Thanks to Darren Hood for leading a great conversation on his World of UX podcast.

You can listen to our 70-minute conversation on the episode page (also on Spotify, Apple, and https://media.transistor.fm/5414ab59/f8ed8755.mp3

Excerpt:

There was a semi viral post about how to go into a bar and show people stuff. I think it was meant to be helpful, but it was kind of a smart-ass post…”give people beer and ask them a question.”

It seems like, if one is trying to help somebody else learn a skill or utilize a process or a practice – I guess everything is on a continuum. But you can see one end of the continuum says “this is really hard” and the other end of the continuum says “this is really easy.” And I mean, hopefully I’m somewhere in the middle. I think I’m trying to say this is hard, but here’s how to get there. If that’s my story, I feel pretty critical of people that are like, oh, anyone can do this. This is easy.. There are books and posts like this that kind of say that.

And I think there’s something to be said for lowering barriers, reducing intimidation, kind of giving people some power and some confidence. So we got to ask ourselves, like, is that person, you know, all exhausted from talking to one person in the office? Is it better that they did that than they just sat in their cube and kind of thought how smart they were? Is the team going into the bar or the one person going, is that better or not than not doing that? And I think argument for “better” is like any effort you make to get out of your own head is, it can be well intentioned.

And the evil part of me hopes that people try and fail –if you go to a bar and think if you just ask somebody one question in a bar about something that’s on your laptop and you fail somehow in that and you at least learn that you failed, you know, now I feel like now I’m going to hand you my book and say like, okay, you know, here’s how to get there.

And so maybe people need to try these things where someone says “Oh, yeah, it’s super easy just to ask this one question.”

That’s not how I would go about it. I would like to say “This is hard for the following reasons and here’s the way to get there.”

But, you know, people learn.