What I learnt about UX Design from Jared Spool in 1 hour
On Wednesday 20th November, the Sydney Design Thinking Meetup hosted a talk by Jared Spool titled “A New UX Design Resolution” sponsored by ThoughtWorks.
Jared Spool speaking at Sydney Design Thinking Meetup
Jared is the founder of User Interface Engineering (UIE), the largest usability research organisation of its kind in the world. If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective and knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term “usability” was ever associated with computers.
Jared is an amazing story teller who captured his audience intensely.
Here’s what I learnt in 1 hour of Jared speaking:
Design is the rendering of intent.
Who is responsible for choosing the intention? Who owns the intention when the design is owned by multiple organisations?
We need to understand who determines the intent and design across organisational boundaries.
Forget the 5 Whys
Use the Fishbone analysis to uncover the root cause of a problem. What went wrong when Hawaii received a false missile warning on 18th January 2018? Why did a false alert happen? The problem is different at different levels of resolution.
What does Jared mean by resolution?
By referring to the movie “Powers of Ten”, he explains that notion of perspective and how zooming in and zooming out of a scenario will give you different sets of problems. He gives the example of pollution here:
The 4 resolutions are:
Ecosystem-wide
Organisation-wide
Application/site-wide
Screen-wide
At every resolution, there is a different focus and a different set of tools to be used. It’s about where we are focusing at the time.
The ecosystem-wide resolution is the next tough challenge.
As UX designers, we need to zoom out of the landscape and work in all resolutions.
Jack of all trades, master of none
You can be a jack of many trades if you put the time in. Forget about the T shaped designer. We are multipronged. A UX/UI designer is a real thing.
We are more than a T shape.
We need to shift our focus to skills, not roles.