Jared Spool, CEO and founding principal of User Interface Engineering, spoke last night at the
BayCHI Monthly Program on the topic "It’s a Great Time To Be a UX Designer."
My notes are below.
It’s a Great Time To Be a UX Designer
Apple and Design
- Everyone want to be like apple
- Apple stores had as much foot traffic last year as all the Disney parks combined
- In 2012, Apple made $6050/square foot of retail space
- Even alcohol companies want to be like Apple
- The Apple store is powerful in the way they display products
- iPads as signs
- Checkout from a mobile device carried by any employee
- They focus on the tiny details of retail experience that no one bothered with before
- Everything in the Apple store is intentional
Design: the Rendering of Intent
- At the heart of design in intention
- Design runs on a spectrum from imitation to innovation
- Imitation is cheap - take what works and copy it
- Organizations that often imitate see design as unimportant
- Design is a commodity
- Business wins when it is intentionally innovative
- Business wins when it values design
Case studies: Innovation by focusing on design
- Square
- suddenly anyone can accept credit card payments (babysitter, neighbor, etc)
- Zipcar
- The innovation was the reduction in staff needed to maintain a single car
- Costs were lower, meaning higher volume and better prices
- Cirque de Soleil
- People went to traditional circuses to see the animals
- But, animals are expensive to maintain (health, transportation, feeding)
- Cirque created a circus with no animal acts
- Cut costs overall
- Money could be spent on better performers, music, sets, costumes, etc
- Children no longer came to the circus
- Means higher ticket prices can be charged
- Cirque makes more money every evening than all of Broadway combined
Design: About the Business
- Apple is its own manufacturer, distributer, and retailer
- They get all the money and never discount
- Can beat the competition because of this
- Great business models are intentionally designed
- Great businesses need designers everywhere
Innovation is NOT Adding New Inventions
- Apple titled their help people "geniuses"
- Makes customers geel cool even they their products break
- Appointments instead of waiting in a long line
- Innovation is adding new value
Experiences can be mapped, measures, and designed
- What do we intend?
- TurboTax SnapTax
- Most people can do taxes in 60 seconds by taking a picture of W2
- GE Adventure Series MRI for kids
- Designed by Doug Deitz
- MRIs are scary to kids with cancer
- 80% of kids have to be sedated to get through it
- Deitz designed a machine that is a FUN experience
- Looks like a pirate ship
- Everyone dresses like pirates
- Kids and parents get an experience
- Kids are told if they lay still they will see mermaids
- Sedation rate went from 80% to 0.01%
Experience Design: the rendering of intent within the gaps
- Experience designers are in demand
- Big companies acquire to get them
- Estimated 150,000 job posting for UX designers in the US
- An Experience Designer knows:
- Information architecture
- Copy Writing
- Design Process Management
- User Research Practices
- Interaction Design
- Information Design
- Visual Design
- Editing and Curating
- The BEST also know:
- Ethnography
- Domain Knowledge
- Business Knowledge
- Analytics
- Marketing
- Technology
- ROI
- Social Networks
- User Cases
- Agile Methods
- Of those, the very, very best also:
- Knew how to explain to people through story telling what they were trying to do
- Effectively gave and received critiques
- Could sketch an idea so that everyone would "get" it
- Could present ideas at the drop of a hat, and everyone would "get" it
- Facilitated groups to bring across the nuances of what would make a product great
- It's really hard to be a UX designer
Specialists vs Generalists
- The differences between a specialist and a generalist are what the economy can afford
- Specialists appear when the economy can afford to have them
- Generalists succeed the rest of the time
- Design had a 3rd category: Compartmentalists
- Compartmentalists can ONLY do 1 thing
- Compartmentalism = a career-limiting design
- The design world favors generalists
- UX Generalist = Experience Designers (aka Unicorns)
How do you become a Design Unicorn?
- Pick an area where you need help & master it
- Train yourself to be good at it
- Practice your new skills at home (a lot)
- Deconstruct as many designs as you can
- Seek out feedback on your work
- Listen to it
- Teach Others
- You learn a lot from teaching something to another person
The Unicorn is Design's most important innovation
Making Unicorns
- Junior UX designers have a place in companies, if they have the right stuff
- Skills are cheap; craftsmanship takes time
- The Unicorn Institute
Additional Resources:
- "Save the Cat" by Blake Snyder
- Learn about storytelling
- User Interface Engineering
What I asked:
How do I do a better job of getting my engineering team involved in valuing design?
- Get everyone talking the same language
- Look at your product and a competitor side by side
- describe the differences, and come up with vocabulary to describe it
- Once you have a vocabulary, determine a scale from good to bad for each
- Define that scale together
- With common vocabulary, you can then look at any feature together and talk it through, set goals, and understand each other more easily