In this fireside chat hosted by Kuldeep Kelkar, Senior Partner, UXReactor, K.C. Teis, Executive Director of Experience Design at Athena Health, shares his journey into UX and his insights on user experience and design.
He emphasizes the importance of making technology more human and solving problems for users. K.C. also discusses the skills of good UXers, including problem-solving and compromising. He provides advice on influencing and demonstrating value within organizations, connecting UX work with business goals, and overcoming challenges in UX organizations.
Finally, K.C. offers recommendations for new user research leaders, such as being authentic, empowering team members, and creating a culture of learning and innovation.
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Full Transcript
Kuldeep Kelkar
Today, we have a special guest, K. C. Teis. Welcome, K. C.
K.C. Teis
Hey, thanks for having me.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Nice to have you. Tell us a little bit about your journey into UX over the years.
K.C. Teis
Yeah, love the topic, talking about myself. Basically, I got into UX coming through visual design. I was fascinated with computers at a young age. Went to the University of Texas and got into the visual design program, but I was always fascinated with the design of computers and the experiences of software. And so I was able to kind of parlay that into getting into a design studio before the inception of the internet. And I knew that was going to be something that was important. So it was starting to take place in the nineties when I was working in a design studio doing mainly print. And I convinced the owner of that company that we needed to invest in this thing called websites, because that was going to be the future. After kind of convincing him that this is something that was going to be totally changing the print industry, he agreed to it. And so I was able to actually help early days in terms of taking a visual design studio and turning it into a digital website studio in addition to print. And this is when I was in Austin, Texas, which is where I live now. But I knew back then that it probably wasn’t the place that I needed to be because this dot-com thing started to take off and I relocated to the Bay Area. And that’s when I got my first job as an Experience Design Leader, I guess you could say. There weren’t a lot of us, so you could say leader, because it was me and another designer that were working. And I joined a company called AutoWeb, which was one of the first websites to actually allow people to buy cars on the internet. This is like 1998. And then I could kind of tell, I was able to be with that company until it went public, but I could kind of tell that things were going to change and they sure did. There was a bit of a crash and I transitioned over to a software design company that actually was focused on making the tools to create websites and that was NetObjects. And NetObjects really taught me a lot because I actually was working with people that had come from Apple and IDEO and other places that were really kind of changing the way that people thought about technology in a pretty substantial way. And through that experience, I was able to actually transition once that company went public and then it kind of had some difficulties. My next job was at PayPal, which is where I met you, my friend. And so that was a really amazing experience because I was there relatively early. I think PayPal had just been purchased by eBay. And that was a real eye-opener to me because the scale of things that we were dealing with at PayPal and eBay was massive. And so that was an opportunity for me to really understand that you have to make decisions on a global scale instead of a very localized scale. And so it also exposed me to really amazing people. The leadership there was incredible. People like yourself and Kelly Braun, who was one of the user research leaders there really taught me a lot about user research and then, you know, gave that a good run until I wanted to get back to Austin. And when I got back to Austin, fortunately, I was able to parlay my PayPal experience into working for a company that was under the umbrella of eBay and PayPal, called X.Commerce. We were combining those two groups to make a platform for e-commerce. And that’s when I moved back to Austin. And that was a fun journey. But soon people were reaching out to me to actually be the Vice President of Design for a company called Rackspace, which is one of the early companies when it came to the cloud, and one of the larger hosting companies back in the day, and that was located in Texas in San Antonio with an Austin office. So I transitioned over there, and that was a wonderful experience as well, in that I got to make all of the decisions. It was a very nascent user experience group there, and we were able to really bring in some talent focused primarily on user research to begin with, and then building out the design, the experience design folks. And I learned a ton there, because I was playing a little bit of a different role than what I had historically, in that I had to make all the decisions for all of the user researchers and all of the designers and really make sure that we had a strong seat at the table. Did a brief stint after that at a design consultancy, but ironically it was a distributed team and I didn’t like working out of my home office. So, I moved over to get a job at Athena Health, which is where I am today. And then very quickly the pandemic hit and I was working from my home, but we’re slowly making our way back into the office and I’m really enjoying that. And the role that I play at Athena is I am the Executive Director of User Experience focused primarily on the patient part of our business, all of the experiences that we have for patients. There are some important client or practice experiences in the scheduling functionality in the communication channels. And I’ve recently also taken over leadership of the Design Research and Strategy Group, which is the user researchers and quant and qual for all of Athena. Small group, really powerful, great individuals, super smart, learning a lot. So that’s the latest challenge that I’m involved in. That’s me.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Wow, incredible experience. And even though I’ve known you, it’s still so amazing to hear the entire journey. So pretty fabulous. Hopefully very inspirational for the listeners as well. So cool. Let me start with a philosophical high level question. And I believe I’ve heard you in the past, but maybe have a different take. Fundamentally, what does user experience or design mean to you? What does it really mean?
K.C. Teis
I think that’s a great question. For me, it really comes down to almost the humanities of taking this cold binary element which is software and computers and trying to make it human. Trying to take technology and work the way that humans work instead of humans working the way the technology works. So for me it’s all about basically creating something that just naturally solves the problems for people that are interfacing with it without them having to actually do anything different than what they would normally do as humans.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, fabulous. So you have been a practitioner, a designer, an interaction, be it research. You have been the leader. You have hired people. You have managed teams. You have been accountable for UX work. I’ll get to the leadership topic in a minute. But first, if you had to access over the last 20-30 years, what do you generally think designers, UXers, researchers are good at? Fundamentally what skills do good UXers exhibit?
K.C. Teis
Great question. I think fundamentally great UXers are problem solvers. And I think that they’re actually also amazing compromisers. And I say that because I think an important part of our role in user experience is to understand the reality and the context into which the business goals we’re trying to achieve. And the reality of the technology is something that we have to take into account. And we have to make decisions that may not be what we ultimately want it to be, but making sure that we’re compromising so that again, the technology is as human as it possibly can be and works the way that humans work and not the way that computers work. So I keep going back to that because I think a lot of times, particularly when you’re starting out in this industry, you really feel like you have to get along or you don’t have the ability to influence as much because you’re new in it. And what you have to do is really try to focus on figuring out ways that you can ensure that you’re not compromising the principles of what you’re trying to do, but at the same time, being realistic around what’s possible. And so I think that as you know, if I think back 30 years, early days, I mean, we’ve come a long way. It is absolutely amazing. The technologies, how it’s evolved. And ultimately now I think it is… I will say that it’s easier to create better experiences, but I also know that it’s a lot more daunting for people because there’s so many potential solutions that you can go down. And you really have to be very good at understanding what’s important and what isn’t important. And I know that when I started, there weren’t that many options. There were a few browsers, you know, I can, I predate the browsers, but I won’t get into that, but it’s like, there were a few browsers and it was pretty simple. You create something and it works or it doesn’t work. And now there’s, I mean, people don’t even really think about browsers anymore. It’s more about the actual experience and less about the limitations of the platform that they’re on. So hopefully that’s useful.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, yeah. I mean, UXers are good at many things, but I speak with a lot of designers, design leaders, researchers, research leaders. As a community, I have been going to UPA, UXPA, these conferences since the early 2000s. And there’s a general theme that there is a challenge that most designers, researchers, UXers in general face which is around demonstrating value, influencing. And so you have been successful by most measures in your career. Any thoughts around what can designers, researchers, even individual contributors do to make sure that they find their sweet spot and influence their organization regarding what they truly believe is the right thing to do?
K.C. Teis
Yeah, I’ll tell you a secret that we’ve got.
We [UXers] are great problem solvers, but we’re also facilitators. And so, you know, workshopping is really something that I think is kind of a secret power that we’ve got.
And I still use it to this day. I’ll go into a very successful established corporation. And I will help lead a brainstorming exercise using affinity diagramming, which if you’re brand new, hopefully you know what that is. But if you don’t, it’s like you have a prompt. You ask people to write down as many ideas as they can on a post-it, individual post-its. Then you ask people to put them up and to talk about what it is. And you do that with a group of people. And then together you synthesize that towards some patterns or some trends that you see based off of this feedback and that allows you to have structured conversations without a fail. Even from the C-suite down to, you know, the product owners themselves, they’re always astonished by that. And it’s like you’re some magician that actually was able to get everybody’s divergent thoughts into some convergent structure. And that puts you in a position of influence where people look to you to help them to drive strategic decisions. And so I think that we may sometimes lose sight of the fact that not everybody is skilled at that. I don’t know how many times you might show up at a company and you get into a room and you’re going to do a brainstorming session and the Chief Product Officer just overrules everybody because nobody’s going to question his thoughts and it’s not in a structured way, but if you actually apply the approaches that we know, it’s actually pretty amazing and you will be asked to attend more and more important meetings if you’re good at actually driving that towards some sort of resolution. The other part that I think is important in that regard is that when you do that and you maybe come up with some interesting workshopping ideas or user-centered approaches, it’s fun. People want to show up and have a good time and you’re actually doing work, creating artifacts and helping people to consolidate their ideas. And that’s what we’re in this for, right? So I think that it’s really key to think a lot about how you might just be able to say, Hey, you know what? Bear with me. I’ve got an idea. I’m going to get a group of us together for an hour. We’re going to have some conversations in a structured way. Really think about the prompts that you’re going to have. Sometimes to influence, you can go and talk to people beforehand and say, Hey, what questions are you looking to get the answers to? And if you do that well, you go in and everybody’s like, man, this is exactly what I was looking to get. And now I kind of understand where everybody else is coming from. So I would say that that’s probably one of the most important things that I think you can do to be influential when you’re starting out. When you get to be at my level, I think one of the important things is really being good at storytelling and the narratives based off of, you know, the context of really what’s going on. So good user research, a lot of field study work, having in-depth interviews and conversations with the people that use your products and being able to have everybody up the food chain empathize with the people and the problems that they’re facing and then what the solutions are going to be that you’re proposing. So the next thing is to be good at storytelling and to understand those narratives, but make sure that it’s based on the reality of what’s going on and not just something that you’re fabricating based off of what you think is right.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah. Wow, you covered a lot there. I was actually scribbling notes. Facilitators, workshops, driving that influence, storytelling. But the key word that I found was we, as UXers, can bring that alignment within the larger organization through that facilitation. And just getting the divergent thoughts out on a piece of paper, and then getting the organization to converge. We’ve always felt that the designers, researchers, visual thinkers in general can articulate things in a manner that is more than just words on a PowerPoint slide. And then when people start seeing things in action, they start believing. Seeing is believing, and then the more artifacts that the designers can produce, the more alignment that they can bring within the organization and to your point, that drives the influence. Then you get called upon in more and more meetings. And before you know it, you are starting to influence them literally sometimes without knowing it. Did I get that right?
K.C. Teis
Yes, you did get that right. It becomes this thing though, that it’s a double-edged sword because then you’re just called by everyone to actually be in the middle. But as a design leader, you can utilize that to say, let’s get some more people that can do this sort of thing. And it actually starts to build some of that momentum, but you’re absolutely right. That was a great summary.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, it’s a rich man or rich woman’s problem. And once you get there.. So, good. Cool. Any thoughts on, there are lots of articles that are posted out there. There is lots of thought leadership within the community around designers and researchers being able to speak the business language. Because what happens at many organizations is that the person that is at that table, the proverbial table, probably is measured on certain KPIs, be it top line, bottom line, conversion, EBITDA, whatever those metrics might be. And they are accountable for those real metrics. And so they think, they wake up thinking every day about how to achieve those KPIs. What are your thoughts on the UX community being able to connect their work with those KPIs that matter to the organization?
K.C. Teis
Yeah, absolutely critical and, you know, ultimately achieving the goals of the company is just as important to you as a user experience professional as it is to the product owners. And so, you know, I think that I’m a big advocate of continued learning. I’m constantly reading books. I’m constantly trying to better myself in this space. So I’m going to suggest one book that is by a friend of mine who’s a very smart, seasoned, witty, hysterical, but no BS writer. And his name is Mike Lintero. And he wrote Design as a Business, or Design as a Job, rather. Read that book, because that book basically just breaks down what your job is as a user experience professional. And part of his point is that you were hired specifically because you play a role and you can’t just roll over or do what somebody says. You need to basically understand why you’re saying the things that you’re saying and why it is important, but you have to do that in the context of what they were trying to achieve. And so, he gives a lot of examples about that. So I think that one of the things that is really key is as you dig in, you really need to build great partnerships with your peers in the product organization and the engineering organization. But to begin with, I think that the relationship between the product owners and the designers is the most important thing. Because you need to understand what success is going to look like and why you’re trying to achieve it and what pressures they’re under to add to the bottom line. There’s another great book by a guy named Marty Kagan. You may know this individual because he was at eBay when we were at eBay. And he’s written a great book on that relationship about how you actually kind of figure out what the business is trying to do, but then correlating that with the unmet customer needs and coming up with something that’s actually going to satisfy those problems. So I guess the theme of this is to constantly be educating yourself.
A lot of people have already solved these problems in terms of like thinking through how to be successful in terms of partnering with business and trying to learn from them. But at the same time…
Don’t be shy to actually get a mentor that may be in the business part of the business.
… and say, hey, you know, I’m pretty good at being able to understand what the needs are of the customers. I’m pretty good about turning those into tangible examples of what solutions might be and then validating that those solutions will work. But I need some help to really understand why we are doing it and what are the challenges that you’re facing in terms of trying to make sure that the business is going to be viable. And one of the things that happens when you work to get mentors in companies is that they kind of have a vested interest in your success.
So somebody that takes you on as a mentor will actually be trying to ensure that if you’re struggling with a particular thing, they’re going to help you across that hurdle. And if you’re really smart about who you choose as your mentor and have the opportunity to work with somebody that’s a little bit higher up, then you’re going to be influencing them a little bit as they’re influencing you. And that’s, you know, that could be a magical thing. So that’s another thing, don’t be shy to ask for help.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, I mean, great recommendation. Seeking out mentors that are outside of the design or research space will expose, certainly has exposed me to a whole bunch of different aspects. And ironically, I didn’t expect, I personally did not expect this, but it generated empathy. It drove me to be more empathetic to the challenges that the business leaders, marketing leaders and product leaders have because it’s easy for any UXer to complain that somebody else is not listening to the design recommendation or to the research recommendation. But we, as a community, are very good at empathizing and understanding the end users. I fundamentally believe we don’t spend as much time thinking about the engineer, the product manager, the business owner, what are they held accountable for? And they’re not the enemy. They are there to help facilitate fabulous experiences out into the market. So seeking a mentor outside of design might absolutely open up new avenues that the designer or researcher might not have looked at. So, fabulous. Let me turn to some of the challenges. So, as a design leader at your current company or previous companies or just in general, what were some of the common challenges that you have seen that the organizations face? Be it within the organization, running a large, small or large, design or research organization? It could be challenges within the organization, it could be challenges across the organization, it could be challenges with other parts of the organization. What top two or three challenges come to mind for you over the last 30 years?
K.C. Teis
Yeah, in my current role at Athena, one of the big challenges is consistency across our platforms and our products and devices for that matter. In that, this company has been around for about 25 years, and so it has a lot of legacy experiences. And if you dig in a little bit to health care, IT, health care. There were some laws that were passed during the Obama administration that basically said, hey, all the doctors need to get off of paper records. If you’re old like me, you remember you go into a doctor’s office, there’ll be a wall of folders, and they pull your folder down. And at some point, the government said, we need to get all of that digitized. And they incentivized clinics to actually make the transition, gave them dollars to do that, and then at some point, they said, if you don’t do this, we’re going to start to increase your taxes. It was a bit of a gold rush for a lot of companies, but Athena was one of the very early electronic health record companies. But a lot of the technology that it was built on, and they were very innovative in the sense that they did it in the cloud, and they didn’t do it with standalone servers and hospitals or the practices, they did it in the clouds. They were really innovative in that space. And it was very successful, but now we’re… there’s new technologies, new era, and we’re having to transition from those existing legacy systems and new things. And it’s rather daunting to be able to do that. And the other thing, I’m talking about Obama and the laws that were passed back during that time, they haven’t stopped. So there’s constantly government regulations that are coming in. And obviously, health records are incredibly important to people and getting paid is incredibly important to people. And so there’s just a lot of details that we have to take care of in a constantly changing environment. So that is, that’s one of the bigger challenges when it comes to my current role. And with those different technologies, it’s hard to unify on consistent design systems that transcend everything. While trying to change an engine on an airplane when it’s in the air is kind of what we’re up against.
But in general, though, I’m very proud of Athena because it has a very mature UX organization. We all have seats at the table. I and my peers in the different subdivisions report directly to the Chief Product Officer. And we do have influence. And that’s not true everywhere. So historically in my career, I’ve had issues where it’s like you don’t really have a seat at the table when decisions are made, to ensure that you’re influencing some of the decisions that are made are going to be based on what’s the right thing for the people that use your products. And so that was a lot of what I was constantly kind of struggling with in my previous roles, but I don’t have to worry about that here. So I also think that one of the things that’s really challenging right now, I think we’re at a new inflection point. I’ve been through one of these. I’ve seen it before when the internet came around. With artificial intelligence, it’s all going to change. And so you also have to be prepared for, what does that mean? And you have to change the things that may have worked for you in the past to try to embrace the new paradigm that you’re living in now and not be hindered by, or being upset about the change, you have to almost embrace it. And so I think that it’s really fascinating. Like a lot of my time these days is really trying to understand this generative artificial intelligence that’s going on and trying to figure out ways that it could be a “yes and” to the things that we’re doing and that we position ourselves to utilize it because it is amazing in a lot of regards, but it also has a lot of implications in terms of the impact that it could have in a negative way. And I want to be well ahead of that and I want my teams to be well ahead of that. So hopefully that answers your question. I might’ve rambled a little bit there, but.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Yeah, yeah, no, it does. I mean, I know we can chat for hours and hours and we have in the past. Thank you. So my real big last question, which is, you were a manager and a mentor for me back when I was a new manager. I know that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of individuals are becoming new leaders and managers in the broader UX space, but specifically within user research. What two or three recommendations would you have for them? What do you want them to do so that they are successful in their roles as new user research leaders?
K.C. Teis
Great question. So I think one of the most important things you can do is to be authentic. A lot of times when we get into positions of being responsible for people and making decisions relative to what they work on or the challenges that they face, that you a lot of times feel like you need to be the smartest person in the room. And that’s a non-starter. And you’ve probably heard of it before, but it’s like, hire people that are smarter than you. I’ll say hire people that are smarter to you and then listen to them and allow them to have influence. And don’t be shy to be very authentic with them about your vulnerabilities and things that you may not understand and empower them to actually figure out ways to do things that may be better than what you could think of. And the other thing is, a lot of people I think want to, when they’re early managers, they also want to get credit, because you’re new to this role and you want people to know that you’re doing a good job of it. So you sometimes step in front of the people that you manage more than you should. And I think it behooves you to actually allow them to be in the spotlight to a certain extent. Because the secret is if you are authentic with folks, you kind of understand the challenges, you try to find people that are as good as, or better than you. You allow them to have the spotlight that as they’re having success, guess what? You’re their boss, you’ll have success, and you will rise up because people will start to understand that the reason, part of the reason that they’re successful is because of their boss. So that’s something that I think is a little tricky when you first get in there. A lot of people really try to control the situation, and they feel like if things aren’t working, they’re responsible, or that that’s going to be punitive to them.
One of the most important things, this is another book that I highly recommend for everybody in our industry called Creativity, Inc. which is by Ed Catmull, who you know because he’s the person that was the CEO of Pixar and one of the very early Pixar people. And he talks about managing in a creative space. And the main job that he feels he has is to remove fear from the company.
I truly believe that you learn more from your failures than you do from your successes. But the key component to that is learn. And so you have to create an environment where you allow people the opportunity to push the boundaries and know that there’s going to be things that don’t always work out. But ensuring that we learn from that and we grow from that means that you’re going to create a creative culture that is going to be flourishing and very innovative.
But as soon as you start to get into situations where you’re going to be punitive when people have mistakes or you’re diminishing ideas because you think that might hurt you as their leader, mediocrity ensues. So from my perspective, I think that those are some important things to really think about. And again, look around the organization and see people that are successful and try to mimic them and get mentors and be vulnerable with them is another thing that you can do as well. So, you know, there’s the cow path mentality. It’s like, who’s doing this really well? Who’s the person that has the most engagement with the people that they manage? Why is that? Can I try to build a relationship and understand that? How can I mimic them? You know, you don’t have to figure this out. Don’t get it. Don’t get it original. Get it right is another phrase that I learned from Edward Tufte. But I truly believe in that.
Kuldeep Kelkar
Thank you, K. C. Very inspirational, very broad-based topic. Love your passion for all things user research, all things design, all things user experience, but most importantly, all things people. I’m pretty sure that the listeners can just hear the empathy in your voice, the connections, the connecting the dots between people. AI or no AI, at the end of the day, we are in the business of connecting people with people, and so having that level of empathy, that connection, that drive, that facilitator role to bring in that alignment, fabulous recommendations. Thank you, K. C. It was great to have you as a guest.
K.C. Teis
Thank you, Kuldeep. I really enjoyed my time and I’m honored to have gotten the chance to talk to you.
