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Hello. Welcome back to our conference coverage of HFPS 2022. I am sitting here with Christy Harper. Welcome back to the show. Thank you for mobile. Exactly. I know. I think the last time we connected on the show was for Yxpa, right? Yeah, that was last year, too, right? Yeah, it's been a minute or a year before even maybe. I don't know. It's been a minute. Well, welcome back. We're glad to have you here today. You know what? Maybe let's just take a minute back, because I don't even know if we've even talked about who you are on the show. Can we do that for a second? Who are you and what is your sort of area of expertise? Okay, so I'm Christy Harper. I own a consulting company with my business partner called End to End User Research. We primarily focus on UX research for tech companies, but we also do a little bit of human factors testing of medical products. We have facilities that we rent out, which are Usability labs, focus group rooms, and even Mop jury spaces. We don't do that kind of research, but we do rent the space, and we also do participant recruiting along with that. And we have a really great remote team that does all of our recruiting for us. And so it's been very exciting. Five years prior to that, I managed a small research team in the product design group at HP. So I did that for many years before opening End to End. And we've grown from two to 27 people, I think, right now. Lots of people. It's been a good journey for this five years. One of them actually in our lab, too. Rashad. Yes, he is. It's great to have you here, Christie. And thank you very much for giving up the time to come and chat to us. We recognize one of the things that we've heard a lot from people who've spoken to us today is just it's great to be networking again. It's great to be talking to people, and I think that's where probably the real value is in what's going on. But what has brought you to HFES this year? What's been your driving force about coming to this event this year? So there's a few things. So I am the current chairperson of the HFP Woman Group, which is the Women's Organization for Mentoring and Networking, and we have an award ceremony and a happy hour this evening from 05:00 till six. Really, literally an hour. So we're competing with lots of other happy hour events. So ours is a little bit earlier. And we're going to award the Mentor of the Year, the Woman of the Year, and the Rising Star Award. So that's always very exciting. Of course, men are welcome to join and come support the women who are winning these awards this evening. And the other thing that brings me is I am in charge of the local chapter presidents. So I just hosted the lunch for the chapter presidents. So we've been trying to help revitalize a lot of the local chapters and hook them up with student chapters and help the organization stay strong. So that's been my focus so far. Are you presenting anything here? Yes, I'm on two panels. So I mentioned the HFP woman group. So as part of that, I'm part of the council of affinity groups. And so we are going to have a panel talking about on Thursday, talking about bringing your whole self to work, which I think is something that's very important. So we're going to hear from all of the different affinity group leaders on that panel. Additionally, I'm on an industry panel. And that one also on Thursday. But early in the morning. 08:00. I'm not a morning person, but I'm going to rally. But we're going to talk about so you want to be a manager? And so a lot of that is when you get into research, and you're researching for a while, and then you wonder, what is your next step? Should I go into management? Should I expand my skills? Should I contribute more on a technical level? So I think all of those paths are valid. And some of us became managers sort of fell into it. Some of us were trained for it. So we want to share those experiences. And then we also have on Rita from Dell. She's going to be part of the panel and she's going to share the opposing viewpoint of staying on the technical track and not becoming a manager. Yeah. It's a good perspective to have. There's so many questions I want to ask now. Just take a quick step back. You mentioned about the affinity groups and the fact that you're going to be sitting on this panel. We've heard from a couple of the other Finty groups as well. How important are affinity groups to the work that HFES does? Oh, I think it's very important, like, in many different ways. Like any organization. You want to be inclusive, and you want to make sure that people feel at home in their own organization. So having the affinity groups, I think, really helps people to connect in that way, and it also raises awareness. Like we have a disability. So we need to think about how do we account for people with disabilities when they come to an event like the conference. So I think in terms of awareness in general, it's very important as well. So we talked to Rose earlier about the disability group, and it's one of those things where I have one, I don't think about it. And so it's like, how do you sort of encourage people, not just with that affinity group, but any affinity group, to sort of feel like somebody is a part of that thing or can be a part of that thing very easily? Right. How do you make the accessibility of affinity groups accessible? Right. To me, that's a question I have. Yeah. So how do people know about them or how do they join them? How do you help members be aware of them, and how do you make it easy to join them? That type of thing, right? Yeah. So I think a lot of that is happening here. We're having, like I said, lots of competing happy hours, and I think part of that is just to let people know, hey, this group is out here, and if you're interested in this group, come over and meet some other people and check it out. Most of them are super easy to join. Most of us have LinkedIn groups, and we have social media channels, and you can join the oldfashioned way on the email list. What I've done with the HFP Woman group is made it we also have the LinkedIn group, which we have expanded to include lots of people who are maybe outside of HIVs, but are also in maybe UX research or some other related fields that like the idea of HIV Woman, and they're able to attend all of our virtual events and also feel part of the community. Yeah. I'm kind of jealous about just how many happy hours are going on and the fact that I ended up over here in the UK. But I want to hold that against you. It's fine. You're going to be talking in that one group panel discussion around the idea to bring yourself to work. What do you mean by that? Well, I think a lot of times people in the past have had this work persona and their home persona, and I kind of get that to certain extent, maybe you don't want to share all of your personal information with everybody. Of course, people are entitled to privacy, but also they shouldn't feel like they're not allowed to be themselves. So you should be able to be who you are, or you should be able to wear your hair however you'd like to wear your hair. You should be able to dress obviously you have to wear clothes, but you should be able to dress the way you dress. Right. You shouldn't feel bad about wearing a head covering, for example. Right. You should be yourself, and you should be able to bring yourself to work. Right. Barry, I'm giving you full permission right now to come to the podcast without pants on because we don't see you. I was standing up earlier just to try and stretch my legs. I was a bit concerned for a moment. Okay. We were not live. Don't worry. Don't worry. It was a commercial break. So, Christy, you're part of a panel on Thursday here talking about taking that step into management. Right. Do you think that management is sort of necessary for career advancement, in your opinion? So I don't think it's necessary I think it's one path. So I've talked to other people who are doing research who say, you know what, I kind of like the design side of it. Or, I want to become a research scientist, like, go in a different, more academic direction. Or I've heard from people that I want to be a product manager because I feel like product managers don't know enough about human factors research, and they really should understand research more when they're making big product design decisions. And so people management is another track. So it is a viable track if that's the way you want to go. But it doesn't work in every organization. Not every organization has sort of a progression for human factors, or even if you're in a combined research and design team, it might end at the director level. So if you're looking to move up, you need to be in a company that has representation all the way up. Right. One of the ways to go down this, I think from what you said, that your panel is going to go down that. Should you be a manager? Should you not be a manager, go down the technical route to flip that in? Ted, do you think being a human factors practitioner brings something special to being a manager? Does it make you better or worse? Do you think it brings you any special sources to being a manager? I think it helped me when I was managing a team, and I think what helped me was having natural empathy. I know that word is sometimes overused, but I think I'm good at listening and I'm good at being empathetic to people and being understanding of their challenges. And I think that's something important. Mentoring is something that's always been really personally important to me. And I think good managers should provide some mentorship. Not all of them do, but I think that was something that came also from being a researcher. Right. Researchers in general are curious about people we listen to, people we're empathetic. I think there are a lot of those skills that carry over to management, and I think they definitely helped me. Right. Do you feel that there are some domains or industries where that path to a manager position from a human factor's perspective is maybe more impactful than others? I'm not really sure. What we're going to do on the panel is each of us are going to talk about our own experiences and how we got there and what that meant for us in terms of our companies. Right. So I can really only speak to that. It's really hard for me to imagine what it's like, really. HP changed a lot. I worked for Compact and then I worked for HP through many mergers, acquisitions, and changes and different bosses and different structures and organizations. But still, I was primarily at one company, so I realized that my viewpoint is limited and which is why I'm on a panel, right? That's a review for us wanting the answer from the panel before the panels. Actually, you got me. You mentioned earlier you're the local chapters chair with an HF. That's something I'm unfamiliar with. So can you give us a brief rundown on what that role is and what's it about, what you aim to do? Okay, so you're familiar with, obviously, the National International Human Factors group? So there's also local chapters and there's also student chapters. So obviously student chapters come from universities and it's a way for students to become involved, to present, to win awards, to win best papers and all this. You don't have to be in a student chapter to do any of that, but I think having a student chapter just gives you a lot of experience for leadership, for networking, all kinds of things like that. But the local chapters on the other side are primarily for industry, but for us, at least in Houston, it's been sort of a way for industry to become involved with students. There are local chapters all over the US. And some internationally and then some because of COVID and other factors. A lot of these local chapters have been sort of just stagnant or dormant for a while and they're not sure how to get it started up again. And the people who had so much energy prior to COVID are now tired. And so what I'm trying to do in this role is I'm trying to connect people and find either strong chapters nearby that they can partner with, find universities that they can work with and just try to help them. If there's interest in getting a local chapter revitalized, try to share some of the best practices that we learned in Houston. And we just had the lunch, so we had people from multiple chapters share things that have worked for them and concerns that they had. And so that was, I think, a very fruitful lunch and I was very happy, I was very emphatically pushing people to get somebody there and it's like the president's not coming, send somebody else. Well, nobody from the officers are coming. Send somebody from the chapter. There's no chapter. Send somebody from the state, I don't care, just get somebody there. And because of that, we had a nice full table and not every chapter was represented, but we did get a lot of great feedback. This is me probably wildly speculating, and I probably shouldn't, but we talked to Susan earlier about some of the changes that HFES is going to make over the next couple of years. Do you think that maybe a distributed approach of sort of bringing a bigger emphasis on the local communities, but within the strength of a larger community is a good approach to take? I think it's good because it spreads awareness. I think a lot of times people don't even know that the human factors in ergonomic society exists. And I think a local chapter is one way to do that. In our local chapter, we have reached out to USPA or Hexagon, Houston or ISPA and shared some of their events, and they'll share some of our events that are relevant. So I think people may not have ever heard of HFES, and then UXPA says, hey, they're having this speaker come that's relevant to our organization. And so it just helps, I think, on the local level, it's another way to help share what's going on in HFES. But we did talk about some people are very isolated. They're in very small areas, or conversely, they're in a very large area, and people don't want to drive an hour across traffic to get to an inperson event. So we've talked about doing hybrid events. We talked about maybe even teaming up and doing regional events to help some of the less strong chapters. Yeah. So you've only had a day of the conference so far. You had some nice event last night as well, which I'm also not jealous about. We won't talk about.

What's been the biggest win for you so far that you got out of the conference? I don't know. Well, obviously seeing everyone again is a huge win. Just being able there's something about the energy of the conference that's hard to describe. I know, making you jealous. We can have to get you here. It's so great over here, right? It's just the energy. Everybody is looking at all their happy faces, just beaming, excited to be here. Yeah. And just, you know, right now it's like new people are coming in, and you're meeting with people, and there's a constant see of new faces, which is always exciting. And then there's people. What do we do and how do we make sure we keep our organization strong? And so I'm just hearing about this from different people that I've been running into over the past year and a half, just sort of finding out what's happening. I think there's a lot of energy, and it's very exciting. That's awesome. There's a whole week ahead of us. Day one. What are you most looking forward to this week? Well, honestly, I haven't looked at the program much because I've been meeting me too, so I'm sure there are things I will be looking forward to. Today is my busiest day, but then I think tomorrow I'll be able to actually attend some sessions and figure out what to do there. And then I just have a lot of meetings planned and networking and lunches and happy hours and such. But I am looking forward to our panels because even on my own panel, getting to see those people I haven't seen in a long time, that's selfishly exciting just to take a quick step back from the conference, because quite frankly, I'm bored of you now. What a great time you guys are all having. Oh, Barry. Barry, come. I know, but to get back to your human factors roots, as it were. How do you actually get to human factors in the first place? What was the driving force behind you finding out about human factors and getting into it? So I didn't come through the traditional path. When I went to school, I didn't even know there was such a thing as human factors. So I think it's always very exciting to explain to people who we are and what we do. But I had a master's degree in psychology. I was working doing training for the government, and I was working through the post Office, which is just a very dysfunctional organization with lots of system issues. But I discovered it because I was basically trying to figure out what to do next and how to change my career trajectory without going back to school. And somebody told me about Human factors, and so I started reading about it. I just read a couple of textbooks. I started following what we used to call listservs and meeting different people, and then I just basically networked and found out that to break in brand new, even if you had a master's degree in psychology, you needed some experience, and you have to get that somewhere. And the smaller organizations did not have the bandwidth to train somebody who was very new. And so I reached out to Mira Manahan at Compaq, and she was great. She just talked to me and listened to me and brought me in for interviews. The first time, I didn't get the position, but then later she contacted me again and offered me a contract position at Compact. And then a few months later, she offered me a full time position, and I never looked back. And I always appreciate her, and because of her, I'm always trying to give back. At HP, I always had interns more than I could hire, and I do the same thing with my business partner, Monica Snyman. We do the same thing at end to end. We always have more interns than we can hire because we feel like them getting the practical experience is going to help them get good jobs. And we've been very successful people who have worked for us who we haven't been able to keep, have gone on, have great jobs, both from HP and from Intense. Right. Well, hey, we have a couple of minutes left. Is there anything that you want to stay about? I don't know, the state of the society or the conference itself or any of the panels that you're going to be on the floor is yours. What do you want to talk about? I don't know. So I've already told you a lot about what I'm doing. I hope people show up for the HFP Woman group. I hope they show up for my panels. You know, check out these affinity groups, find out what other things are going on. Like I said, there's a lot of different happy hours and you might have to run from one to another, but, you know, any time you can. It's good to meet new people, it's good to network. All of these students take advantage of this. Like these people that you look around that you don't know are going to be the people who are on your future panels when you come back to HFDs. So meet people in your generation and people from another generation. Yes, that's what I tell people do. Well, thank you so much for being on the show and sitting down with us. You're always welcome to come back to door is always open. We're going to take a quick break. Thank you so much, Christie. We'll be back right after this. Human Factors Cast brings you the best in Human Factors news interviews, conference coverage and overall fund conversations into each and every episode we produce. But we can't do it without you. The human factors. Cast Network is 100% listenersupported. All the funds that go into running the show come from our listeners. Our patrons are our priority and we want to ensure we're giving back to you for supporting us. Pledges start at just $1 per month and include rewards like access to our weekly Q and A hosts, personalized to professional reviews and Human Factors Minute, a Patreon only weekly podcast where the host breakdown unique, obscure and interesting Human Factors topics in just 1 minute. Patreon rewards are always evolving, so stop by Patreon.com Humanfactors Cast to see what support level may be right for you. Thank you. And remember, it depends. I'm sitting here with Rebecca Greer and we're going to be talking about the UX task Force that HF Es has been putting together. Rebecca, welcome to the show. Hello, thank you for having me there. We are thrilled to have you and I personally am super thrilled to be talking to you about this topic. This is something that's near and dear to my heart and I'm super excited to jump into some of the stuff that you have to share with us today. Can you just maybe start at the top and tell us what is the task force? So the Executive Council of Human Factors and Ergonomic Society consists of I'm blinking on the exact number, but at large numbers, three folks who served in treasury immediate past and current and three Presidents immediate past and current. Those individuals set the tone for HFS. What are the things that are going to happen? How are we going to operate as a society? All of these things the President can choose every year to establish task force for issues they think are of importance. The reason I ran for the Executive Council and became an AtLarge member my term ended on Saturday was that as a UX practitioner, I felt the society wasn't doing all it could for me and I wanted to be that voice on the Executive Council. So this past year, Chris Reed who was the president during that last year, established a task force to look at the issues related to UX practitioners and their membership within the society. I sent out a call on LinkedIn. We got a large number of people who are interested in assisting us. 19 folks total helped me to write a report that was a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and provide recommendations to the Executive Council to improve HFES for UX practitioners. And we provided them with 41 recommendations on Saturday. Several of them have been adopted as motions. Several of them are being sent to the appropriate committees and divisions within HFES and hopefully we'll go forward in the future. That's awesome. And I do remember seeing this post on LinkedIn and it was a lot of activity on it. And to me that is very telling because it sounds like you're not the only person that thinks that there's some sort of improvements that can be made with a task force like this. And now I want to ask you a little bit about sort of the representation on the team. There's a lot of people you said 19 people. Yes, 19 authors at the end who actually contributed to the document in some way, shape or form. I think there were more who had signed up and had attended some meetings. But 19 folks helped, right? A lot of people involved. Can you tell me just a little bit about sort of what the representation was like throughout those 19 folks? Like what types of domains, industries, roles, cultural backgrounds, that type of thing? Who was on this panel? It ran the gamut, really. I'm in Dublin, Ireland, and there was a couple of other folks from across the pond. Most of the folks were from the United States. We had folks who worked as practitioners and medical domain. We had students, we had professors, we had folks who worked for other large corporations, consultants, folks who were younger than me, folks that are older than me. It ran the gamut, really, in terms of who all was involved in writing the document. That's awesome. I'm really happy to hear that it was diverse with all those different perspectives contributing to it. Because when you say UX Practitioner, that can mean a lot of different things. It does. Actually, that was one of the first things that we did, was to define what we meant by UX practitioner. And we decided that for the purpose of what we were going to focus on are those folks who are actually working in product development teams. So making trade off decisions with marketers engineers. Product managers. Designers. Among others. About either the acquisition or the development of a product. That the folks were working primarily in unregulated industries. So consumer electronics. Software. Web. Those kinds of things. Versus medical or aviation or automotive. And that their focus was on the perceptual and cognitive mechanisms of the end user. Not so much the physical, ergonomics of the end user. And we thought that those are the folks who are most likely going to have UX in their title. Right? And did you filter down even further by sort of role within those, like researchers or designers, or did you include sort of everybody at the table? We pretty much included everybody. I will say that my experience has been that the folks who have graduated from an HF accredited program, which is most of the people we were discussing, those folks who had been HFE members when they were students and somehow became disenfranchised with the society as practitioners, that most of those folks were probably serving roles as researchers and less so as designers or program managers or engineers. But we didn't say that explicitly in the document. Right now. I really want to kind of cut to the sort of meat and potatoes of this. What did you find? Let's get into some of the findings because you sent me the deck. There's a lot to go over, just high level, maybe. What are some key takeaways here? One of the key takeaways is that HFS has been losing membership for the last ten years or so. And while UX as a career has been growing steadily, I think PayScale and CNN in 2017 said that UX researcher was like the 39th best job to have in the United States. Glassdoor said this year that UX designer was one of the best 50 jobs to have. LinkedIn said in the last couple of years that UX design was one of the best top five skills to have. So we should be increasing membership in HFBs, not decreasing membership in terms of the strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats. What we found was that HIVs really does do an excellent job for students. It is an amazing society to build students potential in their home, their professional home, to give them opportunities to do all sorts of things and connections. And this is why so many people want to stay members of HFES. And that's a real strength that we should be capitalizing on. Another strength is the oldest UX professional society in the United States. We have accreditation programs for graduate programs. We have a relationship with BCPE in terms of accreditation, which are things that we have found UX practitioners that don't have a connection to HFDs want for the profession. And that the history of UX, or the history excuse me, the history of HFDs is a mix of practitioners and academics working together to solve realworld problems. Unfortunately, that history hasn't really that strength of partnership hasn't existed in the last few years. And that's one of the weaknesses that we found, is that there is at least a perception, if not a reality, that academics are more valued by the society than practitioners, that academics have more knowledge of the inner workings of the society and of the opportunities that exist beyond just being a member of the society. This is partially due to a complex organizational structure that exists. There are a number I didn't understand the complex organizational structure until I became a member of the Executive Council, and I actually was in a conversation the other day with other members of the executive Council, but they also didn't understand the complexity of the society until they became elected to the Executive Council. The value for practitioners is low in a lot of different ways. HFS doesn't engage with the external world as much as practitioners would like to see that happen. And HFES, we all know this website and other digital communications don't really meet the standard that UX practitioners are used to in terms of opportunities. UX has a fast growing career, as we've talked about. There's an increasing need for HF expertise within human factors as technology gets more and more complex. Artificial intelligence, selfdriving vehicles, more and more things. The popularity of steam data science and behavioral science are all reasons each of us should be growing and things we can capitalize within those. The UN has a Behavioral Science Week, there is an organization that has a World Usability Day, and the UN has signed on in the past to promoting that day. And then those members from their student days are passionate about HIVs, and they have broad networks, and this is also something HIV could leverage. We also have threats from the external world, though, that professional societies don't add as much value to individuals as they once did because of social media. This is a good thing in a lot of ways. Because we can find other people who are passionate about human factors. UX. Not just within our own and without being a member of HIVs. But it's also a threat in that there is a rise of pseudo profundity and that lots of people have said you Google UX. You go onto LinkedIn. You see UX Facebook Reddit. And you are just as likely to get advice that goes against the 5000 years of science within human factors as goes with it. And if you aren't knowledgeable about the topic, it's hard for you to figure out what is the good sources and what are the bad sources in terms of human factor science, UX science. Furthermore, there are other professional societies related to UX. Chi exists, UXPA exists. They aren't the same as human factors though. And then there's also conferences out there. Both for profit companies have created UX conferences as well as other nonprofits that don't necessarily have societies associated with them. But one can attend a conference or present at a conference without being a member of a society. So these were the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats we presented to the Executive council. And then we had 41 action items or recommendations for them. These 41 action items fell into the category of better representation of UX at all levels of human factors. Leadership, awareness of HF, Es, and particularly the degrees of professional standards that are I love keith in Stone has a great metaphor that he uses where his son became a line cook at a breakfast diner to pay for some bills in college. His son never had cooked anything before the restaurant told him how to cook the 20 breakfast dishes that they had. And now his son can say he's a cook, but his son knows that that cooking skill is not the same as somebody a chef at a Michelin Star restaurant. However, in UX, we all know somebody who has stumbled into UX does a great job with what they do, but doesn't understand what else can be done with a Human Factors background. And so and there's also this big push for democratization of UX and user research. So we need Human Factors or another entity, at least some entity, to say, no, seriously, there is a science and there are different levels of that science. And just because somebody says, I've done UX for one year or I took a boot camp, that doesn't mean that they are the same as Peter Hancock or Mike Hemsley in terms of Human Factors UX knowledge, some other action items fell into value, making the journals, the conferences a little bit more attractive and value oriented for practitioners and then the user friendliness and accessibility. So that complex organizational structure. We provided recommendations for making it more easier for UX practitioners to be involved at all levels of leadership within the society. I want to follow up on one of the things that you mentioned. There's sort of this overall need for someone to come in and say, hey, pay attention to Human Factors, pay attention to the science. Do you think and this is sort of me asking you, do you think that's a government's role? Do you think that some other sort of entity, like when you talk about an entity, some other hand to come in, what are we talking about here? I think Human Factors is in a unique position to do that because we do have a relationship with accreditation. We have our own accreditation system for graduate programs and Human Factors, and we do have the relationship with BCPE Certified Professional Ergonomics or Engineers. I can't remember the exact title, forgive me. So I think the Human Factors and Ergonomic Society is in a unique position to do so. And actually they did take up the recommendation. They are creating a task force to create standardized UX titles with skill sets. Potentially this work could involve UXPA that's still to be negotiated and that they are going to leverage the fact that onet does have job titles and job descriptions related to Human Factors and try and get those subscriptions into onet. And then the hope is that once they're in on it, that will make it easier for companies to say, to reference those descriptions and then they'll become more standardized throughout industry. It's kind of a chicken and egg problem in that we need the titles and descriptions for companies to use them, but nobody wants to do them unless they know for certain that companies will use them. So I'm hoping that this task force can create these titles, we can get them out there, and then we can use PR, use others, use strengths, or use our networking, use social media to get them to be standardized within the world. Yes, it's really a strange thing when you really start to break it down and be like, yeah, but we want companies to use these things and therefore will sort of bolster our credibility to say that we know these defined roles, but then how do we define these roles? Because companies are using them in different ways. It's a very complex problem, and I'm happy that a task force like this exists. Trying to look at sort of all the intricacies.

There was another point that you made earlier that I'm blanking on right now, but what are some of the maybe I'll get back to it. This stream of consciousness thing, what are some of the immediate next steps? Like, what can we do tomorrow, today? What can we do today to start making progress towards a more sort of unified domain where both human factors practitioners, UX practitioners, researchers, designers, all feel part of one larger umbrella? So I will say that the Executive Community Council also voted to enact a digital communications committee. This is a permanent standing organization within HFES, and they are going to work with Smith Buckland, who provides all of our administrative services, to ensure that all of our digital communications, be they linked in the website or emails, go forward, meet UX best practices, or at least the best that they can do given financial considerations and timeline constraints. This committee, the task force that I mentioned, there's also a practitioner committee within HFS, and there is a membership committee within HFS. I strongly encourage anyone who is in UX or a practitioner to reach out to the executive council, or Steve Kemp, the executive director who works for Smith Buckley, carolyn Summer at Chris Reed, susan Ketoki, the newly elected president, to reach out to me. And I'll put you in touch with the right folks to get on to these volunteers to volunteer your time for these committees, these task forces. Only with your voice in there, in that room, are we going to be able to make a society that is beneficial to UX practitioners. Now, this isn't your problem to solve, but one sort of, I guess, critique of that approach of reach out to us, we're here. It's an open invitation. I've heard that maybe HFES should sort of be the proactive force in that equation, where they're actually going out and sort of promoting these types of things within existing technology companies out there today or other organizations. Do you have any thoughts on that and how specifically its role with respect to sort of UX practitioners. Is there any other way that HFES can be that proactive force to sort of get out there and get folks involved? So I am hoping that with this task force that is going to kind of create as people learn about it, as we get it off the ground, as it moves forward, then there'll be more attention given to human factors in economic society for the creation of these roles until that day happens. I agree with you that HFES needs to be much more transparent. Use LinkedIn, use Reddit, use other communication methods, not just the bulletin, email and connect to say hey, we have these volunteer opportunities. It is my understanding that they are working on that.

I wish they would do it a little bit more. They have heard me say this many times, I use LinkedIn, a LinkedIn message to get the members from my task force. So I hope that that model and the strength of the report we put together, the passion of the members of the task force that HFS leadership recognizes that and I hope that that just continues and snowballs and that we continue to do that. I will say it will be immensely helpful for that to snowball if people actually do respond. So I can't ask the HFS leadership to reach out and then if there's crickets, nothing's going to change. So it will help if both sides work together to create that handshake, for lack of a better word. Yes. I almost wonder and maybe this is sort of me shouting to the rooftops to HFCs leadership, maybe I'll bring it up to some of them this week, I don't know. But what if as part of your role within HFES, as an EC member or even somebody on a task force like this one, what if part of that role and responsibility is to represent that in a public manner for some portion of the week. Respond to one or two Reddit posts with your name that people know, people can start seeing your name and understanding where you're coming from. Part of that would be to promote HFS and what we do. Could that be included in roles and responsibilities to have more of a public presence and sort of encouraged reach out to these communities and make that part of the role? I'm not telling you to answer for me now, but that might be some sort of way in which that outreach that a lot of people sort of feel unheard or feel like they don't want to do the work that would show that HFD is going out and doing the work. I don't know. Maybe we did put in our recommendations that there be some sort of way of starting discussions on all sorts of social media platforms, at least quarterly, you know, put some things off promoting out there. CIA I always get the acronym C-I-E-H-F which is the british version of Human Factors in Ergonomic Society has put up some great infographics and videos in the last couple of months that are thought provoking and are widely shared. I reposted it, and I've gotten a lot of attention on my LinkedIn site for sharing that. So if we can get that content so it is something I will tell Barbara Shapiro, who is the new chair for that Digital Communications Committee. Perhaps that's something that they can take on. There is an Outreach Committee or Outreach Division. Again, this complex organizational structure, I can I will definitely put a bug in the ear of the individual who leads that. We hired a PR firm. I don't think that they would be that. But we did talk about the fact that we need a cadre of experts so that when that PR firm is asked to respond or think that there's something that Human Factor should respond to and get that out in the news cycle quickly. That we have the experts not on call. But basically that instead of them calling Carolyn Summer as the new president at midnight and her having to think off the top of her head who might be somebody to respond to that. They can go to a call sheet and go. Oh. Okay. They can talk to this person. And so that could be one of those responsibilities, is that there's a PR committee and not only are they experts on call for the Fewer organization, but they do have to respond to one post a month on Reddit or LinkedIn or Discord or you name the social media platform. Right. I do want to make one more comment here, which is you mentioned that HFCs, you got to be a member to present here, and membership is a large commitment for a lot of people, especially if they don't have support from their organization for professional dues or anything like that. Can you talk a little bit about maybe some recommendations for maybe reducing that membership fee or providing an easier outlet for folks to get involved? Yeah. No, it's a complex topic, and we did have recommendations around reducing the cost. So if you volunteered a certain number of hours for the Society, reducing your membership fee, I know that Farzan and Ron Boring, who are the chairs of the conference, have discussed, and we recommended that if you volunteer for the conference in some capacity, that a certain number of hours that you get a free conference attendance. We had a recommendation of, hey, since we're losing members, if people were able to get somebody to sign up for a membership or three people to sign up for membership, maybe they get a reduction in their membership fee. These were lower on our list of recommendations. We all voted, and they ended up falling, not at the bottom, but in the mid range of recommendations. We had higher ones, so I didn't push them too hard to the executive council, though there has been talk on the area. Finances are tricky, and there is work being done to look at what are the cost benefits of certain things in terms of if we reduce membership this much, or what does it take to be able to say, we can reduce membership? For those of you who may be in having troubles because of the layoffs that have happened, because of COVID various things? HFS does have a program, it's on the membership site where you can apply for a reduced membership fee for the year. So that does exist for folks. It's tricky. I will say one of the recommendations that we did put forward was a premium model for because unfortunately, HIV has a lot of amazing content, but it's behind the paywall. So to get to the journals, eid, even a lot of the stuff on the website webinars, you do have to pay. I think that Barb Shapiro and the Digital Communications Committee is going to definitely look into a model of what can we provide for free that will entice people to become more members or to attend the conference. And as we increase the number of people who attend the conference, increase the number of people who are members, the more we can get back to members. Yeah, it is another chicken and egg problem, right? How do you provide value for members? Well, how do you get more members to sign up to see that value? It's a big complex. That's the reason why we have task courses. Right? If there was one message that you would want to let everybody listening, watching live know about with respect to this task force, what's the one thing you'd want people to leave this conversation knowing? That is a good question. I was asking the EC after I presented the 41, what are the four things you want motions you want on the floor? And I was like, oh, I can't pick. And now you're asking me for one. They're all my children. I love them all. Yeah. I asked all the members of the task force to go through and rank the recommendations and stuff like this. And I did it first because I wanted and I had such a hard time of going and not labeling them all as priority one. I really do. If you have nostalgia for HFS, if you're a member now and are on the fence about continuing, then I'm asking you to put in a few hours a month into a volunteer activity, or if you can't do that, for whatever reason, I'm a busy mom. I live in Dublin. It's hard. I get it. Write emails to the Executive Council and tell them the things that you're struggling with or the things that you think HFCs should be doing in the world. It would be even better if you say, these are the things that I think should be done, and I'm willing to help because the way we get the society we want is by participating in that society as active members. And so I know that there are struggles and there are challenges associated with presenting at the conference as a practitioner, there's a lot of legalities. So volunteer to be on the conference committee and work with the conference organization staff to figure out and volunteers to figure out how do we create a system that meets that is more flexible for those in that situation. How do we create more webinars, how do we create more content that is going to change things? Chris Reed also has started an Industrial Industry Advisory Board committee and their goal is to get representatives from large corporations that have human factors and UX practitioners to be advising HF es in terms of and getting those organizations to contribute to HFS. Just as a large number of corporations contribute to Chai and to USDA in various ways. So help Chris, help Barb with the digital communications, write emails with ideas, say it's important and that's how it's going to get raised up. Well, thank you, Rebecca. It's been such a pleasure to have you on the show. And I'm super thrilled that you were able to sit down with me and talk about this task force even though you're not here in person. Really wish you could be. What would be one thing for you to tell people who are here in person or those who want to be in person? What is your favorite thing about being at HFDs in person? All of the hallway conversations are my favorite part. Go to the coaches with fellows, chat with all of the fellows, learn about them in their careers, ask them questions about what they do outside of human factors and form relationships and networking. That way they're all great people. Go to the annual business meeting and that is where you will see the executive council and the division chairs and you can push to get us and that's how you can start the relationship to get more involved as well. So those are two things I know. Okay. It's okay. We always do more than one thing in our one way. That's totally fine. Well, Rebecca, thank you so much for being on the show. One more question for you. Where can our listeners find you or sort of contact HFDs if they want to get involved with something like this? So I am on LinkedIn, I think I'm the only Rebecca, at least the only Rebecca where with UX and I'm on Twitter, but not as frequently. And then you can find a link, contact information for the executive council members on the HFS website. Excellent. Rebecca, thank you so much for being on the show.