Jared Spool

Episode 26
Brave UX

Making the Case for Increasing UX Maturity

In this episode of Brave UX, Jared Spool asks whether organisations can really afford the cost of bad UX, shares some practical methods for increasing design literacy and even does a magic trick!

Highlights include:

What is the UX tipping point and how do we get there?
How do we make a strong business case for investing in UX?
What is immersive exposure and why is it critical for design capability?
What is the magic daily question that you ask your UX design students?
What does a great industry ready UX graduate look like?

June 8, 202101:21:44

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Who is Jared Spool?

Jared is Co-CEO and Maker for Awesomeness at Center Centre, the user experience design school that he co-founded in 2012 and through which he is helping to create the next generation of industry-ready user experience designers.

In 1988, Jared founded User Interface Engineering (often referred to in UIE), a UX consultancy that for nearly 28 years conducted primary research, on how to create great user experiences through delightful products and services.

Jared is a regular blogger, media-commentator, and the author of the formative book, Web Site Usability: A Designer’s Guide. He is often referred to as one of the most effective and knowledgeable communicators on the subject of UX.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, and it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Jared Spool. Jared is Co-CEO and Maker of Awesomeness (and yes, that is his real job title) at Center Centre, the user experience design school that he co-founded in 2012. At Center Centre, Jared is helping to create the next generation of industry ready user experience designers through a wonder of a kind built from scratch two year curriculum. Winding back the clock a bit, in 1988, Jared founded User Interface Engineering, often referred to as UIE, a UX consultancy that for nearly 28 years conducted primary research on how to create great user experiences through delightful products and services.
In 2011, Jared received the internationally recognized Stevens Award cause of his quiet evangelism of usability and his wide ranging influence on how the software industry thought about making systems effective. Speaking at over 20 conferences a year, Jared has delivered keynote presentations for events like South by Southwest Interactive, the Usability Professionals Association, and An Event Apart. He was also the founder of the Annual User Interface Conference, which ran for 22 years from 1996 until 2018. Jared is a regular blogger, media commentator and the author of the formative book Website Usability and Design's Guide, which challenged many commonly held assumptions about design when it was published in 1998. He is also the co-author of Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work and User-centered Website Development: A Human Computer Interaction Approach. Often referred to as the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject of UX today, I'd say we're in for a great conversation. So without further delay, internet sensation and teen heartthrob, Jared Spool, welcome to the show.
Jared Spool:
Wow, I didn't know all that
Brendan Jarvis:
Well. It's all true. Apparently [laugh], and you did all of this,
Jared Spool:
You learned something I, I've always wondered what I won the Stevens Award for. They never told me
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. Well, I pulled that one from your Wikipedia bio and that was verbatim, so I'm assuming that that was the reason why I see. So Jared, it's great having you here. You've obviously got an immaculate career in UX, one of the leading thinkers on the subject. And I always like to start these conversations on a serious note. And I understand that something about you that not maybe many people know is that you are an amateur magician. Is this true?
Jared Spool:
Yes. But I wanna point out to your viewers that the difference between an amateur magician and a professional magician is that a professional magician has gotten paid [laugh]. And so I am not that good a magician. Anyone can be an amateur magician if they don't get paid
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. Well, this is true. Maybe you're above, above getting paid, puts it in another
Jared Spool:
League. Yeah, my son was a professional or is a professional magician. He's still my son and he's still a professional magician, [laugh]. And oh, he is for now. And he learned how to be a professional magician when he was a teenager. So he was actually too young to go to professional magician conferences by himself. So I would chaperone him and I would get to go to workshops and seminars and things. And I picked up a couple of tricks, which and illusions, which you can do if you pay somebody for them and can perform them adequately enough to not get paid for it. [laugh],
Brendan Jarvis:
Have you got any that are suitable for prerecorded podcasts?
Jared Spool:
[laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. Jared Spool. Round of applause.
Jared Spool:
Yo, this is one. This is what I performed for six year olds. I can just take this and it goes away. Of course I didn't do it on camera. Let me try it again. So
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh],
Jared Spool:
There we go.
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh] magic. Look at that. Jared's bull. Excellent. I love it. That's the first time that we've had a live magic trick on Brave UX. That's wonderful.
Jared Spool:
In the profession, they call them illusions and they're not tricks. They're illusions. Yes. Illusions are something illusion. Another profession does.
Brendan Jarvis:
I'm gonna have to fire my researcher for that, which in this case is myself. So maybe we should move on. I'm interested to know, you mentioned your son is a professional
Jared Spool:
Magician. Yeah. He's gotten paid
Brendan Jarvis:
And yeah, he's gotten paid. Was that the way in which you got introduced to magic or did you introduce him to Magic?
Jared Spool:
I introduced him to Magic but not because I knew anything about it. I was traveling a lot for work, going to various client gigs and I would go city to city and he was in his very early teens. And when I was traveling I would bring him some sort of gift, mostly to buy him off for the fact that I was away during important time. And in one city, I think Seattle, it was Seattle. No, it was Vegas. I was in Vegas and the hotel I was staying in had a magic shop. So I went to the Magic Shop. I was in New York, New York, the Vegas hotel. And I went to the magic shop there, [affirmative]. And I said, what do you have for a 12 year old who has never really tried anything? And they sold me an expensive thing and I brought it home and he loved it.
And then he lost it. And my next trip I went and got him another not as expensive thing and this time in Seattle and he loved that. And so I would just bring him home, various things from the magic stores cause it was like a win gift. That was something he appreciated. And then I was looking, going on a trip and I was looking up where there were magic stores on my next trip and realized that there was one here in Boston. I had never known that there was one here in Boston, so it was about 25 minutes away. So one Saturday we hopped in the car and we went and looked at the Magic store there and he was just completely enthralled by it. And behind the counter was a 16 year old. And the 16 year old showed him some illusions and stuff that they had and the expensive ones.
And I ended up buying one. And then said, by the way, every first Friday of every month we have this group that meets here that are all kids who are becoming professional magicians. So if you wanna, you can come to that. And that's when my son was hooked and we started going and he eventually became the president of, as part of the American Society of Magicians and the Youth Magic Society of Youth Magicians. It's called S ym. And he became the president of the chapter when he was 18 and went to Magic Camp for several years. And in fact, if you, there's a movie called Magic Camp that's a documentary about the camp that he went to and he stars in it. They follow four kids through their summer at Magic Camp and he's one of the kids. And you started it all and now he has. Yeah, I started Magician, which is basically [laugh] how I started him. I mean that's just how when you have kids, basically you start the engine by putting money into it.
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative]. [laugh]. Well it sounds like he's got a lot of a value out of that investment that you put into him.
Jared Spool:
Well, okay, so the other thing to clarify is being a professional magician for most professional magicians is sort of being a professional comedian in that you have to have a day job. So he's a very successful software engineer. [laugh], right?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Which no doubt it was. Seems like that might have been influenced by yourself as well. So
Jared Spool:
His mother was very talented software engineer. I think she had a lot to do with that.
Brendan Jarvis:
He in good parental hands then it sounds like. Yeah. So something else, Jared, that I noticed when I was having a little look at the things that you've been up to, you're something I was unclear about. Well hopefully not too much of a stalker, but it's all publicly available. But I sort of got this bit of confusion about this. The details weren't quite clear. It was either that you were responsible for the six keys above the arrow keys on modern keyboards or the design and location of the Arrow Keys themselves. Which one of those is true If either
Jared Spool:
I designed the six keys above the Arrow keys but I was on the team that worked on the Arrow Keys. So [affirmative], I sat in on them. The common keyboard that we have is all based on a keyboard that was created by a company that doesn't exist anymore, digital Equipment Corporation. It was the L K 2 0 1 keyboard. So if you Google that, you'll see it. And that's the keyboard I worked on. It was part of a series of failed personal computers that digital equipment created, which is one of the reasons why they don't exist anymore.
Brendan Jarvis:
And does that keyboard live on?
Jared Spool:
So I was walking, so I ended up in 9 20 15. I ended up working for a year in the Obama White House and one of my colleagues was the Chief Information Architecture, chief information Officer for the National Archives in Washington dc. And he arranged for us to go on a behind the scenes tour of the National Archives while I was there. And in the tour they have this exhibit or they had this exhibit on computer technology. And featured in that exhibit was the computer, computer and the keyboard that I helped design.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well that must have felt pretty
Jared Spool:
Good. It was pretty awesome to say that my work was in the National Archives.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now I have something to ask you. And how do you feel about what Apple did here with the
Jared Spool:
That's a lovely keyboard. It doesn't have those six keys.
Brendan Jarvis:
No, it doesn't, does it? No,
Jared Spool:
No, no. The six keys are sort of anachronistic. They were designed in 1982 before we had mice. So they were designed in a character world when screens didn't have graphics but were only characters. And you used the arrow keys to navigate and you needed to signal that you wanted to delete something or insert something into the text or you wanted to move more than just a line up or a line down. So page up and page down became interesting and going to the beginning and the end. So we designed these keys when you did everything on a keyboard. And I mean there was no notion of keyboard shortcuts because that was the only way you could manipulate anything. And so they served a purpose then they don't serve that purpose. Now there were a couple other keys on that keyboard that did not make it into other keyboards.
There was a help key. So instead of using F1 for help, there was a big wide key that was above the six keys that was labeled help. And then there was another key called the doy. And the DOY was supposed to be a command completion key. So you weren't using return. The idea was that return would literally be a line return. It would bring you back to the beginning of the line. So all these text type in boxes where you accidentally hit return and it sends your message. And what you really wanted was to keep typing but just put in a paragraph break. We were trying to solve that problem by having this separate key that you would always use to send the message the due key and the return key would always behave exactly the same way. It would just go to a new line and let you type another line of text. But that went by the wayside in the evolution of PCs. And so now we accidentally send messages to people
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. I know. And then when you have to unsend them, it tells them that you've uncentered and then it creates even more
Jared Spool:
Awkwardness. Right, right. Yeah. Well unsend something is in a communications world is an odd structure. This idea that you can send a message and then unsend it. It's like let the smoke out of the fire. But you can recall it.
Brendan Jarvis:
Let's shift gears Jared and have a chat about something that I know that you are quite professionally passionate about and it's something that you've spoke extensively on puppies, which is how to build puppies. Well, we could talk about puppies. I was thinking more about the design capability of organizations and how we like, oh yeah, back to enhance that [laugh]. What is the UX tipping point and how do we help companies to get there?
Jared Spool:
The UX tipping point is that moment in an organization when the user experience is seen as important, if not more important than whether something technically works and whether it meets the business requirements. So [affirmative] this idea and a lot of organizations, if something doesn't technically work, they won't ship it. But if it technically works but it doesn't meet the business requirements, they still won't ship it. But if it technically works and it meets the business requirements but it's not designed well or even close to, well they'll ship it anyways and they'll just say, well, we'll fix it in the next release, which for many years I think was Microsoft's tagline.
But the UX tipping point is when an organization finally says, no, no, no, we're not gonna ship something that isn't well designed against our brand, that's against what we stand for. That's against everything we do. So we're only going to ship things that are well designed and that's the tipping point. When we get the organization to move that point, then that changes the game across the board. Cuz we no longer have to fight for who we are and what we do. We are now in this place where we are capable of making sure now to get to that moment we have to do a damn good job [affirmative] because the company doesn't not shipping something. So to be, it has to be a rare occasion that happens and we have to have our, we in America say we have to have our ducks in a row, which I don't understand because if you see ducks, they walk in a line in column, not in a row. A row would be this head on duck brigade. That would just be scary.
Brendan Jarvis:
And clearly they didn't know about spreadsheets, whoever came up with that.
Jared Spool:
Exactly, exactly. It doesn't make any sense to me. I don't understand why we talk about ducks in a row though. I just did talk about ducks in a row.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well if we can suspend our disbelief about the poor structure of that saying for a moment, how do we get our ducks in a row if they're not in a row
Jared Spool:
Already? I think you just pick them up and you wind them up
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. I see how this conversation's going to be.
Jared Spool:
It's a lot of work. It's a big hairy, audacious goal to get to this idea that the organization understands it. We have to refine our techniques, we have to up our skills, we have to get the people we work with to be more skilled. We have to be able to make sure they understand why we do what we do. [affirmative] it's not impossible, but in many cases you have to change the hiring practices in the organization. You have to change a lot of elements about the culture. So there we're talking years
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative] and I know that you have a maturity model that you are quite fond of. And I also remember listening to a talk you gave in 2019 at CSS Day. And I just wanna quote you now cause I believe it's relevant to what we've just been talking about. You
Jared Spool:
Should be sitting over here more about this stuff than I do.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well I'm always happy to come on over when I'm vaccinated. I'll jump on over and we'll have this conversation in person.
Jared Spool:
I should be interviewing you.
Brendan Jarvis:
Sit [laugh] got the easy job, you've got your content out there. I
Jared Spool:
Research you keep telling me what I've done. It's just amazing getting pretty impressed here.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well I know this isn't cuz I did actually listen to you say it. You said, our job as design leaders is to get people to level up to get the entire team, particularly the least mature influencer. If we can get them to be fluent, we can do many, many more things. So my question is, how do you help people to achieve that fluency to achieve higher levels of capability as a designer in an organization where that doesn't necessarily exist without coming across a know it all asshole?
Jared Spool:
Well, they're not mutually exclusive. You can do both. You can get them more mature and come across as a know-it-all asshole
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh].
Jared Spool:
But it's probably ideal to avoid the asshole thing. Part of what we do as leaders is help those around us understand why we're doing what we're doing. This is true of pretty much any type of leadership. Mean if you are running a restaurant and you want to raise up the quality of the food, you have to andrate people into trying to do that. But that's not gonna get you there because if they don't know how to do it now they're not going to just do it. So you have to model the behavior, you have to show how it works. You then have to go through and diligently remove any sort of friction or obstacles that are happening and over time. And part of it is you have to hire the right people. You have to find mm-hmm [affirmative] folks who are capable of growing their capabilities.
And this is key mean in most organizations today. So much of design work, so much of UX work is basically compensating for the fact that the people we work with have virtually no skills or knowledge in this area. And that's our fault. I mean we let that happen and we don't do much to fix it but it, it's actually quite important if we start to piece by piece get people to realize why we do what we do and to give them basic skills to be able to do some of it. And they don't need to be the world's best designer, but chances are we're not the world's best designer. And so we just need them to be able to do the work. So if we understand what the work is and we understand what's necessary to get the work done, we can piece by piece grow it out and people will learn it and they'll pick it up. And if we focus directly on the way that the work is done over time the people around us get better at things.
Once you get there, it takes less work to, for instance, show them something that's a better design than what they came up with themselves. And then if you can help them get to that better design on their own by just piecemeal, by piecemeal, showing them what you did to get there, they can start to get there some of the time and then they start to get there more of the time and then they start to get there all the time. And then if they're getting there all the time, there's that big list of things that we never get to because we spend our time drawing wire frames in 20 different states because we can't trust the developers to code them upright. We don't have to do that anymore. That frees us up and we can go work on that big list of things that nobody's getting to. What is it the users really need and what is it that will make us competitive in the marketplace and what is it that will be truly innovative? And that once we get to that moment, everything changes.
Brendan Jarvis:
And this is the tipping point that you were speaking of right before getting to that point. I've also heard you talk about design process is often a lot of emphasis placed on design process. How we do design to try and help increase that capability within organizations. And I get that, I understand why as designers we want to have some process and some structure and some formality to that. But you said, and I'm gonna quote you now, design processes don't work because they can't possibly operate the same every time because there are too many conditions that can happen. So if design process isn't the silver bullet to build design capability and organi in an organization, what are some more effective or what is a more effective way of increasing that capability in an organization that is at that very basic level of maturity?
Jared Spool:
If you need to hire a plumber, you don't ask the plumber, what's your process? Now I'm not sure what a plumber would say, right? Well we used to work in a waterfall method, but now we use an object oriented approach where we just treat the every drip as its own object and we just send it a message that says fix itself. The idea that we as designers are arrogant enough to suggest that we always do everything the same way is ridiculous. We don't do things the same way. Every project needs to be needs situationally aware. And we don't do two projects in a row the same way because there are different things that need to be done. There are different people involved, there's different contexts that the project lives in. And you know, look at a football field and a football pitch. And when the teams run into the football pit pitch, they don't come with this giant gant chart that has every player in a swim line and the coach doesn't say, Harold, at two minutes and 24 seconds, I need you to score because that's when you scored in the last game.
And that would be perfect In this game, [laugh], we don't have this all planned out and this idea that we somehow have a process that implies that there's one way to do this. And the thing that abuses me the most is when we ask job candidates what their process is as if we're gonna let them use it. Because if their process is the same as ours, well that's great. If it's different than ours, are we just not gonna give them the job because they have the wrong process? Or are we gonna tell them to use our process? At which point why do we care what their process is? What
Brendan Jarvis:
Itch are we trying to scratch with that question? What is it that we're trying to get from a question like that?
Jared Spool:
It's a stupid question. It's a question that people ask when they don't know how to actually assess somebody's skills. Because it's a question that doesn't actually tell you. Now if you said to a candidate walk me through the activities and the challenges from your last project, out of that would emerge a process you'd see whether they did any research, you'd see whether they iterated, you'd see whether they had multiple ideas and then refined them down to one. Or if they just took the first idea that came from them and ran with it, and that's all fine. But if you ask them to describe another project that they're proud of, you'll get a different process. Patterns will emerge if we keep that up and that will tell us something about the candidate and we can ask a question, how come none of these projects involve research?
How come none of these projects consider multiple versions? And we can find out where they're at with that. But to have them tell us their process A is a waste of energy. And so the process is the wrong way to deal with it. And that's not how the footballers do it. The way the footballers do it is they run into the field. Well from Australia you have Ossie rules where they run to feel with very tight shorts. My wife very much enjoyed Ossie rolls football anyway, we saw it in the cricket grounds in Melbourne and [affirmative].
We had absolutely no idea. So we were sitting up in the nosebleed section of the cricket grounds looking at this game. It was with Hollywood Collingwood. But anyways we are sitting there trying to reverse engineer this game and it's pretty clear that the players come onto the field and they're not coming with a plan as to exactly how they're gonna play this. They're constantly evaluating the situation and then adapting that and falling into these different templates and plays that they're using to pull off their win. And it's that process of looking at the situation and saying what's the right next thing to do? And knowing what the capabilities and tools are and knowing where you're trying to get and adapting to the situation that gets us our success. So we don't want one path that is the path we always use. We want to be adaptive to our situation and be able to handle.
So are working with people who understand what we're trying to do. Are we working with people who understand what we're trying to do are working with people who've never worked with before and we don't know what they know. Right? In each of those situations, we're gonna change things up. Are we in a place where the eyes of the organization are on us because this is the most important project And the moment you signal that things aren't going well, everyone's gonna be hovering, are we working in obscurity because the rest of the organization has no clue what we work on and we can pretty much get away with anything right now and we have to change how we work based on these things. And none of those things are ever talked about in design school. None of those things are talked about amongst designers in terms of how do you handle these situations. But these are the things that determine what we do next. Not some sort of notion of, well we always start with personas
Brendan Jarvis:
And just building on this analogy that you've given with the sports team. And when they run out there onto the pitch, they have these plays in mind, but they're not prescripted as an again chart. So they emerge based on what's in front of them. Thinking about the prep that those sports teams put in before they get out there, they spend a lot of time reviewing footage of their previous games and also footage of the other team so they get a sense of what they're in for and they can think about how they might respond if they encounter a similar
Jared Spool:
Situation. We have a name for all that
Brendan Jarvis:
I know one
Jared Spool:
Of, we call it research.
Brendan Jarvis:
And in particular, I know you are quite in favor at least you've spoken about a play called immersive exposure. What is immersive exposure and why is that so critical to building design capability?
Jared Spool:
Immersive exposure is fairly simple. The amount of time that everybody who is making and influencing decisions about what the user experience will be like spends with users, actually watching them do the things they're trying to do with our product or service. If we're going to build something for doctors to use, how much time do we spend actually watching doctors, doctor? And if we don't spend any time, we're just guessing what a doctor needs [laugh], right? Or we have some subject matter expert who might have been a doctor once and they're just relying what they needed once. But not helping us with any variations on that because we're just gonna assume that all doctors are identical to one who worked five years ago. And so [affirmative] immersive exposure is we actually spend significant amount of time with our users actually seeing what they do and eventually seeing what they do with our product and looking for opportunities to change that up and to see if we change the product, do they do different things? And making decisions about what are the behaviors that we want to see and how will we know when we've gotten the behaviors we want.
Brendan Jarvis:
And what do you say to the people that look at that type of research, that immersive exposure, whether it's usability testing or contextual inquiry and they say, how do we quantify the impact of that time and investment that we are spending? How do we know for certain that all this effort is going to result in some sort of return on investment back into the business and to the product that we're trying to deliver to customers?
Jared Spool:
One of the things that we should talk more about in our field is the fact that when we let poor design out the door, it costs the organization money it costs the organization money, having demand support calls, it costs the organization money, having to throw in training with the product. It costs the organization money to build capabilities that nobody ends up using. Or to have the developers redo those capabilities multiple times. It costs the organization money when they lose sales to a competitor who figured out how to deliver the same capabilities and in some cases less capability but with a much better to use, easier to use interface. All those things cost the organization money. So it's the return on investment isn't about the money that the new investment we'd have to make to do this work. It's about taking investment that we're already making in poor design and redirecting it to better design. And so we're just shifting funds around the funds are already being spent and chances are they're being spent on things that are ongoing accumulations of expenses, right? Support isn't a one time cost, it's an ongoing cost. Training isn't a one time cost, it's an ongoing cost loss. Sales are ongoing opportunity losses. So those costs will continue if we do nothing, it's only if we do something that they stop. So this is really a no brainer.
Brendan Jarvis:
So it sounds like you're advocating for a shift in the conversation towards design as helping to reduce drag on the organization so that the organization can deliver better value more quickly with less cost to support.
Jared Spool:
Well that's the entryway. That's how you deal with the conversation of this seems like a lot of work that's really expensive what we gonna do. It's like, yes it is but it's actually more expensive to do what we keep doing. And not only is it more expensive to do what we keep doing, but if you're suggesting that putting out a better quality product is not worth doing because it's too expensive, then I have all sorts of ways we can cut costs, we can fire the QA department because they're just a cost that's very expensive. And we obviously have decided that quality is not that important and we could hire less talented developers, they're very expensive. Let's get people who are half the price, who have half the capability. We could probably get something shipped really fast that doesn't work and save a ton of money. And so once we decide that well some quality is worth it, where do we draw that line? And if the whole measure of quality is it has to be good enough for the customer, have we really figured out what that definition of good enough for the customer is? Particularly in a competitive landscape where someone else can make that customer happy by just copying the capabilities that we innovated but do doing it in a package that's easier to use.
Brendan Jarvis:
So let's pick up on that thread then. So with a lot of technology emerging in the last couple of decades and also new business models forming around how to deploy that technology, a lot of industries have been disrupted, A lot of well established businesses have been disrupted, they've been exposed to competition that they never saw coming. And it seems to me at least that a lot of that has been just the new competitor meeting, the basic expectations you've just spoken about in a better way than the incumbent. Well what can organizations that are incumbents, so I'm thinking about organizations and industries that are slow to respond because they're regulated or they have higher risks. So this could be banking, it could be insurance. Those sort of tried and true, been around forever industries. How can they do a better job of getting their shit together, so to speak more effectively to these competitive threats?
Jared Spool:
So one of the things I learned not too long ago was that the regulations that banking is under are written by banks [laugh], right? They produce a set of regulations, they produce these, the lobbyist for the banks which are made up of banks actually supply the regulations to government cuz government itself doesn't have the expertise to meet these things. And it turns out that most regulations actually allow for more competitive behavior particularly around user experience. There's nothing I have yet to see a regulation that says you must have a worst user experience. Now to be fair, there are regulations that say things like you have to make sure that your customers understand there's risk. But what the bank does is it translates that regulation into policy. An internal banking policy that says we're gonna pop up this ugly terms and conditions dialogue box at the top of every screen to make sure that you press a button that says you've read it, whether you've read it or not, we're not gonna double check it, but if you say you've read it, that's good enough for us.
And therefore you acknowledge that there's risk. And so if something goes wrong, you can't come after us and you can't complain to the government that we somehow let you take a risk. And those policies are poor user experiences, but they are not the policies that are mandated by regulation. Those are an implementation. There are other ways that we can do that. So every website, because of a law known as gdpr, almost every website in the world now pops up this ugly little box that says, do you accept cookies? And of course people press this box without knowing what this means. If you go to the Guardian, then British Newspaper [affirmative], they pop up a different box. They pop up a box that says please don't sell my personal information.
And that for those users who care about those things, is actually a much better user experience. They would much rather be able to just say, yeah, don't let me do this. Apple has gone a step farther and has made the default in their new operating system for the phones to not share personal information. You have to turn it on, not opt out. And all of those are UX changes. Absolutely. None of them are specified in GDPR or any of the equivalent laws. All of those allow for a better user experience. So this is that case where people are paying attention to what the business needs. It has to be in compliance and they're paying attention to whether it technically works, but they're not paying attention to the design and they don't realize that that design is slowly but sure surely eroding the health of the relationship they have with their customers and their users.
And the moment that someone comes up with an alternative and basically defaults the other way and says, you know what? We're just never going to sell your information. You can trust us on that. We're just gonna say that point blank. There's nothing in our system. We will repeat it, but you don't have to click on anything cuz we're just not going to do it cuz it's not worth it to us to piss you off that way. How many people will they get just for that purpose? How many people will say, you know what? If they're going to do that and none of their competitors will I spend my attention with them, I will spend my money with them. And so this argument that we're in a regulated and therefore we have to have an awful user experience, I that's complete crap. That's just laziness.
Brendan Jarvis:
And yeah, there's a bit of that. I see that does exist. But I also see that there is quite a strong willingness to change. But often the people that are in the large organizations that are a bit more risk averse, they're struggling with the machinery of the bureaucracy that seems to get in the way. Sure, what are some of
Jared Spool:
Things? But I worked in the federal government, we were able to do things in the federal government. We had a something, we trained all the new people who joined the program. I was in the US Digital Service and everybody we trained, we taught them a couple of things. And one of the things we taught them was to ask the question when somebody said, well that's the way we have to do it to ask the question, can you show me the law or the regulation that says that we have to do it exactly this way? Cause I'd like to read that. And this wasn't a mean or passive aggressive sentence. This was no, literally I would like to read the rules. If I'm gonna coach a football team, I need to read the rule book. I need to understand what we're allowed to do, what we're not allowed to do.
And it's my job as coach to get us right up to that line of what we're allowed to do and not cross into what we're not allowed to do, but to use the entire landscape in what we are allowed to do, space to its fullest. That's my responsibility to the team. So we would teach folks that they need to learn that. And you'd be surprised how often the people who say, well that's the way we have to do it. Cause that's be, well that's the way we've always done it, but it's not because that's the way it has to be done. And a lot of these things has to do with the fact that those poor people on the regulatory side, the compliance people are completely overworked. And so what they like to do when they're overworked is they like to find a solution that they know will get through the system.
We've gotten it through, we've gotten it through a dozen times. If they flag us this time, we'll say, but what about the other dozen times you let us go? And we know it works. So we have precedent. And that's often what they're basing things on is, well this path always works from their perspective, they're walking through a minefield and this is the path that never explodes. And if we take any other path, it might be safe, but it could explode and I'm busy and I'm overworked and I don't have time to deal with your explosion. So we're just gonna take the path that always works and that's where they're at. So then we need to find out why are they overworked? Why do they not have the resources they need? And this becomes a UX problem that the compliance people don't have the resources they need to actually allow us to explore the other paths through the minefield and to do it safely. And that's the trick. Once you have that realization that you need to help them get more resources so that you can have the freedom to explore the other paths, everything opens up. You also need tools to be able to navigate the minefield you need mine detectors, all sorts of things, but we can get those things.
Brendan Jarvis:
And why was President Barack Obama so interested in developing the digital service and having government improve user experience? Cause I understand you were working, I think it was the office of the president.
Jared Spool:
Yeah, yeah. I was in the executive office of
Brendan Jarvis:
The president senior level.
Jared Spool:
My boss's boss was Barry. That's what we called him. Not to his face. You called him to president, Mr. President to his face [laugh].
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Barry, if you're listening to this, I do apologize,
Jared Spool:
[laugh],
Brendan Jarvis:
Why
Jared Spool:
Michelle calls him
Brendan Jarvis:
President. Yeah. Well I think we're probably not on that much of a familiar term with him, but why was President Obama so keen on getting user experience right in the public service?
Jared Spool:
Because he completely screwed it up
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]
Jared Spool:
There. So here in the United States one of our more uncivilized practices, other than allowing everyone to have guns and kill each other, [laugh] is to not give people proper healthcare. The people who wear pro-life badges are against giving people healthcare. I don't understand how that works, but that's how it tends to play out. And
Brendan Jarvis:
That's the nature of hypocrisy though, isn't it?
Jared Spool:
Yes, yes, yes, yes. So we have a strong American culture of hypocrisy. So we don't have single payer healthcare where everybody gets the same plan, no matter whether they're working or not. All your healthcare comes through an employer. And this is completely unfair to people who don't have employment. And so in an attempt to get both sides to agree on something, we managed to pass a law that became known as Obamacare, but in fact was based on there, there's a Republican called MIT Romney who was the governor of Massachusetts, and he was the one who came up with it. So it was originally a Republican plan but the Democrats got it through federal government. And part of Obamacare was this website where you would sign up and all the health insurance businesses would basically create this marketplace. So think eBay for health insurance. And the idea was you would go and you'd look at plans and you'd pick the one that was best for you.
And the first day it opened up, the website just crushed itself under its own way, [laugh] to create a new account. Once you entered all your information and you pressed create my account, it took eight minutes to come back and say, okay, your account was created. And of course people thought it had crashed, so they started over and it just made it worse. And so it was a complete disaster in its first launch. And the president with the help of his chief technical officer went off and found a small team of about 13 or so tech people to come in and basically redesign the whole thing from start to finish. And they did it in six weeks. The previous thing took a year, it involved 300 different government contractors, probably a thousand people cost millions of dollars to build. And this team of 13 people just built it from the ground up.
And of course none of the 300 organizations worked with each other to build it. So when they first turned it on, it just didn't work. So this team built it, rebuilt, it got running in six weeks. Got it. And within the first two weeks it had signed 10 million people up or something crazy like that. So the minute he saw that that was capable, that could be done I that we should have that because another part of government that has to do with our elected representatives has a division called the government oversight Office a government accounting office, government accounting office. And the government accounting office every year publishes a report of the top 30 tech projects that are likely to fail this year. And they measure a top by how much money has been spent so far. And so these are tech projects that are often in the hundreds of millions of dollars that are on the verge of failure for the same reasons that healthcare.gov was. And he's like, I need a team of people who just basically go from project to project and just help them get back on track. And so that's what we were hired to do. And so our job was to create a better citizen experience.
Brendan Jarvis:
And you've highlighted in that example with healthcare of what you were talking about earlier, which was that quite real cost of getting design wrong. And in that case it sounded like it was a horrendously high price, both for a political price to be paid, but also for the citizens. It was a high cost to endure not being able to get through that application process and register yourself for Obamacare.
Jared Spool:
Yeah, exactly. It was expensive all around [affirmative]. And this was an opportunity to do fix that. And the digital service is still there. The team is doing fantastic work. I was just there for a year. They're doing fantastic work. They have become a sort of model of how tech can work in government and are being emulated all over the world, including Australia, which has a fantastic digital service.
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative], [affirmative]. Jared, let's shift gears and talk about something that we touched on earlier, which was the work that you've been doing at Center Centre creating the next generation of user experience designers. You spoke briefly about hiring practices and better questions that can be asked, and the ways in which we can better understand the talent that we're looking to assess to join our organizations. What does an industry ready UX graduate look like? A great one, and what are the ways in which industry can assess whether the people they're looking at are great talent to hire?
Jared Spool:
So we set ourselves a simple to say, but not simple to do goal, which is when someone graduates from our program, it's a two year program. And when they graduate from our program and they get their first job, they are ready to do production quality work on the very first day
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative].
Jared Spool:
And we got there because we did a tremendous amount of research with hiring managers, asking them about hiring folks in particular hiring folks right out of school programs. And what we found was that the hiring managers kept telling us that the thing that frustrated the most was that these folks went through all this program and then they show up and they aren't trained, they can't work, they don't know how to do the things. And it was because the skills that the schools were teaching were sort of textbook theory, but not actual work. And they didn't have the flexibility to adapt to a different way of approaching a similar problem. And so we started looking at, well, what would it take to get someone who on their first day of work actually could do the job? And that's where we came up with this idea of industry ready and we started to look and say, okay, what do you need these people to accomplish in their first year?
And what are you willing to train them on? Because there are some things they're gonna have to train them on. They're gonna have to train them on some specifics of the product or what the actual need is. Maybe who the users are. They're gonna need to train them on how the organization works, but should they be training them on basic craft? Should they be training them on using the tools? Should they be training them on being able to adapt to situations? So we focused our program on teaching folks how to assess the environment they just ended up in and look at the situation around them and say, okay, I know what to do next. I know how to navigate this, you know, want me to do user research. I know what questions to ask and I know how to do this. And we did it by basically taking a program where two thirds of the time for that two year period, so we have 96 weeks. So basically 67 weeks out of the two years, the students are in essence doing project work. They are working on specific projects and they work on multiple projects. So they'll work with, and these are real company supplied projects. They're not little toy things. We made up [affirmative]. They are a project that if the students do a good job, we'll get put into production.
So there's, there's the finishing details, there's the research, there's understanding how to spin up a project, understanding how to wrap it up and get all the details done. These are all things that not only do we teach them, but they practice multiple times throughout their two years. They do six, 10 week projects. And that gives them a fair amount of experience of variations on themes because across those six projects, user research won't be done the same way twice across those six projects. The deliverables won't be the same deliverables twice across those six projects, the students won't have the same configuration of team. So they'll have to adapt to new team members and how those team members interact together, [affirmative]. And so it's those types of things that help us understand how to make sure that they have all the skills necessary to be able to do the projects, which then gets them the skills necessary to take on the new jobs.
Brendan Jarvis:
I mean, those projects, no doubt, will be hugely valuable. And I also understand that there is a daily practice that you have with the students, and it won't be unfamiliar to a lot of us in design, which is the daily standup. But I understand that other than asking the basic standup questions that we would all know, what did you do yesterday? What are you focused on today? Have you got anything that you need a hand with to remove an obstacle from your way? You ask another question, a magic question. What is that other question that you have your students answer at your daily standups?
Jared Spool:
We ask them what have you learned since the last standup and what's the most important thing you've learned and how will that change the way you behave in the future?
Brendan Jarvis:
Why is that so important? And
Jared Spool:
Well, it creates this culture of continuous learning [affirmative], it sends this message that we as an organization are not about you showing up and being using your superpowers and then weaving. We are there for you to actually keep learning. You need to learn and then keep learning. And, and the thing is that everybody participates in this stand up. So I participate in it and my co-founder Leslie Jensen, Inman participates, and when the people who run the program are saying something that they didn't know the day before that they just learned and sharing that sends this message that everybody can constantly be learning and that we don't have to be ashamed of not knowing something. So much of the time we have it sort of beaten into our head that if we look like we don't know what we're doing, they're gonna fire us. They're gonna get rid of us, they're, they're not gonna respect us [affirmative]. But having a culture of continuous learning means that every day you have to come to the table with something that you didn't know before. So by definition yesterday you didn't know this. You didn't know what you were doing, you didn't know why you were doing it. You learned that in the last 24 hours, some aspect of what you're doing [affirmative]. And when you do that every day and you celebrate what people are learning more than what people already knew how to do, [affirmative], it changes the way people approach new things. [affirmative],
Brendan Jarvis:
I think this is a huge point and culture changes in small ways in such a small but important practice. Asking those questions every day is one way in which organizations can change their culture to be more receptive to learning and for their people to be less fearful of getting things wrong. Our traditional education system is really set up not to encourage us to be seen, to be wrong. And I think that leads to a lot of wasted talent and a lot of wasted time and effort.
Jared Spool:
That's exactly right. When we set up the school, there are no tests. You never take a test in order to pass, you have to demonstrate that you can do something there. There's a list of things that you have to do. We call them competencies, and you have to demonstrate that you did it. We don't care how long it takes you to learn how to do it. You just have to learn how to do it. And so you can try it on your first try or you can do it on your hundredth try. As soon as you do it, you do it. And then you can say, yeah, I did that. And the list of competencies was derived from the hiring managers we talked to of the things they want people they want people to be able to do. So not only can you say, well, I know how to do that. You can actually point to the projects that you worked on where you did it because we had you document that. So basically every time you pass a course, you are creating your resume and you're creating your resume for something that the people who are gonna look to hire you want you to be able to do. And this creates this virtuous cycle of making sure that the people we graduate actually can do the things that we said they could do.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, it's hugely important. Jared, I'm just being mindful of time and I realize that we're at time. I have a couple of final questions for you. One of which I'm hoping to ask to help all of those UX recent graduates or students that may be studying UX at the moment and having an eye towards the job market. And obviously we're in an interesting economic predicament currently with Covid 19 ravaging, the global economy. Are you up for a scenario based question?
Jared Spool:
Sure.
Brendan Jarvis:
Great. All right. So this is for all you UX graduates out there, but a wisdom from Jared
Jared Spool:
Hope, I hope I get
Brendan Jarvis:
It right. [laugh], there are no right or wrong answers, Jared.
Jared Spool:
Okay. Just answers will laugh at once. I leave the
Brendan Jarvis:
Room. [laugh]. All right, here's the scenario. You're a recent UX graduate, you've learned some great skills during your studies and you're excited to apply them in the real world, but after applying for over 20 positions, you still haven't landed an interview. Self-doubt is creeping in and you're beginning to question your abilities. What do you need to consider doing differently?
Jared Spool:
Wow. Yeah. This is my life in that I get this question at least once a week from people. It's hard right now. One of the things is that the market's compressed a little because of the pandemic, because of the lockdown, because the economic strife that came with the lockdown organizations until very recently have really held back on hiring [affirmative]. So they're just not hiring the job. Markets have been down across the globe. And so that's one problem. And then on top of that, the ones that are hiring they, they're behind on projects. So they tend to be looking for more experienced people and they can look for more experienced people because of the economic downturn. There's a bunch of experienced people who are looking for new work and are on the market. So they're filling their positions with experienced people. So this means that people who are lighter on their experience, who just haven't had a chance to prove themselves, are not getting the opportunities that they were getting a year and a half ago, two years ago, when the market was growing and all the experienced people who were any good were well situated in where they were.
And companies were saying, well, okay, if we can't get experienced people, let's get inexperienced people [affirmative]. And it makes sense that companies want experienced people. I mean, if you're gonna hire a plumber because your toilet is leaking badly you're gonna want one who's fixed that toilet before. You don't want someone who's like, well, it's my first day on the job, let me see what I can figure out. So you'll only settle for someone less experienced if you have all the experienced people you can have. And there just aren't any more people on the market. And someone who is less experienced really wants to go someplace where they can continue to learn. They need to see their first job as a continuation of their education, not as a distinct different thing. It's like, well, I was done learning on graduation day and now I don't need to learn anything.
I'm just gonna go do, and that's not how it works, [affirmative]. And so you wanna go someplace that can take you in and can continue your education. So it's a partnership. And right now organizations are so stressed because they put everything on hold for almost a year that they don't have room to be training junior people. So the first thing to realize is all those applications and no interviews is not your fault, [affirmative]. It has nothing to do with you. It has to do with an economy right now that is in a difficult spot and it's gonna work itself out it. I don't know how long it's gonna take to work itself out, but it's going to work itself out because if the last year has taught us anything, it's only that design is even more important, not less important. We've seen issue after issue after issue where people got left behind, where things failed us, where things didn't work because we didn't think through the design implications of all the things [affirmative].
So that's only the gonna grow. So it's just a matter of time. So some amount of this. The watch word is patience. You just have to be patient. But that doesn't help people who graduated with a plan to go get a job and they need the money and they need the work, and they want the experience. It's not gonna help them that way. But what could help them is to realize that the hiring managers who are open to hiring folks with less experience are way more interested in what you and how you learn and how you've learned what you learn than they are in what you can do today. Because the odds are whatever you're going to do for them, you don't know how to do [affirmative]. I mean, maybe you know how to run a usability test and maybe you know how to create a wire frame and maybe how to do the visual design of an app, but that's only a part of what you're going to need to do.
You're gonna need to figure out who are the users and what do they need and how does the application work, and how do you connect things to the back end and what things can't you do because of regulation and compliance issues. And you're gonna need to learn all this stuff that there's no way you learned it in school. Our students didn't learn it in school. You probably didn't either [affirmative]. And so you're gonna need to learn that stuff. So how do you show a hiring manager and the hiring team, all the people you interview with, how do you show them how well you learn things? How do you show them that when you started your program, these were all the things you didn't know and when you ended the program, these were all the things you knew [affirmative], and what was the path to getting to that and how does that continue?
What's the vector of growth? How do you continue growing and how does that vector of growth land in the middle of what someone needs you to do? That's what the a smart hiring manager is looking for. Now, caveat, not all hiring managers are smart. Some of them are actually not smart, and they will ask you things like what is your design process and how would you design an elevator control panel for a building that has 5,000 floors? And if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? These are all real interview questions. Those are questions that are asked by hiring managers that don't know how to hire [affirmative], but a hiring manager who knows how to hire those people are going to really dive in and ask you questions. Tell me about the project that you worked on that you're most proud of, and then ask you a thousand questions about that project and really dive into how you tackled it and what you need to surface is how you learned all the things that you needed to do that project. [affirmative],
What did you learn during the project? What did you learn in order to do the project that you didn't know when you started school? What were the things that were most challenging about the project that you had to figure out in the process? Those are the gold questions. Those are the questions where when a hiring manager hears that you have, you ran into this big complicated challenge and you were able to figure it out. Maybe you took six tries to figure it out, but each time you learned something that didn't work until you learned something that did, that's what they wanna know because they're imagining you running into some challenge in their job and they wanna see how you bullied through that challenge and how you made it happen. That's what they wanna know. So if you wanna give yourself an advantage over other people who are just saying, I know how to make personas and create wire frames and do usability tests, don't talk about that, that everybody knows that stuff. That's that. Those are entry stakes, [affirmative]. That's not what anybody cares about.
Brendan Jarvis:
It sounds like what you are saying is that the emphasis should be on the story of the learning and telling that story as opposed to the outputs from your studies, your hero's journey through education and what that
Jared Spool:
Exactly right, [affirmative]. Exactly right. You came up with this design, how did you learn that was the right design to come up with [affirmative]?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, that's a really important point, Jared. And my final question, which this is related to is thinking about the state of the economy, the state of the design industry at the moment, what is your greatest hope for the emerging generation of designers in the coming years?
Jared Spool:
I think my greatest hope, I mean, there are a couple things. One is, okay, I have multiple greatest hopes.
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh] allowed. That's all right.
Jared Spool:
One of my multiple greatest hopes is that we focus on understanding and eliminating all the sources of bad design in the world. At this point, we know enough about design to understand that no design should be poor, no error message shouldn't make sense. No user interface shouldn't be poorly designed, no task flow should be poor, no compatibility issues with other systems should be poorly designed. We understand how to do all these things and we understand how to do them well. And there's enough examples of when this is done really well, that nothing should be poorly designed anymore. So we need to figure out why things are being poorly designed and we need to work with that. So that's the first thing. And then the second piece of it is that we need to start looking at how we eliminate inequity in our systems. Right now there is so much of technology in particular, which is aimed at the privileged and doesn't serve the underprivileged.
We felt this in the United States dramatically when schools shut down. [affirmative] and kids from privileged families had no trouble making sure that everybody had a laptop and they could all be on Zoom and they could all go to their Zoom classroom at the same time. But so many people lived in places where they did not have bandwidth to be able to connect. They did not have the technology at home. Maybe they had one tablet to be shared across four children who had to somehow go to school simultaneously with a working single working parent who was also trying to work at the same time, potentially remotely. But in many cases, they were an essential worker and they couldn't be at home. [affirmative], we failed miserably, we were challenged and we failed. We left so many kids behind. And where is the design community talking about that? And so we need to be focused on, if we do a great job on this product, who gets harmed?
Brendan Jarvis:
Those big ethical questions.
Jared Spool:
We can frame them as ethical questions, but they are really questions about doing a high quality job. We treat ethics as this thing that we think about when we've got all the other things in place, but we don't treat quality that way. Quality is something we have to build in. So why is this not part of the quality equation? Why is this something different? Why is this something separate?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah.
Jared Spool:
I think the answer to that is, is that we let our privilege blind us. We did not ask the right questions at the right time, and then suddenly this virus showed us that we're actually really bad at our jobs because we left millions of people in situations that should not have been in those situations. And we need to go back. We take a lot of research and understand what the hell just happened, and ask ourselves, how do we prevent this from ever happening again? [affirmative],
Brendan Jarvis:
That's a really somber and important point for everyone listening to think about and reflect on. Jared, thank you. This has been a great conversation full of big ideas and practical insights. Thank you for so generously sharing those with us today.
Jared Spool:
You're welcome. And if somebody knows how you get all the docs in a row, I will be grateful.
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh],
Jared Spool:
This is what, this is what's top of mind for me.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, if you do find the answer to that, anybody please leave a comment and we'll pass that on to Jared to make sure that he knows. And Jared, I also wanna say thank you for your longstanding, outstanding and continued contribution to the field of UX.
Jared Spool:
Oh, thank you. It's been my honor and my pleasure. I'm surprised that anybody ever listens to me. So [laugh],
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, I'm not. And Jared, if people do wanna listen to you, do wanna find out more about Center Centre and things that you're up to, what is the best way for them to do that?
Jared Spool:
Well, we have our centercentre.com website. We have an online community that currently has 24,000 people in it called Leaders of Awesomeness, [affirmative]. We have all sorts of, I'm ultimately Googleable [affirmative]. Don't believe everything you read, [laugh], the thing with the sheep is not true. [laugh]. I mean, it happened, but I wasn't mean was there. But [laugh] I didn't participate that much.
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. Thanks, Jared, to everyone who's tuned in. It's been great having you here to everything we've covered in the show today will be in the show notes on YouTube, including where you can find Jared Center Centre as well as the resources and communities that Jared has just mentioned. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX, product and design, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe. And until next time, keep being brave.

Jared Spool

Making the Case for Increasing UX Maturity

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Who is Jared Spool?

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