Discover the unique user experience path that Indi Young, Independent Qualitative Data Scientist & Problem Space Researcher, Consultant, Author, and Trainer, followed in this eleventh episode of Season 2. Learn how to resist assumptions and respect others’ approaches.

Indi Young, a seasoned consultant and author with a career spanning from the late 1980s, shares insights into her work focused on understanding people’s goals and supporting them through design. Her primary focus has always been on understanding what a person is trying to accomplish and facilitating that through her work, whether leading a team or consulting individually.

Key Insights

• UX is fundamentally about understanding people’s varied purposes and supporting them inclusively.
• Avoiding assumptions and respecting diverse thinking styles are critical to effective design.
• Inclusive design requires intentional methodologies, pattern recognition, and harm assessment.
• The field is evolving rapidly, with increasing importance placed on accessibility and emerging technologies like the metaverse.

Transcript

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Host (Marc):
Welcome to another episode of UX Pathways. I have the honor of being joined today by Indi Young. Indi, how are you?

Indi:
Good. How are you?

Host:
Excellent. Glad to have you here. I’m excited for you to share your story. To start, what is your current role? I know you’ve done so many things.

Indi:
Sure. As I look back over my career—which started in the late ’80s—I’ve essentially been doing the same thing the entire time. My work has always been about understanding what a person is trying to get done and supporting them with whatever my team or my clients are creating. For most of my career, I’ve been a consultant and run my own business.

Host:
And currently you have a new book that you’ve released, Time to Listen. Where did that idea come from?

Indi:
I’ve been writing since I was five. In high school, I wrote a novel—never published it. I always wanted to be a writer, but I earned a degree in computer science and moved into coding. Writing for entertainment takes a different kind of energy, and I shifted toward understanding people instead.

This is the third book I’ve written. Each book evolved from the last—so you don’t have to read them all; you can just read the latest one.

I also try to make my work teachable—something others can bring into the world—because it’s so important to our future. We need to understand a broader variety of people and create a broader variety of solutions. Right now, most sectors—product, service, tech, civic design, education—aren’t set up to support multiple approaches for the same purpose. If someone needs to get to an airport gate on time, there are multiple ways to get that done, but we don’t design for many of them.

I’ve expanded this into six courses. To be inclusive, I created multiple ways to access the material: recorded videos, a live practice course, the book, and eventually an audio version.

I also worked with two specialists—one in online self-guided learning and one who is deaf—to make the videos accessible. I learned how to write useful captions and describe what’s on screen so people don’t have to watch the video to understand it. Many people have told me they appreciate being able to listen while doing chores.

It’s taken a lot of work to create something accessible in multiple formats.

Host:
Your book touches on inclusion and inclusive design. You mentioned UX—so my question is: Was computer science what started your journey into what we now call user experience?

Indi:
Yes. I started in computer science, working on operating systems and compilers. I’d done internships with a group building compilers and took my first job with them. But I didn’t want to write compilers—I wanted to create the tools people actually used, like editors and debuggers.

That was my first application design project, but I designed only for people exactly like me. I didn’t yet understand different thinking styles or different approaches.

Over time, I began realizing that a person’s approach matters, and UX wasn’t even a term yet. I was just a front-end developer, but I gravitated toward understanding how people work.

One formative experience was consulting at Visa. They had a call center—Visa 911—where reps spoke many languages and worked on green screens. They used atlases to find cities where customers had lost cards. I mapped out the process using a state machine—because that was the only tool I had—but I still didn’t understand at that time that people approached the work differently.

Today, UX has evolved from mapping processes to understanding purpose. Many of us share the same purpose, so we can study patterns across people. I identify patterns in approaches and in interior thinking, which become the “thinking styles.”

I now measure how well an organization supports each thinking style and each part of someone’s approach. For decades, I’ve done gap analysis with clients, and now we can also measure the harm caused when we don’t support certain approaches.

Host:
That’s fascinating. People entering UX today might have similar early thoughts you did—but there’s so much more to it. Why do you think there’s so much interest in UX now? Is it timing?

Indi:
Partly. When you and I grew up, we didn’t have phones in our pockets. Most of our day was screen-free. But people entering the field today have spent most of their lives interacting with screens.

The people who get interested often think:
“I could make this so much better.”

Sometimes they’ve been harmed by poor experiences and want to prevent that harm for others. It’s still rooted in wanting to improve experiences and feeling unseen by current systems.

The interest is higher simply because more people have had these experiences.

Host:
As we talk about screens—and the rise of the metaverse—what should someone entering UX focus on? What might blindside them?

Indi:
The biggest thing is to resist assumptions. That’s not easy. I train people how to do it.

When we think “I want to make this better,” that “I” is drawing from personal experience—or your team’s experience or your boss’s instructions. But that’s a tiny slice of human experience.

Throughout history, our ability to support each other has been limited by geography and mechanics. But the internet changes that—we can connect in many ways, whether through apps, phones, novels, TV shows, conversations, or shared activities.

What we forget is that people have different cultural approaches. We often design only for our own culture.

So:

• Resist assumptions.
• Respect other people’s approaches.
• Try to learn about them.

My book and courses focus on listening and finding patterns, so we can intentionally design for a variety of approaches—not just physiological differences but thinking styles and philosophical approaches.

We are not “different”; we are a variety.

There’s a lot of existing knowledge in organizations, and we often don’t use it well. I teach people to layer knowledge from past projects, ask careful questions, and build relationships so they understand the real purpose behind requests—like when someone says: “Build me a dashboard that shows this number.” If you build it without understanding context, they won’t use it.

We need to explore purpose, context, and other people’s perspectives first.

We also need to understand harm. I often post about four types of harm: mild, severe, lasting, and systemic. Most organizations only look at mild harm, and only with “average” participants—not by thinking style. Very few organizations intentionally evaluate for thinking-style differences.

Host:
Great advice. There’s so much to unpack. If someone wants to learn more about you, where should they go?

Indi:
My website: indiyoung.com. It has free information, recordings, links to books, social media, and more.

I’m on:

• Twitter: @indiyoung
• LinkedIn: Indi Young
• Instagram: @indiyoung_
• Medium: essays linked from my website
• And I have a newsletter, which announces new things.

Host:
Excellent. There’s a wealth of information out there about Indi and her work. Thank you for being on the podcast, and I wish you well.

Indi:
Thank you so much, Marc.

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