The X-Interviews | The Cost of Guessing

Interview #15 - Jared Spool on Strategic Design Leadership

Jared Spool on Strategic Design Leadership

Today on The X-Mentor, it’s Jared Spool, Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre.

If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about user experience (UX) design, you know he’s probably the most effective and knowledgeable communicator today. He started working in the field of user experience in 1978, 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. They made a revolutionary approach to vocational training, infusing Jared's decades of UX experience with Leslie's mastery of experience-based learning methodologies. 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. For 23 years, he was the conference chair and keynote speaker at the now-retired annual UI Conferences and UX Immersion Conferences, and he manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time. 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.

The X-Mentor: Welcome to The X-Mentor, Jared. Thank you so much for being with us today!

Jared: Thank you very much for having me.

The First Usability Test

The X-Mentor: As one of the top UX pioneers, I'd like to start by asking you about your experience in helping shape the UX discipline. You started your career at Digital Equipment Corporation back in 1980. How did your career progress from working at DEC to becoming a leader in UX and web design?

Jared: Well, I had already been working as a software developer for about four years as an independent contractor. I worked for a company that had patents for computer e-mail clients on Apple computers that enabled moving e-mail through phone networks. This was before the advent of the Internet and ARPANET. There were no existing standards for e-mail transfer. Now there's things like SMTP which is the simple mail transfer protocol. That didn't exist when we were creating this tool that lets you send e-mail from an Apple computer to another Apple computer. So, I was basically a software developer doing all these things and then Digital Equipment hired me to work on one of the first personal computers, before the advent of the IBM PC. It was not taken seriously by small businesses or large businesses. But when a product called VisiCalc came out, which was the very first spreadsheet, it was very clear that personal computers were going to be a thing. And because I had done all this work in a business setting on e-mail and building a database tool for Apple II and things like that, DEC hired me to come be part of the team that was going to build their personal computer products. It was very exciting.

The X-Mentor: I believe you were in DEC a few years before Karen Holtzblatt joined and then went on to develop contextual design. What was it about Digital Equipment Corporation at that time that made it such a dynamic place with some very dynamic people?

Jared: The team that Karen worked with was run by a guy named John Whiteside, and he was hired the same week I was hired. We went through orientation together and his office was 4 doors down from mine. And I was absolutely enthralled with what he was doing because we were working on this personal computer system and my job at the time was to write what would later be referred to as a word processor and spreadsheet software for this personal computer so that it would come out with software that people could use. So, those things fell in my lap. In fact, we had eighteen of them in DEC, running on all different platforms and operating systems. All of them were really hard to use and John’s team was working on a project which was code named Ugly Baby.

The X-Mentor: What was project Ugly baby?

Jared: Ugly Baby was the code name; the idea was that it was supposed to be a text editor. So, something you would just go and type text into. Special characters of text at the time required all sorts of special key code combinations too. You know, you would hold down Control and shift and press 7 on the numeric pad and that would do Bold.

The X-Mentor: Yup, the old keyboard twister game!

Jared: Instead of requiring the memorization of all these key codes, we were trying to build something that someone could just use without memorization, without having to spend a lot of time studying how to use things. The word processor was invented up the street by another company called Wang Corporation and the Wang Corporation, if you bought a Wang word processor, these things just sold like hot cakes. If you wanted to learn how to use the Wang word processor, you had to go to Lowell, MA, where their headquarters were, and you had to take a one-week class that would teach you how to create a new file, open an existing file, save a file, and print a file. It also taught you how to change the ribbon on the printer because you'd need to do that every so often and the printer was embedded in the unit. And that was week 1. If you stayed for the advanced course, you got bold and italics, which require that you change the wheel on the printer because the normal wheel couldn't do italics. It could do bold by just double printing the character, but it couldn't do italics. And yeah, this was the state of computing in 1980.

The X-Mentor: Oh my gosh!

Jared: So, we wanted to build a word processor that didn't take two weeks of training just to get to bold and italics.

John Whiteside was a psychologist. He and a couple other folks had been hired; Dennis Wixon was another. Dennis’s previous job literally involved running rats through mazes. So, I mean, these are capital P, cognitive psychologist, Ph.D.’s.

DEC had decided to hire a bunch of these psychologists to get an edge on this stuff. While I was there, we shipped a model of one of our many computers and with it you would get a pallet of manuals that weighed more than the computer. I mean, they literally took a pallet of binders and documents and wrapped them in plastic and put them on a forklift pallet. And that's how you'd receive your manual set. And so, we were trying to figure out how to build computers that people could use without all that documentation. And so, they hired these psychologists to figure this out. And I was building this product that I was trying to figure out how anyone was going to figure out how to use.

And that changed how we thought about things, and we conducted the very first usability tests that anyone had ever done on personal computers in a set of laboratories that we built out of old air conditioning control rooms.

The X-Mentor: You're saying it was where the first usability test occurred?

Jared: Yeah.

The X-Mentor: Wow, OK. Usability Testing Ground Zero!

Jared: There were two teams in DEC who were doing them [usability tests] and then there was one team in IBM. And we're all sort of figuring it out as we went.

The X-Mentor: This is fascinating and mainly what it's doing for me, and hopefully our readers, is grounding everyone with the same understanding of just how far we’ve come in the UX discipline.

Jared: Yeah, I mean we had no idea what we were doing. Most of the practices that you see user research folks doing and usability testing today, such as, for instance, asking participants for their consent or informing them that we're not testing them, we're testing the product. Putting together test plans and synthesizing results. This was the stuff we had to make up. We had no idea what we were doing.

Experience Design Management

The X-Mentor: There are millions of UX folks in the field now that have benefited from the work of pioneers such as yourself. And you started to teach engineers about ‘human factors’ at a university. Could you explain the key concepts of the experience design management course you taught during your 17 years at Tufts University?

Jared: So. I was part of a school called the Gordon Institute, which is an engineering management school. And so, if you want to be an engineering manager, it's basically an MBA for engineers. But it's not just for hardware or software engineers. It's for all types of engineers, Chemical Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, any type of engineer. It was created by Bernie Gordon who founded a company that invented the CAT scan. His company made hardware, devices and chips and people would get promoted into management out of being an individual contributor. But they would only know about the type of engineering that they had done. And what they didn't know about was what other people in the organization did.

Eventually, if they got promoted high enough, they would oversee multiple types of engineers at the same time, but they'd only understand one form of engineering and they wouldn't know how to manage the other forms of engineering. And he was very frustrated with his team at Analogic. He would get to a point where he couldn't promote people to be head of all of engineering because the people had such narrow understanding. So, he created this school to fix that problem.

The Dean of the school hired me to basically be a bridge between the humanities courses that they were requiring and the engineering courses. And my job was to remind everybody that when you're building something at a company, there are users and customers and operators, you must build for those people.

The X-Mentor: Don Norman more recently has been saying we should no longer call people “users.” Like you're talking about here at Tufts, it's about connecting to the people (i.e., human) element, right?

Jared: You're absolutely right. The whole idea is to make this human centered.

One of the things that has happened in the last few years is that UX has forgotten that the 2 letters stand for “users” and “experiences” because we don't talk about users or experiences in UX very often, and I'm on a mission to put it back.

The X-Mentor: Can you describe what it was like during the early days of UX, before the term "user experience" became widely used, and how you saw the field evolve from the 1980’s and 1990s?

Jared:

1. In the 80s we were just figuring out that this was a thing.

2. In the 90s, we were trying to figure out how to make it into a discipline.

3. In the 2000s, we were trying to figure out how to make it contribute to the business.

And so, you can look back on those days and you can see the changes that we went through. All the conversations in the 80s were just about, hey, you do this too. I guess there's a bunch of us who do this, and it's a growing number. In the 90s it was about, hey, how do we get engineers and what was the equivalent of product managers to make time to do this in products. And then in the 2000s, it was about all this technology being shoved into people's lives because personal computers are now popular. Windows is now a thing. Browsers are a thing. The Internet is a thing. Company IT departments are building websites, having never thought about actual customers ever in their life. And that changed everything.

The X-Mentor: You mentioned that in the 90s, there were roles in the industry that were similar to today's product managers. Can you elaborate on how these product management roles came together? What were these early "product manager" roles like in the 90s?

Jared: Product managers in the 90s, particularly for software that was a product, Product managers focused on what we used to refer to at the time as womb-to-tomb. Everything that was necessary to take an idea and turn it into a product, grow the product base, and then at some point kill the product. Then figure out how the organization can back off having to support it. And so, Product Managers have always sort of filled in the gaps. It’s only in very recent years, like in the last five to 10 years, that Product Managers have become a standard discipline. Up until that point, Product Managers were people who did all the things that nobody else on the team was doing.

Someone once referred to Product Managers, the way they thought of it was, “it's like the way the Chinese think of soup.”

My understanding is that in traditional Chinese cuisine you eat soup last, not as an appetizer like we do, but towards the end of the meal. And the thinking is that it fills in all the cracks in the food. And that's what a Product Manager does, is they fill in all the cracks in the team. So, if there's no one to write documentation, well, the product manager's going to write the documentation. If there's no one there to design screens, well, the product manager is going to design screens. If there's no one there to keep the server running, the product manager keeps the server running, you know, whatever it is.

When I was at DEC, we had “product managers” and some of them literally kept the developer machine backups going. Someone needed to ensure that as the developers wrote code, it was backed up onto the time tapes, which were used for backups, and that these tapes were stored and cataloged. The product manager on my team did that because there was nobody else who had the time or space to do it, and he didn't want the code to disappear one day and us not to have backups. So, he just made that his responsibility and for most of my career, product managers have played this role.

So, you go from one organization to the next, and what a product manager does varies completely differently because the cracks in the team are completely different for every team. You even go from one team to the next, so you can't just hire a product manager from another team and expect them to do the same thing they did at the other team. Because this team needs something different and so product managers have always sort of played that role.

It was at Microsoft where I first saw the formalization of Program Managers and Product Managers, and they started to make this more of a discipline. And then other software companies followed that, and then [Product Management expert] Marty Cagan wrote a book and just threw everything on its head.

The X-Mentor: I was there at Microsoft during that time when they were still called “program managers.” And their roles were very much as you've described, the womb-to-tomb, soup-to-nuts role of filling the cracks. At Microsoft, there were these teams called “triads,” which consisted of Developers, Testers, and Product Managers (i.e., Dev, Test, PM). These triads were the core of the product team. And Microsoft at that time was a very product-centric culture (read: Technically centered). And so UX was perceived as this ‘outside-the-core-team’ discipline.

Jared: Were you there when Ken Dye was running UX?

The X-Mentor: I was there, but I started as a consultant for Microsoft. Ken Dye was one of the most impactful research managers at Microsoft and a mentor to many of the folks I would later work with in Microsoft Office, Windows, and other parts of the company.

But here's where I'm going with my question…

Can you explain how UX's role in defining “what to build” has shifted from the early days when contextual design pioneers like Karen Holtzblatt forced developers out of their cubicles and into the field to observe user’s pain points, to today where product management often drives strategy while design focuses more on the user interface and interactions?

Do you think this is an accurate portrayal of the change we’ve seen over time?

If so, how did we get to this point?

Jared: I think it depends on the organization. I think different organizations approach all these things very differently. The thing that I have seen is that a lot of it has to do with how people think. They work with or pay attention to their users, right? How do people do that? There are some teams where people spend a tremendous amount of time really trying to get to know who the users are, what the users are trying to do, where all that comes from. Then there are other teams where they only do that to make sure that they're not screwing up. It's a QA [Quality Assurance] step.

The thing that really makes a difference is how much exposure everyone on the team gets to users. And how much they understand the experience of users, not how they use the product, but what their overall experience is like.

The Cost of Guessing

The X-Mentor: Looking back to the mid-2000s, Microsoft’s “Triads” were in the habit of deciding what product they wanted to build and then Product Management would go about finding a market for it. Today, there’s still concern about how we can keep user-centricity at the core of product development.

With remote usability testing replacing field visits, for example, how can we ensure a strong user focus in product development? What steps should UX, and product teams take to stay connected with users despite these changes?

Jared: The real question is what's the cost of guessing? I have a saying, which is there's a technical name for the absence of research and that's guessing.

The X-Mentor: Yup. I’m familiar with that one.

Jared: When we're guessing what users need, when we're guessing how our product fits into a user's life, it's highly unlikely we will guess correctly.

If people were good at guessing what people needed, there would never be divorces. And you know, there might be far fewer marriages, but there would definitely be fewer 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.

I was talking to a research manager the other day who is trying to get her team to be more strategic in research. And one of the things about strategic user research is that you make a major shift from being product focused or functionality focused to being experience focused. It's a nuanced difference. But it's an important difference. And her company makes software used by a group of professionals that go by the formal title of system reliability engineers, but people always just refer to them as DevOps. And DevOps, basically, once software is running, they keep the servers up.

The other day I wanted to book a ticket from Boston to New York on Amtrak, and I went to the amtrak.com website and I typed in Boston, NY and the dates and I got back a message that said, “Something unexpected happened. Please try again later.”

This is the domain of DevOps. Somewhere, Amtrak either has or should have a DevOps person who at that moment was trying to figure out why I couldn't just see all the available trains. There's one every hour. Why couldn't I see all the available trains from Boston to New York?

And I could do it on my phone, it worked perfectly fine for my phone. I just couldn't do it through my laptop on a browser. That's what a DevOps tries to figure out. These people that I'm working with make the tools for DevOps. And the thing is that none of the user experience people have ever been a DevOps. In fact, most of the engineers haven't been DevOps. Product managers haven't been DevOps. Practically nobody at the company has ever had the job of a DevOps, but here they are creating tools that are going to make their lives much, much better if they do a good job. Yet how do they know how to do a good job?

And 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. But, what I'm curious about is, let's say Amtrak has DevOps. What was their experience like at the exact same moment I was trying to book my trip? Were they still sleeping? Were they up and about? Did they know there was a problem? Did they have an idea what the solution was? Where were they in that process? And what tools would have made their life much easier? What were they doing by hand that they shouldn't be doing by hand? What information did they not have that they should have at that moment? I want to know what the experience of that moment was like for that developer, from the moment the problem came to be, till the moment it was resolved.

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.

They never had that kind of perspective.

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.

The X-Mentor: There's a lot of talk about the relevance of UX research, with discussions on LinkedIn and at conferences. What's your take on where UX research stands today?

Jared: UX Research is just a label for a bunch of activities. So, to ask what’s the current state, it's like saying, what's the current state of cooking? I'm not sure it's a very meaningful question.

The X-Mentor: Interesting, there’s been international conferences built around that very question.

Well, let’s see, I mean, there's some prompts that are underneath that question. For example, like you'll hear at recent conferences topics like “methods and frameworks,” or the “evolution of user research” or thinking about “business outcomes” and “connecting user research to business outcomes” or how to be more effective in your “communication of your research.” But at the end of the day, you have a lot of people asking, “is user research still a career path that's relevant?” And how much of it really depends on your ability to show business impact?

Jared: I think that showing the value you bring to an organization, no matter what you do, is always important to your survivability in the organization. If nobody understands what value you bring, why should they keep paying you? So, you always have to do this, and we've always had to do this. The thing is what makes us valuable has changed.

The X-Mentor: What's changed?

Jared: I guess the question is do you want to talk about Pre 2007? Or post 2007.

The X-Mentor: I want to discuss the period after 2007, focusing on recent trends in the field. The design and UX landscape have broadened significantly, but it has also experienced many layoffs, with some of the most senior leaders losing their positions.

Jared: Yeah, those are isolated cases. There are more people actively working in the field, in places where their work is valued than ever before. That has not changed.

The X-Mentor: Observably so. That true.

Jared: So, we can point to the fact that it's like saying some football coach had a couple of bad years and they finally let him go. So, football coaches are on the way out. I mean, that's not true. It is not indicative of a trend. But I think there are a lot of people who are out looking for work right now and I don't want to diminish their experience. It's very hard to find a job for a whole bunch of reasons that have nothing to do with them. They're looking for something to blame, and so I think we've seen this rise in public discussion about how the field has been ruined. But you know what, in every field I know of, doctors are complaining that medicine is no longer the way it used to be. And police complain that police work is no longer the way it used to be. Everybody complains that all this stuff is no longer the way it used to be. I think that's just human nature. The reality is, I am very optimistic about UX and general user research in particular, because I think there's a tremendous amount of unfulfilled promise that we can latch on to.

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.

So, what happens is, 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.

The X-Mentor: Suppose you're speaking to an executive about why the decisions they're making are in some way, shape or form a UX decision. What are you articulating to them in terms of the value of design or UX?

Jared: Apple Sells 1/10th the number of phones that Samsung sells and makes 10 times the amount of money.

Why?

Right, that's the question.

The X-Mentor: In our X-Interview with Forrester’s Maxie Schmidt, we talked about the four dimensions of value, we've touched on economic, functional, experiential, and symbolic value. Economic value considers affordability, like how Samsung is cheaper than iPhone. Functional value looks at whether a product does what it’s supposed to. Experiential and symbolic value add other dimensions. Symbolic value, where you can often charge a premium, seems crucial.

What are your thoughts on how symbolic value affects pricing and customer perception?

Jared: No, I think that's the wrong abstraction. You can charge a premium price because the perceived value is really high. There are only two ways to succeed.

1. You can sell the lowest cost product, not the lowest priced product, but the lowest cost product.

2. Or you can sell based on the best quality.

A lowest cost product is a product where your cost to produce and deliver that product is lower than all your competitors.

The X-Mentor: But does the company get a greater profit margin?

Jared: Right. But more importantly, you can bring the price of that product below what your competitors can make and deliver it for. And if you can do that, they must work at a loss while you work at a profit, even though it's a small profit, you put everybody out of business. This is how Amazon does this, how Walmart does it. They don't have the best product. They just focus on keeping their costs lower than everybody else's.

The X-Mentor: Are you saying that you want to keep the cost of UX down low as well?

Jared: No, I'm just saying that's one of the ways you make money.

The X-Mentor: OK. Understood.

Jared: The other way you make money is by just charging lower than they can, eventually they must fold at the poker table and then you can raise your prices all you want. Until you get another competitor, and then you play the game all over again.

That's Walmart’s secret, right? They put all these stores out of business by just always underselling them. But that only works for commodity products. That only works when you don't care which box of laundry soap you buy, right. For things where there's some quality, some aspect of that product that people will pay extra for, that stops working. So, by quality it could be, and this is what I taught in my engineering management school so many years ago, by quality it could be more reliability. It could be better maintainability. It could be status. You know, people see me in this car, that's worth paying for.

The X-Mentor: Yup. “status” is what The X-Mentor has recently been calling “symbolic value” and the “meaning you get from doing business with the brand.”

And spot-on with Walmart! Sam Walton has always focused on “low prices always.” Which also means low-cost always. Walmart’s secret is that they put all these stores out of business, then employed those same workers at far less than living wage.

Jared: Yes, I understand. Right.

But that's just one aspect of quality. There are dozens of them.

If you talk to people who work in the construction industry, they will pay more for durability of their tools.

The X-Mentor: Jared, what’s your response to those who claim UX has turned into a commodity?

Jared: It's not a commodity.

I mean, by definition, it can't be a commodity because all experiences are not the same.

UX as a (Dry-Cleaning) Service

The X-Mentor: Some people are concerned that UX design is being spread too thin because senior design leaders are losing their jobs and product managers are taking over their responsibilities. This shift seems to be driving some senior design leaders to pursue careers in product management instead. As a result, design might be getting pushed further down in the organization and becoming less influential.

What is your response to those who worry that this trend is diminishing the role of design in companies?

Jared: That's just a lack of good leadership. There is an absence of UX leadership in that place. The leaders don't know how to work strategically, so they're being replaced by people who do.

The X-Mentor: People are concerned about what this means for their career path, when they are being pushed further down in the organization. For example, in my previous X-Interview with Robert Fabricant we discussed something he talked about in his most recent Fast Company article where he stated that, “Tech companies, too, are downsizing their in-house design functions with design increasingly seen as a subordinate capability in product-led organizations.”

Can you drill down more on your comment?

What does it mean when you say, “The leaders don’t know how to work strategically?”

Jared: Yeah, I mean, this is a very big shift in the conversation. This is a problem of the fact that UX people have been taught for 30 years now how to be tactical.

None of them have been taught how to work strategically. It's not the same skill set. And because it's not the same skill set; they're not prepared.

So, in these organizations, they're prepared to work in a company like Samsung. But they're not prepared to work in a company like Apple. They're not prepared to make their company a company like Apple. They're prepared to make a whole boatload of products that have features in them, but don't necessarily deliver better experiences. And everybody's constantly guessing what the features should be, and you just build as many different products as you can and hopefully one of them sticks. Right? Samsung, at any given time, has ten different divisions that make 10 different versions of phones. And Apple makes 1.

There are other equivalents too. For example, an easy one is Disney versus Six Flags. Six Flags has a lot of theme parks. Disney has five. And Disney makes 20 times the money in their theme parks than Six Flags does. And nobody gives up a week of their vacation to go hang out at Six Flags. They maybe go for a day. Why? Right! Why will people pay for a premium to stay at a resort inside the Disney Park? Six Flags doesn't even offer resorts. If you don't understand the experience that people have, and if you don't have leadership that understands the experience that people have, then you fail to deliver products that people care about.

And you're always just guessing. I.e., Maybe they'll like this one if they don't like that one. We’ve got 10 others to choose from. And when you work in that environment, what is the role of UX people except to just make sure that each of the products you put out are the least terrible versions that you can? And that's tactical.

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.

The X-Mentor: That's an interesting way of seeing the problem. This is fascinating!

You mentioned that UX professionals aren't typically trained to be strategic, suggesting there's a need for additional preparation before they start working in the field. Many people believe you don't need a college degree to learn UX, but you seem to be saying that some strategic skills should be part of their training. Is that correct? Could you explain what kind of strategic training you think UX professionals need?

Jared: I think that if you want to be strategic, you must learn how to be strategic. I do not think that everyone in UX needs to be strategic before day one of their career.

I think that being strategic in UX is like being the executive chef of a Michelin star restaurant. You may aspire to that, but at some point, you must learn how to make omelets, and that's tactical. That's not strategic. And so, you probably start by making omelets. And you probably do a decent number of years as a line chef before you start thinking about being an executive chef. And the skill set to be line chef and executive chef are tremendously different, and there's very little overlap. Executive chefs are rarely in the kitchen. And line chefs rarely use the same recipes that home cooks do. And so, it's a very different experience. It's just a different job and you must be trained in that job.

Could you be a UX leader without ever having practiced UX?

I guess so, but that's not the path that most people are going to take. Most people get to this point where they reach the peak of what they can do as an individual contributor, and if they want to do something different, they're going to have to get into leadership and part of leadership is constructing a vision of what the future could be that's better than the future you'll do if you just keep doing what you've always been doing.

That's when you start to get strategic. You need to be able to go into an organization and say how can I use every piece of resource and experience and knowledge and technique and process and method and skill set, and people who do UX work to help the company be a market leader, to help it deliver innovative products, to make sure that if we're going to do a merger with another company, that the experience that comes out of that merger is better than the individual experiences of the company staying separate.

How do we make sure that every decision we make makes the lives of our customers and our users better? Have you ever gotten a new release of a product that you thought was great, but the release actually made it worse?

The X-Mentor: Yes, at Microsoft Office where 80% of the features in the product were scarcely being used. Yet, that didn’t stop the PM’s from releasing even more features. It’s the opposite of simple, it’s complicated.

Jared: OK, this is what I'm talking about. Where was the strategy that ensured that every new release in fact improves the experience, not degrades it?

The X-Mentor: You know this really does connect to not one or two, but several X-Interviews that I've done, starting with the very first X-Interview with Peter Bull, where we hear this same basic message over and over. Which is essentially, “You need a plan for how your design team and design operations are going to contribute. Every other area has a plan, so it should be the same.”

Businesses often use metrics and accountability tools like RACI charts to track progress and responsibility, but design teams are usually not held to the same standards. This raises the question of where strategic planning and accountability for design should be handled. If it's not happening at the top levels of leadership, should it be the responsibility of Design Operations, like other operational areas in the business?

Jared: No, it's the lack of a strategy, the lack of leadership.

There's no leader. So, if there's no leader, it's not going to happen. It's a void. To say that this hasn't happened is false. It has happened. It just doesn't happen everywhere. As William Gibson said, “The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed.”

The X-Mentor: In the 1990s, the emergence of graphical user interfaces changed the role of design in technology.

Today, we're seeing a similar shift with automation, cloud technology, and large language models. These changes are affecting design, UI, and how people work in these fields.

Given these new technologies, where do you see the future of design heading?

What roles and skills will remain essential, and which ones might change or become less relevant?

Jared: Well, I don't think any of those things change the fact that we just have a void of leaders. There are just a few people who know how to lead UX, period. And this has always been the case. But there were other people carrying the water for a while. And those people have other pressures on them and they're no longer carrying the water for UX people. And so, what's happening is that as organizations try to make the production of innovation into a repeatable process, they have decided that UX is more like a dry cleaner than a leader.

Another way to think about it is, a business is going through a major transformation. It's happening across the business in every department, sales, marketing, finance, all these areas. For instance, auto manufacturers must think about a future where they're no longer producing the cars they've made for 120 years. But they must produce a whole new type of car that takes a whole new type of factory that has a whole new supply chain, right? And so, they're trying to figure out how in the next 10 to 15 years, they're going to completely convert their manufacturing and sales processes to support this whole new technology, or they will die.

So where does the CEO of that organization turn to?

To make sure that their teams are working right, they go to their head of Manufacturing operations and say, are we converting the factories? Are we training the people? They go to their service departments and say, do we know how to service this new type of vehicle? They're going to their sales department and say, do we understand how to sell this? They're going to their marketing department to say, do we understand how to market this? We're going to go through a 10 year or 15-year transition where we must make both and support both. Are we equipped to do that?

There's one team they're not turning to for advice on this transformation. That's their corporate custodial team – the people who clean the buildings. They think custodial work is important. They think they should have clean buildings. They're absolutely vital to the organization, but they're not part of the transformation. They're not seen as someone who needs to be involved in every conversation. So, the CEO doesn't turn to them. They're not on the transformation task force.

Where does UX live?

Are they on the transformation task force or are they sitting with the custodial team waiting to be told what to do once the changes happen?

And in most organizations, they're not on the task force for the transformation because no one thinks to put them there because they've never understood what their contribution to the organization was. But it's absolutely clear that if you're an organization that's going to go through a major transformation, that major transformation better take into account what customers want and need, what employees will need to learn to service two types of vehicles simultaneously. What your supply chain will need from a people standpoint to make sure that you've got everybody in line, so they always know where things are in the inventory. Right?

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.

The X-Mentor: Jared, thank you for sharing this fascinating story and bold message for our readers to contemplate. It takes a UX pioneer such as yourself to put things in the proper perspective and give us a clear understanding of what’s happening and what needs to be done. I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me today on this important topic.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Jared M. Spool is a Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre. Center Centre provides UX professional development programs to coach today’s emerging and established UX leaders, so they can guide their organizations to deliver market-leading products and services.

Greg Parrott is The X-Mentor and publisher of The X-Interviews.