the cost of guessing
Jared Spool, Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre.
A pioneer in the field of user experience before the term "UX" was ever associated with computers.
While he led UIE, the industry research firm he started in 1988, the field of UX design emerged, and Jared helped define what makes UX designers successful worldwide. UIE's world-class research organization produces conferences and workshops worldwide and for companies in every industry.
In 2016, with Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman, he opened Center Centre, a new school in Chattanooga, TN, to create the next generation of industry-ready UX Designers. UIE joined forces with Center Centre and now delivers the best professional development programs in the UX Design industry.
Jared has been a highly celebrated keynote speaker and workshop presenter at conferences across the globe.
He co-authored Web Usability: A Designer’s Guide and Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work.
You'll find his writing at centercentre.com.
“ if people were good at guessing what people need, there would never be divorces.”
Humans are inherently bad at understanding what someone else needs. And if you're not actively paying attention to what someone needs, even someone who lives in the same house with you, you get yourself into a lot of trouble.
So now imagine people trying to guess what people need for whom they've never met, or they don't even know what their job is. You can't usability test your way into understanding someone's experience. You can put a product in front of somebody and say, try to configure a new server. And see if they do what you expected them to do.
I want to know everything that happened in that person's life. Whether they use my tool or not. Because that's the only way I'm going to innovate.
This is a challenge we've never really had in the field. Most people were never trained in contextual inquiry. I take some credit for this problem that we were very usability testing focused, and we were like if we could just get everybody to usability test then all these other bigger, better techniques would come. But what happened was usability testing became the sort of hammer for which everything is a nail. And we didn't lay the groundwork to say this actually only gets you a slice of what's happening in someone's life, and it's only under very controlled situations. And it's not actually solving the problem.
What's happened is it has become absolutely clear that any decision that an organization makes is a UX decision, and yet most of those decisions are not informed by UX research.
People are guessing what customers need, what employees need, what users need, and the end result is they’re guessing wrong and most of the products that come out are still crap.
“ UX as a dry-cleaning service.”
The way UX is done in our industry is we treat it like dry cleaning. You realize that the wedding is coming up. You pull out your suit, you find that there's a spot on your suit, so you take it to the dry cleaner’s.
You hand it over. You don't know what the dry cleaner does with it. You don't actually want to know what the dry cleaner does with it, but you come back three days later, and the spot is gone, and it looks crisp.
And the dry cleaner earned money and you are happy to pay them. And you never think of the dry cleaner again until the next time that scenario plays out.
“ We damn well better stop guessing!”
There are UX issues all through every decision that you are making in that transformation that will affect the life of somebody.
You damn well better have UX there!
But where are the UX people?
They are shoved over by the custodial team because no one has stepped up to explain that these are UX decisions that we're making, and we damn well better stop guessing at them.