Getting2Alpha
Getting2Alpha
Jared Spool is educating the next generation of UX designers
Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Spool is a legend in user interface design through his pioneering consulting company, user interface engineering, he's helped hundreds of companies create more usable and delightful software.
Jared's latest project is Center Centre, an accredited 2-year college for UX professionals that set up to train the next generation. Jared's approach to product design is informed by decades of experience and deep pattern matching. I love hearing his stories and actionable chunks of UX wisdom.
Jared: The biggest mistakes I see are that they don't have a [00:01:00] solid vision of what the experience they want to build is.
They might have this idea in their head of what the product looks like, but they haven't thought about the experience of use. There's a big difference between that, between the product and its use, anyone who's ever used something and had the reaction, did they ever use this thing?
I mean, did they ever try it? Uh, has run into this problem of things that are not as usable as they should be, or not as delightful as they should be, because they hadn't thought about the experience of use. On a day to day basis.
Amy: Jared is a gifted communicator and a delightful human being. Join us for a far reaching high impact conversation about the past, present, and future of user experience design.[00:02:00]
Welcome Jared to the Getting2Alpha podcast.
Jared: Thanks. I'm very excited to be here. I love talking to you and I love talking to you about work.
Amy: Awesome. Well, thank you. Now, you're quite well known in the UX world, but for people that aren't as familiar with you, give us a whirlwind tour of your background.
How did you first get started in design and tech? And how did you decide what to pursue along the way? How did you steer?
Jared: There are these cars at amusement parks that you get in when you're a little kid, and you can drive the car, and it goes around this track, and you think you're steering, but in fact there's this groove, and there's a pin in the groove, and that keeps the car always going around the track, and I'm not sure I've seen that before.
I think I'm just in a car and a groove and it's just taking me places. Uh, [00:03:00] I started as, as a software developer in the seventies back when, you know, software was done on big honking machines before personal computers and mobile devices. I was working on office automation is what we called it back then and office automation is what we would now refer to as word processing and spreadsheets but back then there were no spreadsheets and word processors had only just sort of started to exist and I was fascinated by how would we get people who weren't brought up with computers to use computers because I Back in those days, if you used a computer, it's because you were a trained engineer or computer administrator.
You couldn't have access to a machine. They wouldn't even let you in the same room unless you had complete training to use it. Here we were thinking about, well, someday we're going to have these things on [00:04:00] people's desks. And I was fascinated by that transition of how are we going to get all these people who've never been exposed to a computer before actually working on computers and how will we do that.
So I started to do that and I got through the little car in the groove. I somehow made my way to digital equipment corporation and at digital equipment corporation, I learned about working with the personal computers. We were rolling out some of the very first personal computers that exist.
I worked on everything from the design of the keyboard to the. word processor. I wrote email programs and, uh, one of the world's first voicemail programs.
Amy: What were you programming in? What language were you writing in?
Jared: We used a combination of Pascal, Bliss 16, and Bliss 32, and PL1, and a lot of machine code.
This was before [00:05:00] C was a language then, but we, we weren't using Unix. So we didn't do a whole lot of C. Uh, C uh, didn't exist yet. Objective C, Swift, Go, the languages of today, PHP, none of those things existed back then.
Amy: Wow. So how did you evolve from being elbow deep in code to really focusing on UX?
Jared: Well, you couldn't separate them at the time.
There was no such thing as a UX designer. There was no such thing as, there weren't even things as such as things as usability tests. I was involved in the first usability tests. We, I worked with the team that built out the first usability lab ever. We, I mean, we were doing usability testing. There were no rules.
There's no process. There was no. This is how you should do this. We were just making it all up. All the things that are done today. We, we had to make up. It was all in this quest to answer the question of how do you get people who aren't [00:06:00] engineers to use these tools and how do you make them work for them?
So we, we had to figure out how you did that. And so the people who were building the product were the ones who had to figure it out. There was no separation back then. There was no specialty. You had to do everything.
Amy: So then what happened?
Jared: So the products that I worked on were on a platform that barely saw the light of day.
It did ship. This was back in the day where if you shipped 10, 000, you were considered a success. We did ship about 10, 000, but then the IBM PC came out and sold Millions and we were goners. So then I went and worked for companies that made PC software. And then I went, worked for a company in Cambridge called Symbolics that made these crazy machines called Wisp machines that were basically these artificial intelligence tools, and then worked for a company called Bachman [00:07:00] Information Systems.
Which was at the time, the largest software venture funded company ever run by a guy named Charlie Bachman, who has the notoriety of inventing the relational database for Honeywell. And then I started user interface engineering, uh, which became UIE and, uh, ran that for 28 years. And then we became Center Centre.
Amy: So when you made that leap from Being an employee to running your own business. What was it that gave you the confidence to do that? What was your drive and your passion at that point?
Jared: Oh, I had no confidence I could do it. I used to tell people that the reason I started UIE was because I couldn't keep a day job.
But the main reason was because I felt that the market was right for A organization that did user experience work that we didn't call [00:08:00] it that then at the time we called it software, human factors or usability or something like that, but I thought it was, it was, it was ripe for a company to do that and to teach other companies to be able to do that, to work with employees and be able to teach them to do it.
And so we, when we first started UIE, when I first started, it was just me. And I was basically just this consultant who was going around. Helping companies learn how to build things that people could use that didn't require training that didn't require sitting up and reading the manual from end to end and trying to memorize it, but you could actually sit down and use it.
Once I started doing that, I found companies that were actually interested in getting help doing that. And I started working with more and more of them. We ended up having more work than I could just handle. So I brought on a couple of people. It turns out that the primary way I learned to market what we were doing [00:09:00] was I would go to events where there were programmers and product managers and things like that.
I would give talks on what we were learning as we were doing all these usability tests. And people would hire us to do the usability tests, but they were way more interested in learning what we'd learned in other people's usability tests. So we started publishing that and that became our business running usability tests.
And we got to the point where we would actually conduct usability tests that nobody had hired us to conduct. We would just say, Hey, it'd be interesting if we went off and tested this, let's go test this and try some stuff. And we did the first usability tests on websites and A lot of the way the web is built today is because of research that we did back in the late 90s, early 2000s, the way e commerce sites are built, things like that.
So we did that for a long time. And our primary product at that point was then training. And then in 1996, we started our first conference that became the user [00:10:00] interface conference, which is this year will be in its 22nd year in Boston. In November, we've done other conferences since then we do three or four a year.
Yeah, that's the, that's the process. It was really just listening. You know, the reason I say that I don't feel like I've driven anything is that I spend most of my time responding. I just listened to what people are looking for and go for it. You know, and now this past year, we opened a school for UX designers.
Uh, and the reason we did that was for Because we were listening to the market, which was that there are not enough designers in the world and we need to produce more. And so we, we launched in this project and with my co founder of the school, Leslie Jensen Inman, we, we started it up and we're rolling with it.
Amy: Exactly. Let's drill down on that. How did that come to life? How did you find your co founder and then actually bring that spark of an idea to life?
Jared: It started with whining. [00:11:00]
Amy: It all started with...
Jared: It all started with the whining. I was whining about there not being enough designers. I was whining about how the design schools that exist today were doing a crappy job of actually producing students.
And I was whining about the quality of those students that they were producing. We're not meeting what companies needed. And I was talking to a woman named, uh, Molly Halschlag, who, if you don't know her, she basically is one of the people who invented the things that make websites, And she wrote. Like she's written like 45 books on the topic and she's just a powerhouse and we're having dinner in a little Chinese restaurant in Chinatown in Boston.
And I says, you know, someone needs to start a school because we don't, we need a school for designers. She says, you need to do it. And I thought that's the stupidest idea I've [00:12:00] ever heard. And she said, no, you need to do it. I quickly changed the subject. We went on to something else, but the idea stuck with me.
I could not shake the idea of starting a school. And I started talking to people about it and what it might be. And I was talking to a friend of mine, a guy named Dan Rubin, another one of the people who basically was there at the beginning of the web, and I was listening to him at the time I called the project project insanity, because my thinking was This project was just insane.
And if you have an insane project and you tell your friends that you're thinking about doing this insane thing, your best friends, your really good friends are going to take you aside and they're going to look you in the eye. And they're going to say, this is a stupid idea. Don't do this. This is going to ruin your life.
You don't know what you're getting into. You're insane if you go ahead with this. And so I was going and finding my best friends and I was [00:13:00] telling them my idea. And what I learned was, was that I don't have any good friends because nobody took me aside and said that. Everybody said, you have to do this.
This is exactly what we need. So I'm thinking, okay, no friends. And I'm telling this to Dan, hoping he was going to be that friend. And he, his response was. Have you talked to Leslie now? I had known Leslie for a decade. We had worked together on a bunch of web standards projects, but but I hadn't talked to her about this project because at the time I didn't consider her a good friend.
I didn't know her that well. And they say, you need to talk to Leslie because she's working on the same thing. So really, I thought, okay, well, good. Someone else is crazy. They can do it. And so I thought about that. And the next day I happened to be staring at the Twitters when Leslie tweets that she had just [00:14:00] resigned her job at the university of Tennessee Chattanooga, and she didn't know what she was going to do next, but she knew that whatever it was, it was going to be a great adventure.
And I just sent her a direct message and said, we should talk. And within the hour we were talking. And the next thing I know, we're talking about building a school. And we started to share notes. It turned out for her PhD, she, she got a doctorate in education. So technically it's not a PhD. It's an EDD. I didn't know that either till I met her.
She got an EDD. And her thesis for EDD was basically how would you create a school for web designers that would merge industry and education and community, which was sort of exactly along the lines. And we started to, I started to look at her thesis and I thought, Oh my gosh, she's building the same school that I thought I was going to build.
She had wanted it. She had originally designed it for a major university to pick up. I had [00:15:00] never gone down that route. And the more we talked, the more we realized that, that there was no way we'd get a university to do it the way we wanted to do it, the way education works today is just broken. So we decided to do the even more crazy thing and try and build up.
A secondary education, higher ed program without the support of a university. So we did that and that was five years ago. And it took us four and a half years to go through authorization and build the curriculum and figure out how we were going to pay for it and all the things. But, uh, we got it open in October, October 17th, the school started the first student showed up.
It was stunning. They're now in their fourth month. They're doing fantastic. They'll graduate in, it's a two year program, so they'll graduate in October of 2018 and I'm very excited about it.
Amy: Mazel tov.
Jared: Thank you.
Amy: That's a great story and I'm excited to be part of helping you succeed with this and sharing, [00:16:00] uh, our game thinking toolkit and techniques with your students as they get a little more advanced.
Jared: Oh yeah, we'll definitely want you in to do that. They're already running into things. That you can help them with because their first project is to build a resource website, a tool for them to actually help them study. It's basically the way we're thinking of it is it's like a Reddit for UX. And it's, it'll just be for collecting UX articles and videos and resources and cataloging them and tagging them and commenting on them and upvoting them.
All the things you can do on on something like Reddit, but it's all in for UX. And the whole idea is that because the way the program works is, is there's large. Independent study components and for the independent study components, they need to have all these resources, all these good things. And there's no reason for every student to have to go find their own resources by Googling.
They can. [00:17:00] We want to give them a a place where where the students themselves sort of collect. Stuff and they comment on it and stuff that.
Amy: Yep. And that is a common and well established problem that. All groups end up needing to solve. And yet it's non trivial to solve it well.
Jared: Right. So they're building this thing and having spent a lot of time with you talking about, you know, the different stages that users go through and all these things.
I'm staring at this thing and I'm watching and I'm thinking, man, these people need to talk to Amy. You need to talk to Amy Jo, right away.
Amy: So Jared, you have such an awesome perspective of seeing the industry evolve and also as a consultant for so many teams, really seeing patterns. What are some of the most common mistakes that you see first time designers and product owners make in the early stages when they're bringing their [00:18:00] ideas to life?
Jared: The biggest mistakes I see are that they. Don't have a solid vision of what the experience they want to build is they might have this idea in their head of what the product looks like, but they haven't thought about the experience of use. There's a big difference between that between the product and its use.
Anyone who's ever used something and had the reaction, did they ever use this thing? I mean, did they ever try it? Uh, has run into this problem of things that are not as usable as they should be, or not as delightful as they should be, because they hadn't thought about the experience of use. On a day to day basis, not having that vision, not having that vision socialized across the [00:19:00] whole team, you know, one of the things I'll do is I'll go into a team and I'll have them take out a sheet of paper.
I'm draw a line down the middle of the sheet paper, what the story of Hansel and Gretel is. And on the right side, I want them to write down in bullet point form. What the story of a user using their product five years from now. Is like when they do the left side where they're doing Hansel and Gretel, they have no trouble.
They just write down the bullets. And if I have them compare their bullets to their neighbor's bullets, they'll be basically the same bullets. Uh, when I have them write down the experience of using their own product five years from now in bullet form, they just look at me. Like I've asked them to write in a completely different language.
I mean, they just stare at me like, I don't know. And the few people who can do it. There's don't match anybody else's in the room. And that's the crazy thing, right? You know, I tell them, [00:20:00] how come you guys all know the story of Hansel and Gretel, have you talked about it? And they're like, no, like, okay, well, somebody has, cause how would you know this, but the fact is they don't talk about their own design, don't talk about their own product.
And so that vision turns out to be key. So that's the first one. The second mistake is that they don't spend a lot of time watching their existing users and customers. Use their product and use competitors products. They'll go talk to customers. They'll have a conversation with customers. They'll say, Hey, if we built this, would you use it?
And the customers go, yeah, that sounds like a good idea, but that's very different than actually watching people because when you watch people, you see how the existing products and services aren't meeting really is needed. You see where they fall apart, where they run into rough edges. And that turns out to [00:21:00] be key.
So they need to spend time doing that. And then the third thing that I see is that they often don't have what we call a culture of learning and ability to continuously learn. And this is particularly common in startups where the mode by which you get your startup money is you have to talk in terms of knowing all the answers.
You have to know what the market's going to do. You have to know what the product's going to do. You have to know what the industry is going to do. You have to know all these different things. And so everybody convinces themselves that they can never say, I don't know, let's go find that out.
And then they get themselves into trouble because they don't actually have a culture. Where those types of thoughts, you know, huh, we don't know this. Let's go find it out can be discovered. And the reality is, is that the way we learn [00:22:00] how to do things is through experimentation, the way we learn how to do things is by constantly trying new ideas.
You can't get it right out of the gate. You have to have that ability to constantly be learning. So those are the three big mistakes we see. They don't have a vision. They don't have exposure to users and they don't have a culture of continuous learning.
Amy: Yep. That's fantastic. And I see there's a lot of overlap with what I see as well.
So yeah, it's, um, those are great things to get beyond. And I'm sure you're incorporating that into your curriculum at Center Centre.
Jared: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. That's it's, it's a key piece of the curriculum. Uh, the first thing we taught students. So the first classes after the intro to UX course was sketching and prototyping so that they could start to draw out not only their ideas.
For what the product should look like, but their ideas of what the experience of use will be information [00:23:00] architecture, so they could understand how to organize all the pieces. Of it and sort of make sure that the design doesn't get too messy and user research practices. Which is basically how to go out and see your users and study them.
That's what they learned in the first 12 weeks of the program. Those are tools they'll use throughout. So yeah, we're, we're starting with that and just keep going.
Amy: Awesome. When you teach them about user research practices. One of the things that I run into a lot with my startups that I work with, people know that they know that, okay, we need to go out and we need to actually like expose sketches or prototypes or ideas or competitor's products to our target users.
But something that I see a lot is how you define your target users and who you, think they are and the channels you use to find them can turn up really different people that give you really different feedback. [00:24:00]
Jared: Absolutely. And I think that one of the mistakes people make is we have to go out and expose our ideas to users.
And that's actually the wrong thing. The right thing is we have to go find out. More about our users. Our ideas aren't that important, right? There's an old saying, which is great designers don't fall in love with their solution. Great designers fall in love with the problem. And until you really understand the problem, you can't even begin to propose reasonable solutions when you're going out to get what we call exposure, that exposure has to be to the problem, not to the solution.
So you don't want to walk out with sketches. That's actually the wrong thing to do. I think in many instances, you want to walk out with just saying, and it's the first question you suggested here, which is, can we even tell our users from our non users? Right? Do we have any sense as to who that is?
Now, there's the [00:25:00] rare product that is used by everybody. But that turns out to be an extremely rare product, right?
Amy: Well, it never starts that way. It always starts much narrower.
Jared: I mean, laundry detergent isn't used by everybody. It's only used by people who do laundry. And in every household, not everybody does laundry.
So, you, you can focus. You can start to ask yourself, why do some people not do laundry? And why is that? And we, we actually, I think that we need to spend more time in our development process, studying people who aren't our users, as much as we spend time studying people who are users, because until you really understand.
What makes a user a user? Why is it that they're choosing to use this thing when other people aren't? You don't really know the boundaries of what you're trying to design for. And that creates all sorts of issues.
Amy: Talk to me a little bit [00:26:00] about how you use storytelling, both in creating this curriculum and also in bringing designers to life, which is what you're doing at Center Centre.
Jared: Yeah, I mean, storytelling is essential. It's funny. I just came across a quote. I mean, like, in the last 24 hours, I saw this quote, and I meant to write it down. It's something to the effect of, Those who can tell great stories will always have the competitive advantage. Humans love story. As far as I know, we're the only species that tell stories.
I don't know. I guess bees do, but that's the thing. And it's been that way for. Thousands upon thousands of years is that the way we've communicated the way we make things happen the way we motivate others is through passionate storytelling. I mean, you can you can see how the stories played out in the in the last election.
We talked so much about fake news. Well, what is fake news? It's a [00:27:00] it's story. What is the Bible? It's a story in some ways. It's fake news. I mean, it's no more or less of a story than fake news is, you know, all of these things. And if we're saying, well, okay, these things are influencing people's behaviors.
Of course they are. That's how it's done. So the thing is, is that. The way people become designers is because they hear stories of how people use their product, and the way people become great designers is they tell stories about how people could make their lives better through using their product or service.
So it turns out that story is at the center of everything we do. It's one of the key skills we're teaching the students is how to use story, how to tell stories so that people really get to understand what it's like to be a current user, how to tell stories about what it could be like if you made their lives better in the future product.
You could tell stories about how you're going to build it or what [00:28:00] steps you're going to go through or what you've learned so far and how that's going to influence what you're doing. You know, you get up and you pitch an idea. It's a story. You want to persuade people to decide to take the design in this direction versus that direction.
You use a story. So stories are key, essential pieces of everything. And that's how we do it. And so if you can't, you have to be able to understand the makings of story.
Amy: Yep. And that's a lot of why. Uh, story is so deeply connected to game design and movie narrative. It's embedded in time. Absolutely. Story is embedded in time.
Jared: Yeah.
Amy: For me, you know, as a UX designer, I came up like you did as a programmer first. Building things, databases, you know, uh, media stuff for Paramount. And I realized that games were embedded in time when I had a, [00:29:00] my first big game project and the lead designer delivered this story that took place over a year.
Of how customers would use their game. And I went, Oh my God, that's a whole different way to design.
Jared: Right.
Amy: And that's really what you're talking about.
Jared: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the, the ability to tell the story of, of how the user changes as they use the game or the product and how those changes. Lead to other changes and how the product has to change out from under itself to adapt to those changes in the user.
All those things are key. That's why I've very much loved the frameworks that you put together because they so nicely explain this phenomena of change that lots of people don't see. They think the product is static that doesn't it doesn't adapt, but that's not true.
Amy: That's the page centric way of thinking.[00:30:00]
You know, Paul Adams at Intercom I think is really brilliant on this and kind of leading the charge. I've learned a lot from him. Um, but he says that, you know, at the core it's systems thinking because it's thinking in terms of systems. And if you build systems, you know that every complex system starts as a simple system that works and then evolves.
That's how systems work and that's how games come to life and anything that's an interesting system. But if you're thinking about static pages, you don't think that way. So for me, part of what I'm bringing as a educator and trainer is tools to help you think in systems that are very practical, that like help you solve your problems.
Like, oh, you have to design a reputation system or you have like the Reddit thing. That's a reputation system you have to design for that. You know what? There's no one right way to do that. You have to really think it through.
Jared: Right.
Amy: I think systems thinking is one of the big challenges for UX people of our time.
And you're doing your part for [00:31:00] that. I'm part of that. The intercom guys, by the way, share a ton of great stuff that you should definitely expose your students to. And in our game thinking, we give people tools to actually address this and solve these problems. Because it's so critical. And because in the 21st century, we're building systems.
We're not building pages anymore.
Jared: Yeah. I'm not sure we were ever building pages. I think the idea that we were building pages was a misnomer because no one was using pages, right? People didn't think of the sites that they went to in the page format. They were using systems. You know, if someone goes to Amazon to buy a gift for their niece, There's no gift for their niece page.
They use this complex system of customers who've bought this have also bought and reviews and, and all these things, some of which are on a page and some of which are on other pages and they were never aware of the page. You know, you click on a link and it brings you to the [00:32:00] bottom of the page, they don't know that.
You click on a link and it, and it takes you someplace new, they don't know that. If they click on a link and it pops up something, they don't know that. This distinction of what's a page and what's not a page, that's a programmer artifact. And the users, they're, they're blissfully unaware of this. And only when it's poorly designed do they have to become aware of it.
So we actually want to hide this detail from them. So I don't think we were ever there. I think we mistakenly thought that that's what we were doing, but that wasn't what we were doing. And the people who were successful were either the ones who knew that or somehow accidentally didn't need to know that.
Amy: Yeah. So you're leading the charge to really, uh, reinvent UX education. And thank you from all of us because really well trained designers who understand these issues are going to do amazing things. So reflecting on [00:33:00] where you are now in the context of where you've been, what do you see as your superpower?
What's your sweet spot? What really lights you up?
Jared: Superpower. What's funny people often ask me questions about the future, you know Where do you think we're going and I've never saw myself as a futurist I see myself more as a historian, as a critic to some extent, you know, sort of like a, a literary critic.
You know, occasionally people look at something that, that my company's done, it'll go, Oh, you're so smart about design. How come your stuff isn't well designed. And as much as we try and we get there, we're a small operation and we tend to focus on our clients more than we focus on ourselves. So every so often something slips out that isn't as well designed as we would have liked.
And while it's a sort of lame excuse, the reality is, is [00:34:00] that, uh, we're not good designers, you know, it's not, it's not what we are. Roger Ebert was actually not a very good movie maker. He made one movie. It wasn't that great, but he knew movies better than anybody in the world. I know a lot about design. We know a lot about what takes companies to make great design.
And we did that because we study lots and lots of companies and lots and lots of organizations. And then we turn around and we say, okay, these are the things that have led to great design, and these are the things that haven't. And every so often someone will say as well, they haven't led to great design before, but maybe they will this time.
And we're like, Okay, maybe they will. You could be the first, but I wonder why none? Anybody else succeeded? What are you gonna do differently? And then they don't usually have an answer to that. So I think if I were to define a superpower, my superpower is history.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim.
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