Episode transcription

Voiceover:     (singing) Sign, sign, everywhere a sign.

Voiceover:     Blockin' out the scenery, breakin' my mind.

Voiceover:     Do this, don't do that. Can't you read the sign?

Alexander Kotler:     Yes, indeed. Signs, signs, they are everywhere. Do this, don't do that, but wait. What does the sign actually mean? Communication is critical and that's why we're speaking directly and symbolically with a lead designer, a semiotics enthusiast and an expert communicator on this edition of RubyApps Insights.

Alexander Kotler:     Our guest today is Laura Hahn, head of design at Priceline.com. Today we're going to discuss semiotics, the importance of communication and how interpretation and every slip, so to speak, is a big deal.

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     Okay. I did that. Welcome.

Laura Hahn:            I do like that.

Alexander Kotler:     (laughs)

Laura Hahn:            I do like that. And one correction that maybe we should have gone over is that we're now just Priceline. We've dropped the "dot-com" officially.

Alexander Kotler:     Ohh.

Laura Hahn:            This is ... it's a recent change, so …

Alexander Kotler:     Oh, excellent.

Laura Hahn:            ... you know, (laughs) no problem there.

Alexander Kotler:     Good. Glad my research uncovered that. I'll have to-

Laura Hahn:            I know. That's …

Alexander Kotler:     ... get rid of that.

Laura Hahn:            That's our fault, though, I think.

Alexander Kotler:     Yeah. (laughs)

Laura Hahn:            Our ... our brand guidelines are a bit of date, so (laughs).

Alexander Kotler:     W- well, from Priceline, welcome.

Laura Hahn:            Thank you.

Alexander Kotler:     (laughs)

Laura Hahn:            Thank you. Happy to be here.

Alexander Kotler:     Yeah, so exciting. So tell us a little bit about your role there. I know that you're the head of design, so what does a day in the life look like?

Laura Hahn:            Yeah. So it's a relatively small team, but we cover brand design, product design, content strategy, and then also, ... what's the last one that we've got covered?

Alexander Kotler:     The biggest one yet.

Laura Hahn:            The biggest one yet (laughs). No, I think that's, like ... that's a general overview of the functions that we've got, but it's ... right now we're 10, we're hoping to be 12 in the near future, but day in the life is that we're working really closely with our product managers, engineering organization as well. So, building out all of our different Priceline products, both on the web, our native apps, all that stuff, and then also engaging with our promotional materials. And everything Priceline that you see comes from our shop, so …

Alexander Kotler:     So to set the stage for some of our conversation as we get deeper into it, there's a lot of collaboration and intra-organizational interaction that goes on on a day-to-day basis.

Laura Hahn:            Yeah, absolutely. So, most of the designers are partnered with a product manager as well as a dev-lead and then engineers that are actually pushing out product, so there's a lot of cross-functional and collaboration going on there. And then, of course, we've got myriad departments of the ... the company at large, so heavy interaction with our marketing teams, and then also our customer care teams. So there's a lot of different functions that my team is interacting with all over the ... the organization, so…

Alexander Kotler:     And, so, without stereotyping, but with stereotyping …

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     ... it sounds like there may be different kinds of personalities, people with different skillsets that approach problem-solving and their roles differently.

Laura Hahn:            Absolutely, yeah. Definitely different problem-solving approaches, yes. We also have two offices. One is here in New York. One is in Norwalk. Also Winnipeg office, so there are cultural differences just between those different offices, and then also the departments have their own cultures as well. So we're doing a lot of, ... yeah, like, cross-cultural stuff and being ambassadors of design, essentially, to lots of other ... other arms of the company. That sounds a little high-falutin', but, yeah, we kind of are representing our function a lot.

Alexander Kotler:     Well sometimes people just don't notice that. I mean, it's ... it was funny you said, "Norwalk," and you're here in New York," and we're like, "Well, that's Connecticut." But even Connecticut culture …

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     ... so to speak, is probably different than what an urbanite in New York City would, …

Laura Hahn:            Yeah.

Alexander Kotler:     ... would be.

Laura Hahn:            Definitely. (laughs) Definitely.

Alexander Kotler:     Sorry to all you folks from Connecticut, even those of you that are commuting into New York City.

Alexander Kotler:     So when we first connected, we had a conversation about linguistics and meaning, and I know that's a passion for you. So, let's …

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     ... unpack how precisely that came to be for you.

Laura Hahn:            Yeah, for sure.

Laura Hahn:            So, I've always been a language enthusiast. I studied languages all through high school and college, both, you know, the Germ- ... or, like, the romantic languages that you tend to study, so a lot of Spanish and French. Also studied Japanese and Tamil. So, yeah, I love languages, A, and I started thinking a lot about the interplay between language and culture and the interplay between language and meaning.

Laura Hahn:            I think doing an art history undergrad paired with more of a linguistics undergrad, that started to meld a lot as I was doing, like, readings of different pieces of artwork. So how do you take a painting and then read it lots of different ways? So semiotic theory was one way to ... to think about that stuff. So, what are the different signs and symbols that you're seeing? How do you interpret those things? What do they mean? And also the ... the subjectivity of that reading. So, I think a lot of postmodern art history theory, you're thinking a lot about, okay, the author may have some intent, but the real magic happens with the viewer and how they're ... they're reading whatever that thing is. So, yeah.

Alexander Kotler:     Yeah. And you dropped the "S"-word before I even …

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     ...  expected it. So of course that's ... that's semiotics and you did ... thank you for ... for defining it, of course, you know, the study of signs and symbols, ... but what was interesting to me about your background is that you paired visual study with verbal. And sometimes people are very single-track. You are a writer or you're a visual thinker, but pairing those two together, there must be some really f- fascinating interplay in space in which you exist and even the way your mind probably works with how you ... problem-solving is one thing because that is a very business-oriented approach to things, but just in general the way that you must see and experience the world is probably enhanced based on that background.

Laura Hahn:            I'd like to think so (laughs).

Alexander Kotler:     I basically just gave you a superpower, so, yeah.

Laura Hahn:            Yeah, I know. That sounds really great.

Alexander Kotler:     Awesome.

Laura Hahn:            Yeah. I think it definitely does, ... if you think about the ... the history of language and specifically written language, I mean, it starts out as something that's very pictographic. Right? And then it morphs into something that's more symbolic, so you ... we all understand that now this thing doesn't represent a cow anymore, it represents the "aw" sound. So that, I think, is really interesting from ... in the design world. Right?

Laura Hahn:            Because so much of what we're doing is, making the invisible visible, or rendering some sort of conceptual intent in a way that people can more readily understand. That's a lot of what written language serves too. So, how do you make something that is otherwise invisible, or something that's, like, between two people and something that ... that has more tangibility to it, I guess, and more of, like, a lasting artifact of that thing? So that's super interesting to me and I think about as I'm ... as I'm engaging with people as a designer, I tend to pair spoken, like, conversations …

Alexander Kotler:     Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Laura Hahn:            ... with, white boards, or my notebook or whatever is nearby to clarify what it is that I am trying to communicate with that accompanying visual artifact. It tends to ... people just tend to understand what's going on a little bit more if you're representing it pictographicaly as well.

Laura Hahn:            So, yeah. I- I was listening to someone who, ... I'll probably have to get back to you with this name …

Alexander Kotler:     (laughs) Yeah.

Laura Hahn:            ... but he, ... a genius.

Alexander Kotler:     You have to listen to the follow-up at this point.

Laura Hahn:            Yeah, for sure.

Alexander Kotler:     (laughs)

Laura Hahn:            A genius from MIT, but he was talking about how, if you're speaking conversationally or just talking or even writing, it's a very low-compression medium. There's ... you're essentially having to, using long words, try to transfer whatever is in your head to another person's head, and then they have to reconstruct whatever that picture is that you've got in your head. So, a lot gets lost in that translation, but if you can r- render it as a visual, it's a more highly-compressed medium to pass that same picture.

Laura Hahn:            So, something like, you know, mathematical notation allows you to very quickly (laughs) relay something that otherwise would take you maybe a couple sentences to explain. So I think that there's ... there's something about that form of communication that is higher compression and lower loss, you lose less in translation.

Alexander Kotler:     Yeah, there's a w- ... a word that continues to pop up in my mind, which is "uniformity," and the idea of uniformity for various audiences to interpret something in the same way.

Laura Hahn:            Yeah.

Alexander Kotler:     And it seems like uniformity is easier to achieve with this compressed state, rather than all of the ... I don't know, other ... other nodes and distractions that you have to grapple with in order to achieve that core meaning.

Laura Hahn:            Yeah, absolutely. I think that's totally right. So, yeah, I think a lot of semiotics is about the fact that whatever the sign is can be interpreted m- ... in multiple ways, like what that meaning is could be different, and, ... and it's very subjec- subjective, what your interpretation of that is. So, yeah, how do you, like, create some form of communication that has fewer, like, disparate interpretations?

Voiceover:     Today, the matter of truth is critical for all people, professionals and marketers especially. Whether or not there can be multiple truths is debatable, but within the context of brand and content management, there's typically only one.

Voiceover:     That's where RubyApps comes in. RubyApps is a cutting-edge collaboration platform that provides marketers and business developers with a single source of truth from which to manage, publish and share mission-critical content in a more consistent and efficient fashion.

Voiceover:     To demo RubyApps today, visit RubyApps.com.

Alexander Kotler:     One of our team members here actually shared an article from Vox Media with me on, how to design for fear. And I don't if you've …

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     ... actually seen it, but it- it was about the selection of an icon and having it be memorable but meaningless so that there would be attention given to it and it wouldn't have any prior associations. In particular, it was about the biohazard signal …

Laura Hahn:            Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Alexander Kotler:     ... and whether that would be a lasting signal going forward in time. But I was just curious to know if you had any perspectives, not necessarily on biohazard symbols …

Laura Hahn:            Yeah.

Alexander Kotler:     ... but on ... on the creation of symbols and how there can be prior associations and meanings that some might have with a particular geometry, and then assigning it some new meaning, and how you move it away from that or how you create something net new without people saying, "Oh, that's the blah-blah-blah from the blah-blah-blah."

Laura Hahn:            Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot about, the cognitive space that things already occupy. So, that for sure happens with certain shapes and certain symbols. You just can't really shake some of that stuff. So, I think about it a lot in terms of meme spacing in development where you want to ensure that, something has a clean name space, it's not sharing a name space with something else.

Laura Hahn:            So, definitely I think that also happens with words too. I know that I already chatted with you about a recent (laughs) situation at my company where we had this whole workshop day where a consultant came in and was talking about how you take a big product idea and break that down into smaller experiments where you can validate that your product idea has teeth. And all day long we were talking about experiments and how you design the right experiment to validate your product idea. And then, at the end of the day, I realized that everyone had heard "experiment" and ha- ... could only have the Priceline translation of that, which is an A/B test in production. So, everyone's experiment was in A/B test in production rather than any of the many other ways that they could have validated their ideas.

Laura Hahn:            So, that was a really good reminder of the fact that, yeah, words do have very specific meanings in specific contexts and specific cultures, and we hadn't done a good enough job of unpacking what that meant outside of the Priceline world, and that it could be something more agnostic of this very specific definition that we had. Language can be a dangerous thing, 'cause people's ... I think people's minds tend to rewire towards that specific meaning, so …

Alexander Kotler:     So that's a great illustration. And what I was hoping we could do would be to go one step further …

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     ... (laughs) and just talk about literally what the risks can be associated with, you know, these preconceived or cultural constructions that organizations may have around words or around terms, or even processes and how they yield kind of preconceived results because of those cultures.

Laura Hahn:            Yeah. I think that they, like ... words and cultures can.. and that sort of ... that

wiring that goes along with it, I think that it can reduce elasticity or plasticity in your culture or in your organization, in your processes, if you have a set of words or a language that's too narrow, where you're ... you're trying to overly-categorize things into, like, strict buckets. And I think that that ... that tends to create more solution-or- ... -oriented cultures, rather than ... solution and, like, output-oriented cultures, where everyone in that situation was trying to drive towards the output that they knew they were measured on. Like, we have certain quotas around how many A/B tests we put into production. So, that's something that ... that they're measured by, and is a ... a construct for w- what they're expected to deliver.

Laura Hahn:            So I think that being careful about those sorts of things ... yeah, design is another one that's tricky for me because a lot of people's mental models about design, they're kind of conflating three different things. So, there's the actual design artifact, which might be ... most people would think it's a wireframe or, I don't know ... something pretty, I guess, is a lot of what people are thinking about. But then there's also design as a process of creation and then there's the designer, who's a person, or design as a department or a role.

Laura Hahn:            And all of those three things kind of get, like, put together …

Alexander Kotler:     Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Laura Hahn:            ... but there's something very prescriptive when you think about design as a deliverable, where ... yeah, if people are expecting that our ... their engagement with us should result in a specific deliverable, then they're not gonna be able to understand all of the other different ways that they could engage with designers. So I think that's something that gets pretty tricky. Like, I think moving from calling ... if yo- ... I've ... I don't think I've ever been in a situation where we'd called developers or engineers "coders," but if you're calling coders "coders," there's a very specific expectation for what it is that they're delivering that might not allow for them to take up more space in an ... in an organization.

Alexander Kotler:     Right.

Laura Hahn:            Is that ... (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. You put ... you- you're putting people in ... in ... in boxes essentially, and they're only allowed to exist within those boxes, and that can be very limiting for an organization.

Alexander Kotler:     I was wondering ... this is a ... a little bit off-topic, or maybe it's not. I was wondering if jargon is something that falls into this category as well.

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     There's certain, you know ... c- certain fields have their own languages that are germane to those fields, and it has some prescriptive meaning.

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     You know, if you're gonna build a deck, a "deck" means something ... it ... it may specifically mean a ten-page PowerPoint presentation if you're a management consultant. Well, if you're a management consultant, it probably is a hundred-page deck, but …

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     ... you know, just the same, I- I was curious to know if that was something that falls under this category as well.

Laura Hahn:            Yeah, it definitely does, and in our context ... there's a lot of jargon in the travel industry, w- which, I guess, makes sense but it's funny for us because it starts to creep into the way that we talk to our customers who are very much not in the travel industry. So, yeah, things like, ... for example, on our rental car's path, internally we referred to our checkout page as a "contract page," because historically there's a contract between you as a customer and the company that you're renting a car from but that's not what that page is from a customer viewpoint. And if you were to say ... yeah, they wouldn't be able to say that they found a bug on the contract page. They wouldn't even really think of it as a contract anymore. So, there are certain things that are in our lexicon that are very much not in a customer l- lexicon, and …

Alexander Kotler:     Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Laura Hahn:            ... and it's detrimental for us to ... to speak in that way 'cause it makes us less approachable as a company. It, ... I th- ... I think it ... it sows mistrust. Right?

Alexander Kotler:     Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Laura Hahn:            So …

Alexander Kotler:     Or do you have to be bilingual, so to speak? I mean, of course you have to be able to speak to the customer in his or her native language, whatever that may be …

Laura Hahn:            Yeah.

Alexander Kotler:     ... but I- I would tend to think as well that having a shorthand by which you can communicate with your peers has to speed up the process and allow you to serve your customers better and faster.

Laura Hahn:            For sure, but I think that with expediency there's always a loss in nuance, and a loss in ... in some perspective. Right? So, I think as we're hoping to become a- an even more customer-centric culture, I think there's certain things about our language that should change to match that. If that's a goal, if that's a pursuit to ... to think more like our customers and to be more in-tune with our customers, I think by speaking like our customers, we might, like, r- re- ... r- re-wire our organization a little bit. So, that's definitely something that I ... I want to push is adopting new sets of language that are less about our conversations with our suppliers and more about our direct conversations with our end customers, so …

Alexander Kotler:     Mm-hmm (affirmative). And if ... let's just say that your business is acquisitive and you wind up having new customers, theoretically you'd have to learn new ways to speak to new customers.

Laura Hahn:            For sure, definitely. Yeah, I mean, language evolves, people evolve (laughs), companies evolve …

Alexander Kotler:     Sure. Yeah.

Laura Hahn:            ... so, yeah, absolutely. We should be ... we should be growing our vocabulary, yeah, over time.

Alexander Kotler:     Makes perfect sense. Who in the world, I guess …

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     ... in the world of business, though, probably specifically, does this well or better than others? Or at least does it well in one way enough that w- ... well, we can talk about it and people can ... we can name-drop.

Laura Hahn:            Yeah, for sure.

Laura Hahn:            I think I've been thinking a lot about how A- Amazon does product development. One of things that's part of their product development process is essentially writing a press release ahead of time. So, you pitch your new product by writing the press release that ultimately you would want to be presenting to a customer. Right? "Here's our new cool thing that we made for you, and here's why it's valuable to you." And I think that that's a really good exercise for putting yourself into the customer's mind. What would they want to hear about this cool new thing that we've built, even though you haven't built it yet?

Laura Hahn:            And I think that obviously the ... the business value should be pretty evident in whatever that is. But how do you sell something that, like, is meaningful to you- ... to your business, to a customer? How do you connect that business value with that customer value?

Laura Hahn:            'cause that's ... that's product-market fit, right? Where it's delivering value on both sides. So, I think that that's a really good exercise and it's a ... it's a wr- writing exercise. It's a storytelling exercise. How do you tell the story of the thing that it ... that you want to build? So I think that that's really ... I think that's a good way to go about doing product development, but, I don't know (laughs). Is that …

Alexander Kotler:     Yeah. I ... and i- ... well, 'cause it's interesting, because we had this conversation before. Not this whole conversation, but I asked you this question and I recall you mentioned Amazon. And so, in preparation, I went and wanted to get a better understanding of how Amazon communicates. And I think I knew this already, but one of the things that I learned about how to communicate internally is that meetings are run via the memo. And so they will prepare a six-page memo, and that's how the executives ... and the executives go into the meetings, they read the memos,and then they have the actual meeting itself, which is pretty fascinating, come down to it. And you have to have strong written skills, I would imagine, otherwise you're not gonna get that job there. I don't think I know of any other organization that has that demand on memo-writing, but I also don't know any other organization that …

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     ... is as successful, really …

Laura Hahn:            Yeah.

Alexander Kotler:     ... as Amazon has been.

Laura Hahn:            Yeah.

Alexander Kotler:     So, take that [crosstalk]

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Laura Hahn:            No. Yeah, it's an emphasis on communication and clarity of communication, something that can stand alone. It's ... it goes back to that ... that idea of artifacts too. Right? There's the production of an artifact, which is a memo that needs to be able to stand alone and can be socialized or passed around as necessary. So, there's something really powerful in having to produce something like that. But …

Alexander Kotler:     Would that be your recommendation to anyone at any organization? 'cause clearly there's gonna be a cultural fabric anywhere and you have to do what works, but would you start by suggesting the creation of some artifact, and then socializing that artifact …

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     ... across the organization in some way? And then that's how you would imbed a- a new idea, or a new definition of experiment, or something to that effect?

Laura Hahn:            Yeah, absolutely. And I think, too ... I mean, I might be biased as a designer (laughs), but I think having it be a visual artifact rather than a written artifact would be even more impactful.So if there's a way to better visually represent whatever concept it is that you're trying to push, not necessarily a high-fidelity mock of a user interface, but some sort of diagram of ... of whatever ... whatever information it is that you're trying to present, I think that's very valuable. So …

Alexander Kotler:     You know, I was ... I was gonna end the episode here …

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     ... and just say, "Okay." But I- I did have something else occur to me that I thought I wanted to ask earlier and you just mentioned again. So, talking about the power of ... of visual, that visual's not gonna stand on its own, it's gonna be accompanied by something verbal. And my next thought would be, "Okay, the more senses you have incorporated, the easier it is for the full idea to be absorbed."

Laura Hahn:            Yeah, absolutely. Yes.

Alexander Kotler:     So, actu- ... if you actually did a song as well …

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     ... then you ... even greater chance that …

Laura Hahn:            Absolutely, yep. Yeah.

Alexander Kotler:     Right, okay.

Laura Hahn:            I think ... I think for sure or something that's tactile. I think a lot of the ... the sort of design-thinking workshops that I run, we tend to ... to try to have ... I mean, Post-it notes is a really simple way to do that, but it's something that's actually tactile that you can move around, that you can be engaged with and ... and interactive with. And, yeah, if you think about all the different ways that people learn ... some people learn kinetically, some people learn visually ... yeah, the more ... you're absolutely right, the more different senses that you can engage, the more likely it is to be adopted and understood. So, yeah.

Alexander Kotler:     Awesome. Amazing. I don't know if I have read the ... the signs and symbols right …

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     I've looked at the time and I want to make sure I'm respectful of yours, but is there anything left out? Should we cover anything else?

Laura Hahn:            Other than that, I'm hiring (laughs), so …

Alexander Kotler:     All right! And, I mean, if this hasn't been an advertisement for someone you'd want to work for, then I don't know what is.

Laura Hahn:            (laughs)

Alexander Kotler:     So, wonderful. Well, Laura Hahn, than you so much for joining us today on the RubyApps Insights podcast. It has been my pleasure to speak with you.

Laura Hahn:            Yeah, thank you. My pleasure, yeah.

Alexander Kotler:     Thanks for listening to this episode of RubyApps Insights, which is recorded in Studio 55 and hosted by me, Alexander Kotler. You can subscribe to RubyApps Insights on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play and Pandora. If you liked this episode, please leave us a five-star rating and a comment. Equally, if you didn't, or if you'd like to hear a guest or a topic on a future episode, send an email to insights@rubyapps.com.

Alexander Kotler:     Until next time, have an awesome every day.