In a Tech Field, Stay People-Focused

Matt interviews Geordie McClelland, Head of Digital Strategy at Delve. Delve is a product innovation firm that brings ideas to market, guiding clients to deliver faster and more sustainable success.

Geordie explains the importance of staying user-focused in a tech-driven field. With a rapidly growing technology ecosystem, he says we need to serve users with smooth, secure digital experiences. One of the biggest challenges to that is slowing down users so they consider security and digital safety when moving through the online world.

Key Quotes:

“The focus still is always the people. Technology is gonna change and evolve and grow, but people's needs stay pretty similar and we’re always trying to figure out the best ways to leverage that. Those technological advances and service of people is just really exciting and intriguing to me.”

“People's most likely response when faced with any product experience is to do nothing, or to take the easiest path. You need to be aware of what that threshold for security is gonna be… a lot of it gets into user testing. Because at the end of the day, if it's not something that people are going to use in an easy, intuitive way, they're gonna find workarounds and that really becomes a security challenge.”

“You need to design with an understanding that people's most likely response is to not do anything. And I love and respect people! It's why I got into this business. But also part of loving and respecting people is an acknowledgement that we all have some failures. And one of our failures is inertia. You need to acknowledge that you need to design around that.”

“Stop people for even just a moment to reconsider what action they might take or hopefully not take in that scenario. Being more purposeful about talking about why security matters in certain places. And it can't be the five pages of terms and conditions, but just well-written UX copy that gives people the right information that they need, makes 'em feel confident in the decisions that they're about to take.”

“From a user perspective, if you think about some of the challenges with facial recognition and how that doesn't track consistently across races. If you were to build something people first, it would act very differently. That means that marginalized communities may be further marginalized and we need to be conscious of that and understand what the implications are for that.”

Time stamps:

01:05 - Geordie’s role at Delve

04:35 - Building products with critical security measures

11:00 - Making products user-centric

15:10 - Challenges of digital-first experiences

21:25 - How to build a good product experience

35:05 - How Geordie views innovation

37:10 - Future-thinking

44:26 - Quick hits

Links:

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