We give them a a basic structured questionnaire and then we do the first few interviews with the client so to show them how it works, we can just hand it over and give them the opportunity. So we do the first layer of assessment after the first few. This is our current hypothesis.
Simon:Now away, disprove us so my brain's going at a thousand miles an hour because, you know, obviously I'm a practitioner, so I'm immediately going oh, this, that would be really interesting here and that would be fantastic there. And I mean just to give you one simple example um, a piece of research was done in the uk that looked at whether natural ventilation was still fit for purpose in modern airtight homes. It was a very, yeah, famous piece of research. That was done five years ago, now six, six years ago. Ian Maudit would have led on it, who I know, you know, and there were a couple of really interesting takeaways from me out of that research. The first one was, which was the one that's been used to beat the industry with, and rightly so, was that about 95% of the homes were non-compliant. So, to give some context to listeners, these were new homes that were given to research, assuming, I assume, as the developers best foot forward, as their best possible projects that they handed over yeah on first.
Simon:On first visit, 95 of the homes were effectively non-compliant right, which is a shocking statement of the state of affairs of ventilation in the UK.
Dan:Shocking but unsurprising.
Simon:Unsurprising to any of us here that are involved, for sure. But the interesting piece of this is the bit that I use often in statements is that on first visit they also looked at the use of those ventilation systems and 40% of the inlets, the trickle vents, you know, the holes on windows that allow air in. So on first visit, 40% of the homes had between 0% and 20% of those vents open of the homes had between zero and 20 percent of those vents open. So what I often describe to people in my talks is that in the uk, based on this study, 95 of the homes were non-compliant with the regulations. But even if they had been fully compliant, the majority of them were being used in a way that wouldn't have delivered a good outcome.
Simon:So even if they had, you wouldn't have got a good outcome. So there's a huge piece to be done in ventilation in not only presenting what's being delivered in a property better so that people understand it understand it but looking at habits and user behavior and understanding, because presumably people in these new modern, airtight homes were making decisions for a reason to behave in the way that they did do, um, and we don't understand that at all. Yet you know that the feedback around the isolation switches were that the control switches for the ventilation are a bit inconvenient because they're up so high, because people were using the isolating switches to turn the fans off, on and off, because they didn't understand how it worked. In scotland they introduced co2 sensors in master bedrooms as part of the new regulations and I can't remember off the top of my head, but something like 20% of them 20% of the people surveyed thought that they were carbon monoxide alarms, not CO2 sensors. Yeah, and certainly something like 80% of them were never given a handover and a description of what the thing was. So we've got to do better, particularly with something like ventilation.
Simon:There's a huge step needed and one of the interesting pieces about my work is it's similar in some ways to user experience in that it's quite niche.
Simon:I tend to focus on air quality and ventilation, which is a very small fraction of housing, often with these organizations, but like user experience, it's omnipresent, which means there isn't a corner of housing supply or management that doesn't need to deliver decent ventilation.
Simon:So I end up dealing with the voids teams and the condensation teams and the capital replacement the same as you do. So it becomes change management in nature, because you're dealing quite strategically and structurally with those organizations to deliver change. But there's this huge void still, even if you get the internal pieces right, in crossing that gap between the delivery of ventilation and people's use of it. And that's where I think user experience can be exploited much more in ventilation and air quality is trying to understand these personas, these users of the spaces, why they're making the decisions they're making. Because we don't even know if it's simple or not, if this is a simple fix or a complicated fix, because nobody's really looked at it, not at scale and not in practice. But it's not being applied in practice in industry, whether that's private rented or socially rented or private owned sector.
Dan:We haven't applied that kind of principle of user experience and knowledge to ventilation and air quality. Yet that I've seen. Yeah, because we don't care about the people. Yeah, yeah, because we don't care about the people. But as an industry like you know, there are aspects where people within the industry are motivated to care about people. But as an industry like you, don't make money out of people, you make money out of sorry. You don't make money out of giving people the best proper, the best possible service and the best quality of life. You make money by selling them stuff.
Dan:So shifting product that's that's the goal. I think. So your point about people not understanding how to use a ventilation system like that's absolutely on point. That's our experience of so we do so the first phase of research. So the way alex and I frame it is because we've been doing this so long. We can do four interviews with a persona or user type and we can. We, we are confident that we can pull out the key themes that need to be interrogated further in a research exercise. By the time you get to 10 interviews with a persona or user type, we are very confident that we know what is important and we can stop there often, like shift it to a quant approach, by the time we get to 17 interviews now we're getting the outliers which reveal hidden value, that you're not going to find people who are subverting the system in ways that you couldn't possibly expect and getting something else out of it, for good or for ill, who knows? Because this is the thing. We never know quite what we're going to get and our MO is to try and disprove our hypothesis through the interrogation.
Dan:But what you're describing so this energy sprung project, we found that people, lots of the building users, the residents, still didn't know how to run their systems. They were still trying to, they were still thinking about them in terms of the old home that they used to live in, which didn't exist anymore. And they were. They in some cases, were really struggling to adapt because it was. It was quite different. So, like uh, one customer was delighted by the freshness of the, the internal temperature of the home in the summer, it was nice and cool, but they were aggrieved at the smells of barbecues coming in through the ventilation system, like the outdoor odours. Now, they didn't know to start looking at the filters. Know to start looking at the filters. Uh, they hadn't been informed or they hadn't paid attention when they were informed, and like thinking about behavior in those sometimes it doesn't matter what you tell people, like they just aren't able to hear it.
Dan:And developing a process that can enable people to be supported, to learn at a reasonable pace, that can capture these common missteps and foibles, which people are fickle and complicated and contradictory and confounding. The most engaged people will sometimes just stop listening. They will only hear what they want to hear. We had one guy who really engaged in the process, loved his heat pump, delighted Slightly, he put himself in a slightly vaunted position against the people he perceived to be his peer groups, the other residents who've been through the program, because he understood the heating system and the ventilation system, like and I'm not saying this, it might sound like I'm a bit condescending to my tone, so sorry, uh, but like it was just really interesting that he acknowledged that he'd had to learn about this stuff, that he was capable of learning about it, and he thought that his peers who were going through the same program would need a lot more support than him, that he'd been told he wasn't allowed to use his attic for storage anymore because of the ventilation ductwork that went up there and the electronics equipment that was related to his solar panels.
Dan:It was fragile, it was installed, no one should be tampering with it. He thought balls to that, I'm putting my stuff back in the attic. And carelessly recklessly, rather he just put all his stuff back in his attic. He didn't care. So he understood all the stuff, yet still behaved in a manner which could quite possibly have fundamentally compromised the system. How do you account for that?
Dan:Yeah that's an interesting balance.
Simon:I often talk about this in ventilation parlance with housing providers, in that part of your job as a provider of something is to park stuff is to say I've done my piece and I've done it well, so that if, if you are dealing with an outlier when there's an issue down the road, you can say, well, look, we delivered authoritatively what we could in that circumstance and you chose to operate outside of the norms and that we can't control, that, that's one view of it, right, in that you say, look, we have an obligation, a moral obligation, to have delivered a sound retrofit with good ventilation. And we did that, we. We provided the right advice. We put ducting out the way as much as we could in the attic. We advise people not to put stuff up there. It's delivering the right flow rates objectively, we did our piece.
Simon:And then somebody chose to throw their suitcases on top of the ducting when we told them not to. That's, that's beyond our control. And now they're complaining they've got damp and mold or poor air quality because there's no air coming into the bedrooms. Um, so so you can, you know your honor, I did my bit, kind of stance on this. But then the user experience piece goes beyond that. You're saying well, actually, what we care about is the outcome, and the outcome isn't that you delivered. What you should do is that the tenant got good air quality. So there's been a failure there somewhere, in that they decided to act or behave in a certain way, maybe because of the user experience that they had, that we didn't present the right information in the right way or didn't deliver the import of what you were trying to achieve in the right way, and hence you get a negative result. So it's a fascinating conversation where that delineation is often in your responsibility versus outcomes. Ultimately, this.
Dan:Actually, this is an instance in which I think ux as a practice or a way of thinking is really important for the built environment in all sorts of facets. We know people are going to do so. Why aren't we designing processes to accommodate it? Like we know, like we absolutely know that people are going to subvert a system, they're going to hear what they want to hear and we pretend as if, well, they should have known. Like you know your honor, I did all I could. Well, no, you didn't you know. This is a flow in people. Like one of the key recommendations, let me just cut across.
Simon:Let me just interject there, dan, because I want to bring that right back to something that's very on point with ventilation, and that is the housing ombudsman. It's not a lifestyle premise, right? That for years, within social housing, we've been saying to people oh, you shouldn't dry your clothes indoors, and you should. You know you, you need, you're cooking badly in your home and you know you're behaving in a way that's causing problems. And it's only really been in the last couple of years that that needle has shifted to the other side. We're going. Well, hang on a minute. People, everybody, do you dry your clothes in the home? Yeah well, why are you blaming tenants for drying their clothes in the home? I thought we wanted people to cook at home rather than buy takeaways and get fat. Well then, yes. So why aren't we designing homes to deal with people drying clothes on radiators and cooking?
Dan:in the day.
Simon:Yeah Right, like that's a really good example of, from an air quality perspective, of what did you expect.
Dan:Yeah of from an air quality perspective, of what did you expect, yeah, well, so the drying clothes, I think, is it's a really fascinating one, uh, and really boring. It's fascinating in all its glorious mundanity, like uh. So at the research, one of the significant changes that residents faced was they couldn't dry the clothes on the radiators because the radiators run at a lower temperature more consistently. So where we are used as uh so in in britain and ireland in particular, we are used to uh, turning on the heat in putting your wet clothes on a hot radiator fast, blast, dry your clothes, get on with it, done, gone, can't do it. That's a behavioral change, a cultural change Like and I say cultural because like it's more than just drying your clothes. It's your expectation of how you live in your house. It is a pattern of behavior that you have lived with for decades, that you will have been taught by your parents. Like, not your parents' parents, but like we haven't had central heating that long, but like it. It is like to take that away from someone is a wrench, and if you don't give them the means to understand what's happened, why it's happened and how they can mitigate the impact of this change. So what the residents have learned is like I can't use my radiators to dry my clothes. However, if I have a clothes horse and I do my washing in the evening and I put my clothes on my clothes horse in the spare room or in the living room or wherever in the spare room or in the living room or wherever, overnight they will nearly be dry.
Dan:Because in this case, they were living in a better insulated, warmer, more consistent ambient temperature. So the temperature didn't drop overnight. It drops a bit, presumably, but it's also been ventilated better. So the moisture that evaporates out of the clothes is taken out of the house, boom gone. So they're not dealing with. So it's easier for the clothes to dry and it's just a different.
Dan:They have to learn a slightly different way of living in their home and doing things that are familiar. But if they're not educated about it, they're just going to be pissed off. So we know that this is a change that people are going to have to face. We know it's going to be an emotional discomfort, because people tend to be made uncomfortable by any sort of change. So why aren't we? So? One of our recommendations is are we briefing residents of this at the start of the process, like it's a little detail about how your life will change and it signifies an expectation for, like, some fundamental things about how you use your home are going to have to change if you participate in this program and it's one that you can grasp immediately in this program, and it's one that you can grasp immediately, unlike you can't understand what a heat pump is going to be like shifting from a gas boiler.
Dan:You might not be able to imagine what it's like to not have hot water on tap all the time you might. The tap's big enough, yeah, yeah, fine, tank's big, big enough, but like this idea, like, oh, I'm gonna have to change how I dry my clothes. Like, oh, man, it's a, it's an easy one to connect with someone.
Simon:Anyway, yeah, that was just I just written that I wanted to get your thoughts on data. Dan, I know you had a fascinating interview actually on your podcast there a couple of weeks ago with the chat from Scotland, german guy oh Falk Lale of Utopia.
Dan:Yeah, yeah, yeah, Really interesting.
Simon:So I know you got, I know you got quite excited about this subject, so I just want to bring that in um because I'm guessing one of the things that developed the ux framework, particularly in the context of websites, was the ability to track data and understand user behavior in a very granular form. How long your mouse is hovering over a button, do you press it? What was the call to action? Success rate, a and B, profiling All of these things that enabled digital marketing and user experience to refine and refine and refine and understand user behavior In the context of the built environment.
Simon:We're significantly moving into a, an era of data coming out of the built environment, not only our energy use but increasingly the environmental outcomes within the building.
Simon:So we can see at a very granular level people's reaction to changes in the built environment. Um, I'll quote switchy from social housing, for example, they have a fuel poverty index, that they a national fuel poverty index because they have enough of their sensors nationwide that they can see the heating behaviors of tenants in social housing and can understand whether people are at risk of fuel poverty, but at a national level, see whether people are leaving, turning the heating on later during fuel crises and things like that. They can see very big and granular patterns out of that data set. They can understand if an intervention has created the outcome that was intended as kind of as kind. A lot of these iot companies, including the one that you were talking to, that's more private sector focused. But I'm guessing and I'll be interested in your opinion on this is that you start overlaying built environment data on ux theory and practice. You start to get a very potent mix from a user experience and behavior perspective yeah, straight up, all right.
Dan:So data is a funny one. Loads of data is collected. Often data is just used to of data is collected. Often data is just used to uh, to fulfill an expectation, like I'm. You know there are lies, damn lies and statistics.
Dan:Like people can, you can use data to prove whatever you want, depending on how you capture it. I think a bit that's missing is I mean, the bit that's always missing is the why. It's all well and good understanding what happened, why it happened, and also so moving away from that slightly, like looking at big data sets. That's really useful in terms of so, like Switchy, I think you said looking at social housing and being able to identify where there is a need, but then that insight stops being valuable because we sort of knew that already.
Dan:There were other indicators that could have told us like these poor people who live in social housing, who are very poor and have no money, they're going to be suffering. Who live in social housing, who are very poor and have no money, they're going to be suffering. Like we didn't need Switchy to tell us that. I think the way you're referring to the overlaying of data there was something really interesting. We did an episode with Tanya Jennings, our mutual friend, who's now at Lewisham Council, formerly of Ealing. Yeah, she, we're on the podcast to talk about an article that she wrote for Architects Journal in which she looked at the.
Dan:It was the map for poverty in her borough and she looked at the map of COVID deaths and it was the same bloody map, like it was the same impression. It revealed the same results. Now, correlation is causation. In this instance, like you know, poor people are dying for all the reasons that we've alluded to so far. Like it's horrific. We didn't need data to tell us that. Big data, like I think there are instances which it can be really useful.
Dan:So we spoke with, so we did website strategy for the low energy buildings database ages ago and we interviewed a bunch of uh users. That's an aecb led project to. It's a database which they're using to capture information for their carbon light certification scheme which, if you've not heard of, it's uh, just a really good set of building standards for new build, retrofit, step-by-step retrofit, um extensions. Like it's not passive house which you might expect from an organization like the ecb, but it's really good. So we spoke with some of the guys at ucl in their energy research department. They were uh. Their project was using ordnance survey data, lidar data so radar from planes passing overhead and smart meter data to build an energy map of the UK, a 3D energy map of the UK. Like quite remarkable, they've been doing this.
Dan:This project has been up and running for years now and when covid hit and everyone went into lockdown, they were one of the few people, like rubbing their hands together, thinking oh, this could be interesting because they are able to observe, not callously, just to be clear. Uh, professionally they were. They were thinking like we've never had this before, like we've got this benchmark data that shows how users use their home heating with smart meters in a sort of commuter environment. I wonder what happens when everyone goes home and they have to live at home all the time, and what impact is that going to have on the use of home heating and energy use and all sorts of things? And he said you know what happened, you know what changes we saw very quickly and in the long term, no one did any, like nothing changed, like usage stayed consistent and their hypothesis, or their theory, was that people just didn't want to touch their heating controls the same thing.
Simon:You could argue for ventilation. Actually, you know, in in in the lockdown and also this post hybrid working environment, there were very broad assumptions made in regulations and standards about the general occupancy of properties and that's shifted quite significantly over the last few years. So while the use of those systems may have changed, the demand on those systems may have increased, so the outcomes may have changed. The demand on those systems may have increased, so the outcomes may have changed, and that that that's something that perhaps the data could point to. The thing for data for me is and I suppose it's the same as a a website. You could argue as you. You kind of have proposed that you can make data say whatever you want pretty much, and I'd agree with that.
Simon:But there is value in a website. For example, even though you well understand your personas, understanding how women are using your site versus men, site versus men and and do you commute, can you communicate slightly differently to get a better outcome? Because there's a 70 percent, uh, women on your website? Or it may be that you're 16 to 22 year old age group as opposed to 45 to 60 year age age group, and do I communicate that in a slightly different way, and what that's translated to in websites is that when you go on websites, it says are you a contractor, are you a homeowner, are you a you know? And it starts taking you on a different journey depending on your likely persona and, I can imagine, within the built environment.
Simon:In the same way, if you have the right data sets, if you understand both the persona of the people that are using the buildings and you can track their use of those buildings, you can start to refine how you communicate with them better and understand what's driving my missus to want the temperature at 24 degrees in the living room, versus me sat there in my shorts and t-shirt, sweating with her with a blanket over her knees, as a classic man woman. Thermal comfort challenge, right, but from an air quality perspective, what's driving a little old lady to turn trickle vents off in her windows? Is it access that she can't open and close them easily because she can't reach is? Do we need to communicate something in a different way to somebody that's closing them because they've been fed the wrong information at some point? Um, I I do wonder if there is value in that data, uh, if it's used in the right way, in the same way that you would combine UX theory and data to manage better outcomes in the digital sphere.
Simon:Because we are, whether we like it or not, we're digitizing buildings and it's not going to be long before there's not many spaces you inhabit in your home that isn't going to be beaming out data in some form or another, you know, and if that's combined in the right way, all of a sudden it's like it's like on google analytics right, it knows whether you're logging in through your mac or your pc, or whether it's a mobile device or not, and and what that's led to is people that develop those sites, developing stuff that's very mobile orientated or mac orientated or pc orientated, so that you get better outcomes and better use of those spaces, and that's fed by data.
Dan:You're absolutely right. So anyone who's interested in this perspective at all, I'd implore you to listen to that episode of Zero Ambitions with Falk Blail of Utopia. They are an IoT company that have a data platform that they describe them as an ESG tech company. Environmental social governance is like an appraisal framework for judging the performance of businesses in a way that's not financial, so environmental impact, social impact and quality of governance. So are you corrupt or not?
Dan:And what Utopia do is they install sensors and they analyze the results and they advise on strategy for building management Within whatever parameters they are given. Broadly, it's demand reduction, so how do we reduce costs? And that is it. Like I'm being horribly reductive now they only work in, uh, private rental and student accommodation sector. But the reason why we were so excited to have him on is, like, what they're doing is brilliant. Like I'm a UX pons and when we met Folk to pitch him to say you've got platform and you work in the built environment, you're well going to need our help. Everything he showed us demonstrated he did not need our help. Like in terms of the platform's development and its function like it is, it is absolutely brilliant. What really excited us?
Simon:sorry, I don't. I don't want to. I don't want to interrupt your train of thought too much, but to flip that on the head. One of the interesting things with iot and data out the built environment is that ux is so critical in that sense that if you don't get that right, you're not able to create actionable insights and sticky customers, which all of those businesses are in the business of scaling, and if they don't deliver a decent user experience, what you end up with is just the not another dashboard syndrome where people are just looking at ziggy zaggy lines on graphs and it has no value to them, so they they have. You know, if you've got a company that's making traction and has success in that environment, they are clearly getting ux right. As switchy is with its products in a very singular way in social housing, they get elements of that UX right, otherwise they wouldn't scale. It's that simple.
Dan:But this is it. They translate it into something human, like they Like, really like. We were excited because the key thing was they have proven a link between monitoring performance optimization of a building and, by implication, retrofit. They've proven a link between monitoring performance optimization of a building and, by implication, retrofit. They've proven a link between applying a proper strategy for those things resulting in an increase in the asset's financial value the building asset. So they've demonstrated, I think, seven times return on investment from people who've engaged with them. Because they work with real estate investment firms Now as a company, they are probably not remotely relevant to most of your listeners. However, falk just describes what they do and they have this whole human level where and when I say human, they're not just thinking about the end users, the residents, but they do, but they think about ways to influence their behavior. But also how can we give this information to the asset manager and the maintenance staff and the people who are making decisions in a way that they can use, which is going to help them meet their goals?
Simon:Yeah, and fundamentally, if you understand the persona of the people that are buying into that tool, they also have to deal with the S in ESG, which is the social value and there is particularly under the EU social taxonomy, which is preceding the EU taxonomy increasingly there's a value in environmental health and well-being, in the assets that you're delivering so for utopia. That's why they'll have air quality monitors or they'll be able to tie into gresb standards or some of the lead or bream standards and others out there, in that that there's a value in the environmental conditions that goes beyond the health and well-being that's being valued at a financial level now, because the demographic that's moving into your student accommodation year on year or into your blocks of apartments next to a google headquarters offices is valuing health and well-being like never before. Yeah, and if you don't take account of that, that affects your leasing value and your renting value of those properties you know, and and ultimately, the value of the portfolio. So absolutely.
Simon:And I know you know from the interview I listened to it you know they're monitoring, at a very basic level, air quality as a result, as part of their data collection.
Dan:Yeah, I mean I don't think they are a really interesting case in point. They focused what they offer and it is delivering positive outcomes in all sorts of ways. Because, well, because that's the way the whole political environment is driving things to an extent, like, people get healthier homes, because health is a risk factor. If you're a professional landlord, like, it has the potential to be a risk factor. It also means that, like we were talking about earlier, if you have better ventilation in in a home, it means there's going to be less wear and tear on the building, because if you don't have mold, you don't have to redecorate like oh, that's a cost reduction. Like, if you produce.
Dan:If you produce, if you optimize the building to be more energy efficient, so you lose, use less energy, you spend less money on energy and your tenants spend less money on energy like, so it becomes more desirable. Like all of these things, there is this there is a degree of virtuous circle which is driven by an absolutely cynical need and all of these cost reducing measures. They will contribute towards decarbonization. Like I said, the the greenest kilowatt hour of energy, uh anywhere is the one you do not use for sure.
Simon:I always worry there that the the most energy efficient form of ventilation is no ventilation.
Simon:Equally so we always have to be careful.
Simon:Um, but um, I I think you know you can see that playing out where you can imagine if you've got a block of 400 student units, you're kind of starting to get to the scale that, between user experience and data from those buildings, you can start flipping a and b profiling communication strategies into that block and seeing which one works properly.
Simon:You can start a and b profiling based on demographics and sex and age and and religion and all sorts of like. All of a sudden, if you're able to see responses in energy use and environmental outcomes based on communication practices and and user experience, interfaces with apps and whatever it is, all of a sudden it becomes a really powerful environment. Um, so it's that it's almost starts to come full circle. I just keep imagining managing, imagining a website that you're turning the built environment into this almost digital space where we start to view things through the same structures we've viewed the digital world, in that we can start to see how people behave under certain circumstances and with certain communication strategies and certain user experiences and adjust and refine and adjust and refine and it becomes a fascinating space.
Dan:Then the big problem with data per se is no one wants to share it. The built environment, first, doesn't like having its homework marked. So if you look at competitions, for example, like architectural competitions and the like, like the most sustainable building, those competitions are judged on design, not performance. But occasionally some of them get judged on performance. So you you've got a fundamentally flawed approach in that regard in. On occasions where performance is measured, these are closed, usually closed-ended schemes which die the moment funding is withdrawn, so like carbon buzz. I think this is something we encountered with the lebd, like the moment, because it's tricky to get the information, people don't want to share it if it's going to make them look bad. People don't like to be judged and then it's a pain in the ass. No one wants to do the data gathering, no one wants to do the strategy to make it easy to do the data gathering.
Simon:Yeah, the point I'd make here, dan, is this is a conversation we're increasingly having with the providers of, for example, housing, because the evidence suggests that the other end people don't give a monkeys about the data coming out of the built environment. Your guy from Utopia, what did he say? Less than one fraction of a percent of people refuse to have data coming out of their home. In social housing it's very similar. If people see a value in the data that's being collected about the built environment, that it helps them get a better user experience. I remember on my first appearance on your podcast, we had a long old preamble about me saying I don't care about what Google collects. I'm of that kind of a mindset as long as I can.
Simon:As long as I got, as long as I've got single sign on and it makes my life easy I really don't care.
Simon:Um, and I think increasingly the built environment, like the evidence suggests, at the consumer end of the built environment nobody cares right, as long as it's delivering value. Um, and that's what I think providers of housing and servicing has to have to be aware of, because if, if they don't do it, if they don't start embedding this kind of technology into what they're delivering somebody else is going to do downstream, it could put them under more pressure, but equally, they lose control of access to that data. If they did it, they may have access to that long term, a bit like your car. You know, when you take your car in for a service, the first thing somebody does, obviously these days is plug it into a computer to understand how it performs. Um, but because of the way that that's been set up with your car, that data also goes back to the original manufacturer and that helps them understand how their vehicles are being used, how to refine the product, how to achieve better efficiency or to dodge it. If you're vw um, don't sue me please.
Dan:I think they're well proven.
Simon:Yeah, yeah, nobody's listening to this from VW, I'm quite sure. But you take my point that there's a value in the original manufacturer, designer, developer, builder, provider of housing to be involved in this process of housing. To be involved in this process because, if they do, it helps them ultimately refine their product and deliver a better product if they're part of it. Because, if they're not, the evidence suggests that the operators of these spaces, or the finances of these spaces, are increasingly going to collect this data because there's an inherent value in it in offering a better service and being more efficient in their operational management of those buildings yeah, there is a risk with that, though in terms of.
Dan:So this isn't being tinfoil hatted but, like particularly in america, insurance companies use third parties to hoover up data sets from all over and are increasingly using them to judge people in terms of the cost of their insurance premiums. We see it in some instances with car insurance and those apps which you can use to gauge your driving and determine whether you're a safe driver or not. We're giving up an awful lot of information there that we might not be aware of, and we are setting precedents which could come to bite us on the arse further down the line. Oh for sure I mean environmental.
Simon:Air quality is the single biggest environmental health risk that we face as a human species. Air quality is the single biggest environmental health risk that we face as a human species. So if we start collecting that data, we're starting to understand and build a frame around probably one of the biggest health care impacts that we have on us from a risk perspective. You can well imagine that feeding into insurance and and other things you know know for sure 100% and you know this is something we're going to have to be aware of.
Dan:But like I think so this again it's like. This is where we use user experience strategy in terms of understanding what outcomes are desired, understanding how to narrow the I don't know the, the user journey or the means of collection in order to deliver the best possible result in the outcomes and deliver to as few unintended consequences as we can possibly muster. Like, at the moment, we're working with the national building control office in dublin to interrog, interrogate the publicly available BER data so that's the Irish equivalent of the UPC To see what we can learn. I mean, this is just an exploratory exercise to see what we can learn about compliance with building control, to see whether people are building to regulations, but we're also uncovering all sorts of other stuff through that process. This is a UX exercise in terms of how do we make this easy to do regularly for the VCO, how do we make it usable for them, because we could turn out loads of data, but what's going to be useful to them? What's going to happen?
Dan:Client side, like what are they going to want to do with insights or recommendations? How can we deliver them so it's easy for them to work with that's. But what we're learning through this process is man, there's all sorts of stuff going on that you don't expect, and badly designed systems deliver terrible outcomes. And this isn't me placing the tinfoil hat on this is just talking about the quality of the data that's collected. Like if you design a field to take any kind of information, text or numbers yeah, and it should just be a purely numerical one, you're creating a problem in the data set that needs to be resolved. And, look, you're pushing on an open door with me.
Simon:On that one I've been talking to people for for a couple of years now, particularly around data for the built environment, things like damp and mold risk, that a lot of people are saying they're providing actionable insight but they're not really, and that's because they don't really understand how to drive user behavior change.
Simon:That it's just. You know, at the end of the day, if you've got 50 red flags popping up on your crm system say you've got 50 properties with damp and mold risk, you kind of knew that anyway, because you asked any of the asset managers, they could tell you which 50 properties are going to be struggling with damper mold most of the time. Yeah, and ultimately does that change anything about how you fix it or how you communicate with people? So the data has got to provide stuff in a way that's actionable and useful and brings in the user experience into that, whether that's the user of the tenant or the user of the person that's going to be using the data, like you say, the building control officer or the housing officer. What's useful to him or her with that data? How?
Simon:are they gonna? How are they gonna use it in a way that's that helps them from a business perspective or a workflow perspective?
Dan:well, this is how we landed on the proposition that everything is user experience. So the actual genesis was Alex and I were working on websites for big banks like JP Morgan, hsbc, and small big players like Brevin Howard. So any financial heads, you'll probably know them. I mean you might not. Well, you'll know JP Morgan and HSBC. Any financial heads, you'll probably know them. I mean you might not. Well, you'll know jp morgan, hsbc anyway.
Dan:So we were having clients asking us to build web pages that would fit within their current like tech setup, that we could slot into the ecosystem or websites, incredibly powerful websites, and they'd come with like with a laundry list of things they wanted, and when we started doing it, we gave them whatever they wanted. Oh yeah, we can do all that, no problem, and we'd build these really powerful websites that they could use like hardcore, content-driven, marketing-driven corporate websites. So no financial data knocking about, so comparatively risk-free, and we would hand them over to the client and the client would barely use them and the the website would wither on the vine like it would be. So they'd ask for a really content, content heavydriven marketing website and then the content on the website would be static like, with no updates six months down the line, like a flurry of activity at the start, and then nothing. And it made us look bad, like why aren't they using this? And so what we started doing was we started to interrogate like all right, you want this, why do you want it, and who's going to run it? So, as with the data, if we give you this stuff, do you have the competence or the resources client side to deal with it? All right, you want this stuff. What's the political environment? Do you have any people who might block progress? Are people likely to stay in the company long enough to learn this and fulfill it? Are you prepared to invest in training and manuals? So, when people inevitably come and go?
Dan:So we started looking at all this other stuff as well to make sure that where we were delivering work, it was going to be valuable in the long term, or at least in the midterm, not the short term. And man, it changed the way we did business. Like it, it worked really well. That's how we ended up consistently working with big beasts like jp morgan and get to play with their budgets. I think that's, that's the bit that made the the biggest difference, and this is why we, we, we why we are applying u UX thinking and methodologies to things like communication. In terms of bid writing, we drilled ourselves in that process.
Dan:In terms of generating ad campaigns All right, you want big fancy creative, but where's it going to go? Because you're not paying for print adverts anymore. It's all going to be like tiny little uh tiles on a website, or it's going to be delivered through your social channels, like so you don't need print. Double page spread print, quality creative, you're never going to pay for a billboard. It's going to be in a tiny little square that no one might ever see because, uh, they've got ad blockers running. Like can we invest this budget more wisely than that? And then, once you take them through the process, if they insist, on having them.
Simon:I think that's why it's so critical to be working at a strategic level with the board and at a governance level and at a higher level within those organizations, because what happens is you deliver a good project, but it doesn't become a system change and that project dies and disappears, and once people move on and you've lost the champions, it's like you've never been there.
Dan:um yeah, or design the product to fit the system, like in all its dysfunction, like acknowledge what the thing is, like, not what we would like it to be, and build it to suit that and you might be able to foster change through doing good work or you might just make a small change in the short term in there.
Simon:I think there's a good lesson for the built environment. You know that it's not just about delivering projects. It's about what, what. What does good actually look like, and how do we build the systems to deliver that for the user. And that's that comes back to good design. We're coming up on two hours, dan. Um, bloody hell yeah I know. It's amazing is that I knew that would happen when we started talking so um. At the moment for listeners you're running. User experience is everything is one of your businesses and zero ambition.
Dan:Everything is user experience.
Simon:Yeah.
Dan:Everything is user experience. We do user experience with larger organizations by and large, uh, impact startups, uh, and we offer ux strategy for all sorts of things. We do websites and apps. But we can design, uh, uh, let me let me pull up my little list that I've got knocking about. Yeah, we do user research, research strategy that we can give people, we can develop wireframes and prototypes. We can do audience definition, journey mapping, stakeholder mapping which is incredibly important communication strategy and service design.
Dan:I mean, we even apply this to brand strategy, using brand interrogation as a way of addressing organizational culture and precipitating change through that, which sounds a bit pretentious, and it is because I am. I can't help it. And we have another business Zero Ambitions Partners. So that is a spinoff from the podcast that we do with Jeff Colley Zero Ambitions podcast, a podcast about sustainability and the built environment, and we just talk about all sorts of stuff related to that. Ostensibly they're the same business, except in one of them we say decarbonization and sustainability strategy an awful lot more. We apply the same methods, we do much the same sorts of work, just with a very specific focus on the built environment.
Simon:Yeah, and anybody that is listening to this podcast that hasn't checked out zero ambitions do? It was, um. One of the reasons I thought about doing the podcast in the first place was my experience of listening to, uh, something so technically competent in the built environment and the conversations that you have so well worth having, and good people involved in it as well, who? Really know their stuff, so well worth checking out for sure.
Dan:Cheers when Simon says technically competent in the subject matter, not necessarily the production.
Simon:We still have teething problems there two years in three years jesus that's the beauty of podcasts, I think um is that they don't have to be perfect dan listen.
Simon:It's been absolutely brilliant catching up with you today. Thanks so much for spending a couple of hours with me always a pleasure, um, and I hope people listening today have got something out of this that that ux and user experience and good design has a place, particularly when it comes to ventilation and air quality yeah, well, cheers uh, yeah, it's been good fun, and anyone who's interested, uh, in talking about any of this stuff like we do, if any of this sounds remotely interesting, we do free ux clinics with people.
Dan:So we'll give you three quarters of an hour, uh, and you put the problem or challenge you've got in front of us and we'll throw ideas back at you to give you a sense of whether you're even thinking about the challenge in the right way sometimes, or whether how you might go about resolving it. Like, we can't possibly know whether we've got the answers right, but we can do something interesting and probably useful quickly, and we do that. We do a number of them a week. So, uh, we just need to get them booked up. So, yeah, find us on linkedin for zero ambitions, or the website is everythingisuserexperiencecom um, yeah, we are on all the apps.
Dan:Yeah, pleasure cheers man, all right. Cheers for listening as well, oh, thanks a million.
Simon:What I'll do, dan, is I'm just going to stop the recording, but don't go anywhere just yet.
Dan:No, no, no, I'm at 50.
