Podcast appearances and mentions of Jared Spool

If LinkedIn is to be believed UX design is a hot mess right now. People are regularly announcing that death of UX, complaining they cannot get jobs and entire companies are abandoning the term UX for product design. Not to mention the fact that AI will supposedly be replacing us all. If you care at all about improving the user experience, this will no doubt feel concerning. It certainly shocked me when I first saw the sheer number of doom and gloom comments.The Real State Of UXBut the more I looked into this the more I realized that this does not represent the reality. In fact the World Economic Forum believe that the UX profession will be one of the fastest growing roles over the next five years. They also identify deep human insight, strategic thinking, and leadership as key skills, all of which are inherent in the roll of UX.So where does this disparity between online sentiment and economic predictions come from? The problem lies in how people choose to define user experience design, and the fact that many fundamentally misunderstand the breadth and depth of the discipline.Many Misunderstand UXFor many, UX design has been largely synonymous with UI design. Sure, a UX designer might spend more time conducting user research and testing, but their primary deliverable is still a user interface.When you have this view of UX it is fair to say that things are dramatically changing at the moment.AI is fundamentally changing the nature of how we interact with technology and we may well see less interactions happen through a traditional user interface.There is a growing number of designers working on products these days and so adopting the title product designer instead makes sense.Add to this the fact that the market is over saturated with bootcamp graduates and it is not surprising that there is a feeling that UX is on the decline.But this really only look at a fraction of the user experience.Jared Spool put it well when he compared it to catering. He says it is like we are seeing a decline in demand for burgers and too many cooks who flip burgers. These burger flippers are worried, but instead of saying that burgers are in decline they are concluding people don't eat out anymore. They are suggesting all restaurants are in trouble, not just burger joints.UX Strategy is the FutureI believe UX design, in its broadest sense, is more in demand than ever before. But it's not just about tactics - it's about strategy. The work goes beyond making Figma files and user interfaces. Instead, it focuses on how organizations work, their culture, how they communicate, and all the ways people interact with them. The user interface is just a small piece of this bigger picture.We Need a New Generation of UX ChampionsThe trouble is few are equipped to fulfill this role. Bootcamps certainly don't teach it and many of those who find themselves in UX leadership roles have been given no training.To change how people see and value UX, we need new generation of leaders. These leaders must know what UX really encompasses and how to make positive changes in their organizations.I Want To Help You And UX EvolveWith all this in mind, I am relaunching my newsletter with a focus on UX strategy and leadership. After working in this field for 30 years and with things as they stand today, I feel this is the perfect time to share what I've learned.My hope is that I can give back to the community and maybe shape the future of UX to be about more than UI design. Realistically I am now in the latter part of my career and so my desire is to help the next generation of UX leaders and advocates.In each issue I am going to take you step-by-step through what true UX looks like and how to impact the entire user experience, not just the user interface.Ultimately the plan is to bring all of this together into a book. However, until then you can subscribe and join me on the journey. You can also signup at anytime in the future and take the email course from the beginning so you don't miss out on what I have covered to that point.My intention is to write this for anybody who cares about the user experience, not just user experience designers. As you will quickly discover, I believe that UX is an organization wide responsibility and that we all impact the experience whatever our role. But, I also want to help UX designers who want to do more than work on interfaces and move into leadership roles.I am hoping you will join me for this journey. For me this is a passion project and an attempt to finally ensure user experience gets the respect it deserves. However, that is only going to work if people like you join me.So, if that sounds good, you can subscribe below today.

Today I am going to try to answer a fundamental question: how should you actually measure user experience, especially with data products—and tie this to business value? It's easy to get lost in analytics and think we're seeing the whole picture, but I argue that this is far from the truth. Product leaders need to understand the subjective experience of our users—and unfortunately, analytics does not tell us this. The map is not the territory.   In this episode, I discuss why qualitative data and subjective experience is the data that will most help you make product decisions that will lead you to increased business value. If users aren't getting value from your product(s), and their lives aren't improving, business value will be extremely difficult to create. So today, I share my thoughts on how to move beyond thinking that analytics is the only way to track UX, and how this helps product leaders uncover opportunities to produce better organizational value.  Ultimately, it's about creating indispensable solutions and building trust, which is key for any product team looking to make a real impact. Hat tip to UX guru Jared Spool who inspired several of the concepts I share with you today.   Highlights/ Skip to  Don't target adoption for adoption's sake, because product usage can be a tax or benefit (3:00) Why your analytical mind may bias you—and what changes you might have to do this type of product and user research work (7:31) How "making the user's life better" translates to organizational value (10:17) Using Jared Spool's roller coaster chart to measure your product's user experience and find your opportunities and successes (13:05) How do you measure that you have done a good job with your UX? (17:28)  Conclusions and final thoughts (21:06)   Quotes from Today's Episode Usage doesn't automatically equal value. Analytics on your analytics is not telling you useful things about user experience or satisfaction. Why? "The map is not the territory." Analytics measure computer metrics, not feelings, and let's face it, users aren't always rational. To truly gauge user value, we need qualitative research - to talk to users - and to hear what their subjective experience is. Want *meaningful* adoption? Talk to and observe your users. That's how you know you are actually making things better. When it's better for them, the business value will follow. (3:12) Make better things—where better is a measurement based on the subjective experience of the user—not analytics. Usable doesn't mean they will necessarily want it. Sessions and page views don't tell you how people *feel* about it. (7:39) Think about the dreadful tools you and so many have been forced to use: the things that waste your time and don't let you focus on what's really important. Ever talked to a data scientist who is sick of doing data prep instead of building models, and wondering, “why am I here? This isn't what I went to school for.” Ignoring these personal frustrations and feelings and focusing only on your customers' feature requests, JIRA tickets, stakeholder orders, requirements docs, and backlog items is why many teams end up building technically right, effectively wrong solutions. These end user frustrations are where we find our opportunities to delight—and create products and UXs that matter. To improve their lives, we need to dig into their workflows, identify frustrations, and understand the context around our data product solutions. Product leaders need to fall in love with the problems and the frustrations—these are the magic keys to the value kingdom. However, to do this well, you probably need to be doing less delivery and more discovery. (10:27) Imagine a line chart with a Y-axis that is "frustration" at the bottom to "delight" at the top. The X-axis is their user experience, taking place over time. As somebody uses your data product to do their job/task, you can plot their emotional journey. “Get the data, format the data, include the data in a tool, derive some conclusion, challenge the data, share it, make a decision” etc. As a product manager, you probably know what a use-case looks like. Your first job is to plot their existing experience trying/doing that use case with your data product. Where are they frustrated? Where are they delighted? Celebrate your peaks/delighters, and fall in love with the valleys where satisfaction work needs to be done. Connect the dots between these valleys and business value. Address the valleys—especially the ones that impede business value—and you'll be on your way to “showing the value of your data product.” Analytics on your data product won't tell you this information; the map is not the territory. (13:22) Analytics about your data product are lying to you. They give you the facts about the product, but not about the user. An example? “Time spent” doing a task. How long is too long? 5 minutes? 50? Analytics will tell you precisely how long it took. The problem is, it won't tell you how long it FELT it took. And guess what? Your customers and users only care about how long it felt it took—vs. their expectation. Sure, at some point, analytics might eventually help—at scale—understand how your data product is doing—but first you have to understand how people FEEL about it. Only then will you know whether 5 minutes, or 50 minutes is telling you anything meaningful about what—if anything—needs to change. (16:17)

Jared Spool joins Anthony and Katie to discuss what it means to be a strategic designer. We cover what strategy means, different leadership styles, and the difference between outcomes vs outputs. Find Jared Spool on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmspool/ Hosts: Anthony Hobday, Generalist Product Designer: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/hobdaydesign⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Katie Langerman, Systems Designer: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/KatieLangerman

We've all experienced it: the frustration of a poorly designed product or service. But what sets apart the truly exceptional user experiences from the merely satisfactory ones?In this episode, Hannah Clark is joined by Jared Spool—Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre—to delve into the nuances of UX design, exploring the gap between meeting expectations and creating genuine delight.Resources from this episode:Subscribe to The Product Manager newsletterConnect with Jared on LinkedInCheck out Leaders of Awesomeness - Center Centre

Welcome to this special episode of Product Momentum, where four ITX leaders share their hands-on experience establishing (Upstate Product Meetup) and growing (Upstate UX Meetup, to nearly 600 members!) two Rochester-area communities of practice (CoP). Perhaps it was the recent conversations with Petra Wille and Jared Spool that inspired the idea for this up-close look … The post 141 / How To Build a Community of Practice, with ITX Leaders in Product + UX appeared first on ITX Corp..

In this conversation, Jared Spool discusses the roadblocks organizations face in embracing a UX-focused culture and shifting their focus to the user. He emphasizes the importance of understanding users' needs and experiences and making them the center of decision-making. Jared also shares strategies for winning over skeptics, building a thriving UX culture, and breaking through resistance to change. He highlights the significance of education and training in creating a user-centric culture and explains how companies can keep UX at the top of their agenda. Jared emphasizes the role of leaders in influencing and inspiring others and offers advice for UX professionals looking to make a real impact. He also discusses the importance of measuring success by the impact on users' lives and shares examples of organizations that prioritize user experience. In this conversation, Jared Spool discusses the importance of improving the user experience and shares insights on how organizations can foster a culture of continuous learning. He emphasizes the need for feedback loops and highlights the impact of providing timely updates and communication to users. Spool also emphasizes the importance of understanding users' experiences and gathering insights to drive enhancements. He suggests spending time with customers and having real conversations to uncover patterns and identify areas for improvement. Additionally, he discusses the skills and resources needed to drive a user-focused approach and emphasizes the importance of strategic thinking in UX. Spool's passion for improving experiences and his belief in the possibility of intentional good experiences drives his motivation to push the boundaries of UX. He also discusses the future of UX and the need for organizations to learn from those who are already doing a great job. Lastly, he shares how he turned his impatience with the status quo into a strength by questioning everything and focusing on what is truly valuable. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/samelogic/message

When Jared Spool first visited Product Momentum a few years ago, he talked about the struggle designers feel when they're directed to add new features to a design without first understanding the problem to be solved. “Great designers don't fall in love with their solutions,” he advised us. “They fall in love with their problems.” … The post 129 / Strategic UX: The Path to Outcome-Driven Design, with Jared Spool appeared first on ITX Corp..

Rich has been doing enterprise/B2B product management since 1988, worked at 6 Silicon Valley startups, and has been an interim CPO or leadership coach for more than 200 large and small tech companies. He wrote "The Art of Product Management" and was the Founder of Product Camp. Rich has taught at top business schools worldwide, at conferences, and chaired the first product manager/product owner tracks at the annual Agile Conference. This episode dives into key topics: **Early days of the Internet **Life-Changing Moment **Explaining the Role of the PM **Addressing Roadmpa Amnesia **Prioritizing on Business Objectives **Dealing with Sales Requests **Product Led Organizations **Building Products that Generate Revenue **Driving Business Strategy **The Iterative Process of Strategy Development **Understanding the Company Business Strategy **Making Hard Decisions Recommended Resources: **What Do Product Leaders Do?** https://www.mironov.com/whatleadersdo/ **Business Cases Are Stories About Money** https://www.mironov.com/moneystories/ **Four Laws Of Software Economics** https://www.mironov.com/4laws1/ **Building and Scaling a Product Team (video)** https://www.mironov.com/prodanon/ Highlighted books: Continuous Discover, Teresa Torres, Outcomes vs Output, Josh Seiden, Managing the Unmanageable, Ron Lichty Anything from Jared Spool or Steve Blank or Holly Hester-Reilly Where to find Rich Mironov: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richmironov/ Dragonboat Website: https://www.mironov.com/ Where to find us: Website: https://productized.co/ Newsletter: http://bit.ly/3aMvWn2 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/school/produ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/productized.co/ Where to find Margarida: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margarida-cosme-pereira/

Em 2003, um consultor de marketing chamado Fred Reichheld incendiou o mundo corporativo com o artigo na Harvard Business Review, The One Number You Need To Grow . Ele afirmou que, ao fazer uma única pergunta – uma pergunta destinada a determinar a lealdade do cliente – a empresa poderia medir os sentimentos dos clientes em relação ao seu negócio. Ele encerrou o artigo com “Este número é o número que você precisa para crescer. É tão simples e profundo.” Jared Spool no seu artigo “NPS é considerado prejudicial” não concorda com essa última frase. “Acontece que não é simples nem profundo. Não ajuda as empresas a crescer., Nem sequer diz o quão fiel o cliente é.“ Mas quem é o Jared Spool? Bem, ele é um escritor norte-americano, pesquisador, palestrante, educador e especialista em temas de usabilidade, software e design. Ele é o fundador da User Interface Engineering, uma consultoria especializada em pesquisa e treinamento de usabilidade de interface, a maior organização de seu tipo no mundo. Embora o NPS tenha ganhado popularidade entre os executivos de empresas e seja considerado um instrumento amplamente utilizado para medir a fidelidade do cliente, na prática, também gerou controvérsia nos círculos acadêmicos e de pesquisa de mercado. Alguns estudiosos questionam o quão confiável o NPS realmente é para prever o crescimento de uma empresa. Além disso, algumas pesquisas indicam que a pergunta central do NPS, sobre a "probabilidade de recomendar", talvez não seja mais eficaz que outras medidas tradicionais de fidelidade do cliente, como satisfação geral ou intenção de compra futura. Mesmo assim ouvimos falar de empresas que lançam novos programas de medição de NPS todos os dias. E isso tem uma explicação. O Net Promoter Score (também conhecido como NPS) atende a todos os requisitos comuns de uma métrica de negócios "útil": Voltado para o artigo do Jared, ele traz um trecho interessante. Ao implementar o NPS, perguntamos a cada entrevistado Qual a probabilidade de você recomendar [EMPRESA] a um amigo ou colega? Na superfície, essa pergunta parece ser sobre a fidelidade do cliente. No artigo original da HBR, o autor afirmou que ela se correlacionava fortemente com compras repetidas e referências. Estudos posteriores mostram que não. Veja por que não: As melhores perguntas de pesquisa são sobre o comportamento passado, não o comportamento futuro. Perguntar a um participante do estudo Você vai tentar viver um estilo de vida saudável?, ou Você vai desistir do açúcar?, ou Você vai comprar este produto?, requer que eles prevejam seu comportamento futuro. Estamos mais interessados no que eles fizeram do que no que vão fazer. Estamos interessados no comportamento real, não em uma previsão de comportamento. No artigo tem um trecho de 16 meses de dados NPS de um único cliente de ecommerce. Por isso chamamos Leando Lima, Amyris Fernandes e Edu Fonseca para compartilharem suas opiniões sobre NPS. Aproveite os 15% de desconto no Workshop de Dados e Métricas: https://www.sympla.com.br/workshop-de-dados-e-metricas-de-produto__2144347?d=PG15

Join our free UX writing course: https://course.uxwritinghub.com/free_course Follow Jared Spool https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmspool/ Your host, as always, is me, Yuval Keshtcher. 

Melissa Perri welcomes Jared Spool to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Jared and Melissa talk about how user experience as a discipline has grown over the years, the challenges that come with it, and how to improve UX for both product leaders and customers. Jared is the co-founder, co-CEO, and Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre - UIE, where he and his team “uncover what it takes to drive organizations to deliver the best-designed products and services.” Throughout his career, Jared has worked in the White House and has been instrumental in establishing digital organizations and shaping the future of UX. His extensive experience and expertise in the field have earned him a reputation as a thought leader in the UX community. Here are some key points you'll hear Melissa and Jared explore: Jared talks about how he got started in his UX career. The biggest issue product management currently faces with user experience, according to Jared, is that user experience is both seen and treated as a service. This kind of approach to user experience work does not produce good quality products or results. Product management and leadership has to make sure the products aren't only being built right, but that they're being built for the right purpose and solution.  The core basis of UX strategy is utilizing all the skills, resources, knowledge and experience available to help an organization achieve its goals. "[Strategy] involves having ways to measure, so it has some metrics capability. It involves understanding how to make sure we're solving the right problems, so it gets involved in the roadmap. You need to have a vision of where you're trying to get to. That vision has to be compelling so that everybody gets excited about that vision," Jared emphasizes.  What differentiates a product strategy from a UX strategy is product strategy is about the progression of the product and UX strategy is about the progression of the user experience. Product leaders need to understand the importance of having a UX department in their company. UX brings long-term value to companies. Melissa talks about the most successful product organizations having their management teams partner with UX. Understanding your customer user experience will do wonders for improving the quality of your product output. Jared explains that his school for UX designers teaches all the relevant UX concepts, as well as how to work with product managers and organizations. Smaller teams allow for UX designers to be able to share their thoughts more openly and freely, and brainstorm more. The product leader must create an environment that allows designers to brainstorm solutions to challenges without feeling like they are walking on eggshells. Melissa and Jared talk about the challenges that come with company mergers that do not take into account user experience. Companies spend millions of dollars on mergers but have no idea how the product will look at the end of that merger or what the user experience will be.  The more you can improve your user's experience, the more valuable they will see you and the more they will want to do business with you.  Resources Jared Spool | LinkedIn Leaders of Awesomeness

Melissa Perri welcomes Jared Spool to this episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Jared and Melissa talk about how user experience as a discipline has grown over the years, the challenges that come with it, and how to improve UX for both product leaders and customers. Jared is the co-founder, co-CEO, and Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre - UIE, where he and his team “uncover what it takes to drive organizations to deliver the best-designed products and services.” Throughout his career, Jared has worked in the White House and has been instrumental in establishing digital organizations and shaping the future of UX. His extensive experience and expertise in the field have earned him a reputation as a thought leader in the UX community. Here are some key points you'll hear Melissa and Jared explore: Jared talks about how he got started in his UX career. The biggest issue product management currently faces with user experience, according to Jared, is that user experience is both seen and treated as a service. This kind of approach to user experience work does not produce good quality products or results. Product management and leadership has to make sure the products aren't only being built right, but that they're being built for the right purpose and solution.  The core basis of UX strategy is utilizing all the skills, resources, knowledge and experience available to help an organization achieve its goals. "[Strategy] involves having ways to measure, so it has some metrics capability. It involves understanding how to make sure we're solving the right problems, so it gets involved in the roadmap. You need to have a vision of where you're trying to get to. That vision has to be compelling so that everybody gets excited about that vision," Jared emphasizes.  What differentiates a product strategy from a UX strategy is product strategy is about the progression of the product and UX strategy is about the progression of the user experience. Product leaders need to understand the importance of having a UX department in their company. UX brings long-term value to companies. Melissa talks about the most successful product organizations having their management teams partner with UX. Understanding your customer user experience will do wonders for improving the quality of your product output. Jared explains that his school for UX designers teaches all the relevant UX concepts, as well as how to work with product managers and organizations. Smaller teams allow for UX designers to be able to share their thoughts more openly and freely, and brainstorm more. The product leader must create an environment that allows designers to brainstorm solutions to challenges without feeling like they are walking on eggshells. Melissa and Jared talk about the challenges that come with company mergers that do not take into account user experience. Companies spend millions of dollars on mergers but have no idea how the product will look at the end of that merger or what the user experience will be.  The more you can improve your user's experience, the more valuable they will see you and the more they will want to do business with you.  Resources Jared Spool | LinkedIn Leaders of Awesomeness

As designers, we have been talking a lot about strategy, maturity, and culture. All these things need to be discussed and worked but before them, we need to discuss the growth, and maturity, of the UX industry or the digital product industry. This maturity can impact our point of view when we talk about the difference between UX strategy and UX tactics. The strategy is usually defined by the leader, but we want to stay focused on the application or operationalization of this strategy as well. This show will pass through some questions like: Are we showing the real impact we can deliver, as designers? What is the most challenging thing for designers in companies? Can the classic team of one designer bring a strategic view to the company? What are the most important or interesting Metrics for experience? For this, we invited Jared Spool a legendary professional from this digital industry, who has been working to uncover what it takes to drive organizations to deliver the best-designed products and services. He is an American writer, researcher, speaker, educator, and expert on usability, software, and design topics. He also runs the foremost school for user experience design focused on UX Design strategy, Design, User experience, Usability, user interface design, and education. —---------- The past year we decided to start this new project called Good Morning UX, an extension of another show called Bom Dia UX, with such special-international guests. Actually, we invited a lot of professionals who are references for us and that have so much history in our industry. Follow Jared on these links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmspool/ https://www.uie.com/ https://jmspool.medium.com/ https://www.centercentre.com/jared-spool/ https://leaders.centercentre.com/ Jared's book: Manual de Testes de Usabilidade: Planejamento, Design e Condução Eficaz 2ª (segunda) Edição por Rubin, Jeffrey, Chisell, Dana publicado pela Wiley (2008) https://amzn.to/3O7kW4n Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work (Voices That Matter) https://amzn.to/3cgbaiM Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide (Interactive Technologies) (English Edition) https://amzn.to/3z5HluD Multi Pack: User-Centered Web Site Development:A Human Computer Interaction Approach with The Essence of Professional Issues in Computing https://amzn.to/3Ryg8aX

Despite what many Bootcamp programs insinuate up front, making a career switch to UX Design isn't always as simple as it may seem. Many companies simply do not have the capacity to develop design talent, and often require years of technical experience for entry-level roles to get around the need to take time to train employees who may be new to the field.  When design positions are hired for at a more advanced level than necessary, and on-the-job training is neglected, burnout can filter up the chain to mid and senior level roles where employees would also like to advance their skills and careers.  In this episode, Jared and Nadia talk about how to structure hiring plans, talent pipelines, teams, and strategy so that organizations can bring employees in at the right level and grow with the organization, rather than against it.    Here's a look at our discussion:   1:07 - Setting up a talent pipeline with mentorship opportunities to create room for growth 7:31 - How to assess junior talent for growth potential 14:04 - Using the “achiever pattern” to gauge designer experience rather than years on the job 21:58 - Understanding the importance of retention rates over time as it relates to developing junior designers and creating a growth pipeline 33:44 - Designing a workplace where learning on the job is intentional, not accidental 43:27 - Jared's new program, How to Win Stakeholders and Influence Decisions, and other projects Links mentioned in this episode: The UX Strategy of Hiring Juniors Over Seniors WinStakeholders.com Jared Spool's Twitter Account Jared Spool's LinkedIn Account Leaders of Awesomeness UX Centered Careers Center Centre

How can UX designers position themselves to land the best suitable roles? Our guest today is Sarah Doody, UX researcher, designer and founder of Career Strategy Lab. You'll learn what companies look for when they are hiring designers, tips for crafting your portfolio, creative ways to scope projects before starting, and more.Download the MP3 audio file: right-click here and choose Save As.Podcast feed: subscribe to https://feeds.simplecast.com/4MvgQ73R in your favorite podcast app, and follow us on iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts.Show NotesCareer Strategy Lab — Sarah's six month UX career acceleratorEpisode 42: Hiring for UX Positions with Sarah DoodyShopify, Gusto — examples of companies who build reputations as employersHelp! Is There a Cardiothoracic Surgeon in the Room? — an article by Jared Spool on T-shaped professionalsDon't Make Me Think — a book by Steve KrugFollow Sarah on TwitterFollow Sarah on InstagramSubscribe to Sarah on YouTubeToday's SponsorThis show is brought to you by Userlist — the best way for SaaS founders to send onboarding emails, segment your users based on events, and see where your customers get stuck in the product. Start your free trial today at userlist.com.Interested in sponsoring an episode? Learn more here.Leave a ReviewReviews are hugely important because they help new people discover this podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, please leave a review on iTunes. Here's how.

Hi folks. In today's episode, I'm excited to be chatting with Jared Spool on the topic of Mastering UX. Jared has been a well-known and respected figure in the field of user experience for decades. He is an American writer, researcher, speaker, educator, and an expert about usability, software, design, and research. He is the…… Continue reading Episode 41: Mastering User Experience with Jared Spool

Importance of good research and dangers of sloppy research. Most common reasons why clients push back doing research and how to convince them not to do so. Top 6 takeaways. Mentioned in this episode: Anfi's case study template. Ioana's most recent article on Medium on Instagram UX accounts she recommends to follow. A designer that we mention in this episode: Jared Spool. 5 W's + H research method ❓Next topic ideas: Submit your questions or feedback anonymously here

Jared Spool is the founding principal of User Interface Engineering (UIE), a research, training, and consulting firm that specializes in website and product usability, He is also the Maker of Awesomeness at @CenterCentre/@UIE. Helping designers everywhere help their organizations deliver well-designed products and services. In this episode, we talked about:How did Jared started his business Center Centre-UIEMore about running a successful 30 year old companyJared's early design research workHow experienced designers can still make bad designs and design decisionsWhy large organizations can have bad designWhy design so important?And MUCH MORE!Links:Jared Spool TwitterJared Spool ArticlesCenter CentreUIEUX Centered Careers

Join Murray Robinson and Shane Gibson in a conversation with Jared Spool about agile UX design. Designers problems with agile. Accepting that your first design is wrong. Focusing on researching the UX as you go. Making agile, all about delivering great user experience; using actual research of real users to define the meaning of done; establishing true UX metrics; building the entire team's UX capabilities and building a big long term picture of what a really great product or service looks like.   Listen to the podcast on your favourite podcast app: | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | iHeart Radio | PlayerFM | Amazon Music | Listen Notes | TuneIn |    Connect with Jared via Linkedin , Murray via email or Shane in the Twitter-sphere  @shagility.   The No Nonsense Agile podcast is sponsored by: Simply Magical Data

Jared M. Spool is a Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre – UIE. Center Centre is the school he started with Leslie Jensen-Inman to create industry-ready User Experience Designers. UIE is Center Centre's professional development arm, dedicated to understanding what it takes for organizations to produce competitively great products and services. In the 43 years he's been in the tech field, he's worked with hundreds of organizations, written two books, published hundreds of articles and podcasts, and tours the world speaking to audiences everywhere. When he can, he does his laundry in Andover, Massachusetts. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/xagility/message

In this episode, we talk about: Why security UX requires “selective usability” and how that poses unique challenges for designers. Thinking about security in terms of safety systems: putting the burden on the system rather than on the user. How to work effectively with the security team. And Jared shares lots of examples.Jared Spool is the founder of UX consultancy UIE and the co-founder of UX design school Center Centre. Interested in hearing more about what Jared has to say about the security of UX? Watch the talk: Insecure and Unintuitive: Why We Need to Fix the Security of UX.

Our Heroes: Jared Spool by Shift by In The Pocket

In today's episode, I speak with Jared Spool. Jared is the Co-Founder, Co-CEO, and Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre – UIE.  For the past 43 years, Jared has been working with hundreds of organizations in the tech world. He has written two books, published hundreds of articles and podcasts, and has been touring the world speaking to audiences everywhere.We dive into the important qualities of leadership and what it takes to be a true leader with a purpose and vision, the difference between a leader and a manager,  strategies and tactics to grow your skills to become a great UX leader in an organization, and how EQ contributes to being a successful leader.

“Really great user experience, if done well, is completely invisible.” - Jared SpoolOne of the most effective ways to increase word of mouth online or offline is through a fantastic experience worth sharing.In other words, the user's experience should mean almost EVERYTHING to a marketer because it makes marketing easier!In this episode we learn how to be a better marketer by deeply understanding the user and how they interact with our own products or better yet - how they accomplish their goals with our products.PLUS- Discover how to think about the user's experience as a marketer- Learn one powerful technique that will help you stay ahead of your competitors- Find out what Jared does to disconnect and unwind after changing the world every day with better UXWho is our guest in this episode?Jared M. Spool is the Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre – UIE.If you've ever seen Jared speak about user experience (UX) design, you know that he's probably the most effective and knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. He started working in the field of usability and user experience in 1978, before the terms "usability" and "UX" were 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 all over the world. UIE's world-class research organization produces conferences and workshops all over the world 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 created 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 workshops, masterclasses, and conferences in the UX Design industry.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 is a co-author of Web Usability: A Designer's Guide and Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work.You'll find his writing at uie.com. You can also follow his adventures on Twitter at @jmspool, where he tweets daily about UX design, design strategy, design education, and the wondrous customer service habits of the airline industry.

Jared Spool asks whether organisations can really afford the cost of bad UX, and shares some practical methods for increasing design literacy. This episode includes:   What is the UX tipping point and how do we get our organisations there? How do you make the business case for investing in UX and UX research? What is immersive exposure and why is it critical for building design capability?   ======   Who is Jared Spool?   Jared is Co-CEO and Maker for Awesomeness - yes, that's his actual job title - at CenterCentre, the user experience design school that he co-founded in 2012. Through CenterCentre, Jared is helping to create the next generation of industry-ready user experience designers.   In 1988, Jared founded User Interface Engineering (often referred to in UIE), a UX consultancy that for nearly 28 years conducted primary research, on how to create great user experiences through delightful products and services.    Jared is a regular blogger, media-commentator, and the author of the formative book, Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide. He is often referred to as one of the most effective and knowledgeable communicators on the subject of UX.   ======   Find Jared here:   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmspool/ Website: https://www.uie.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jmspool   Center Centre:   Website: http://centercentre.com/ Blog: https://www.centercentre.com/blog/   Jared's books:   Web Site Usability: A Designer's Guide -  https://amzn.to/3vLZWHU   Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks That Work -  https://amzn.to/34IaFak   User-Centered Web Site Development: A Human-Computer Interaction Approach - https://amzn.to/2TtGUHU   ======   Thank you for tuning in! If you liked what you heard and want more ...   ... please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listened).   You can also follow us on our other social channels for more great UX and product design tips, interviews and insights!   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-space-in-between/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespaceinbetw__n/   ======   Host: Brendan Jarvis https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/

Press Play for: · What is Design Thinking· Innovation Thinking · The Basis of Some of the Biggest Companies in the World· Philosophical and Practical side of Design Thinking· Designing for Functionality in Business· Thresholds between Price and Value· The Balancing Act - Where Compromise sits in Business We Meet: Dean Meyers, Transformational Coach Episode References: · Thomas Edison - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison· IBM - https://www.ibm.com/· Rode Microphones - https://tinyurl.com/yz3fzk4w· Macintosh - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh· Best buys’ Customer Centric Model: https://tinyurl.com/yn8b8ec9· Steve Jobs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs· Ryanair Airlines -https://www.ryanair.com/us/en· Jared Spool - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jared_Spool· McDonald’s, You want fries with that? https://tinyurl.com/2t92pnbm· Jeff Bezos - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos· https://vizworld.com/Connect: Connect with Rick: https://linktr.ee/mrrickjordanConnect with Dean: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deanmeyers/Subscribe and Review to ALL IN with Rick Jordan on iTunes: Subscribe and Comment on CastBox:Subscribe on Google Podcasts or Google PlayFollow on SpotifySubscribe and Review on Stitcher About Guest: Design Thinking and Innovation trainer, coach and consultant Dean Meyers has been teaching people how to apply visual thinking and design thinking in technology since the Macintosh arrived on desktops with the first graphical users interface. He has employed techniques including graphic facilitation and LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® to help entrepreneurs, startups, managers and C-suite decision makers do better work, build stronger teams and become more than design thinkers: they are design DOERS. His motto is, "Be Brave and ITERATE!". Dean is one of the authors of "The World of Visual Facilitation", Publishes the online news media outlet, VizWorld.com, and is on the faculty of the American Management Association.#RickJordan #Podcast

If you are curious about the guest, we are hosting Lea Kovac Beckman. She is challenged with the heuristic “Be curious” from the Xebia Essentials repository (https://essentials.xebia.com/curiosity/). She describes how cycles of curiosity and boredom can foster innovation, what is the impact as persons, but also in this digital era, and how it impacts teams and organisations. She shares how she uses innovation in her work and how curiosity and collaboration can be partners in finding a better solution rather than thinking in isolation. Lea recommends the following resources: Lea recommends the following resources: Curiosity: The Good, the Bad, and the Double-Edged Sword, by Christopher Bergland (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201608/curiosity-the-good-the-bad-and-the-double-edged-sword)  "Izzy, Did You Ask a Good Question Today?", from Isidor I. Rabi in New York Times" (https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/19/opinion/l-izzy-did-you-ask-a-good-question-today-712388.html)  Why boredom is bad... and good for you, from David Robson, (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20141218-why-boredom-is-good-for-you)  The Importance of Being Bored in a Digital Age, by Alec Sears (https://thriveglobal.com/stories/the-importance-of-being-bored-in-a-digital-age/)  Conscious competence learning model by psychologist Noel Burch The Flexibility of the Four Stages of Competence by Jared Spool (https://articles.uie.com/four_stages_competence/)  Just Enough Research by Erika Hall Lea (@leakovac) is an independent UX Design consultant with a focus on user research and strategy. Together with product teams she has for many years developed digital services and tools for leading Swedish media companies like the Swedish Television and Bonnier News. She enjoys working closely with journalists, an environment where you are rewarded for asking questions. Essential to her work is bringing different perspectives and skillsets together in all parts of the work process, in reaching a common set goal – both in discovery and delivery. She's experienced that the whole team approach mindset is more innovative, effective and exciting. It enables you to learn about, understand and affect areas that would otherwise be out of reach and comprehension. Lea continues to explore the whole team approach and shares her experience at conferences and gatherings as a speaker and facilitator. She has also published articles on cross-functional team mob programming.

For tonight's episode we have a person who is multifaceted. Writer, researcher, educator, speaker but most importantly a pioneer in UX designing, Mr. Jared Spool . He is someone who has been working in the field of usability and design since 1978 and is the CEO and Founding Principal of the largest UX consulting and research organization of it's kind in the world, Center Center . He is also the co-founder of Center Centre. Stream the episode to know everything you must to create meaningful and relevant user experience for your product.

Jared Spool, the Maker of Awesomeness and co-founder of Center Centre UIE, is here to share some great insights. We discuss the steps you should be taking before leaving your UX Schooling, and what you can do to help you secure a job after graduation and avoid those first-year growing pains.Additionally, we jump to the other side of the table in the hiring process. Learn how to streamline and hire better candidates. Find Jared:Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jmspool/Center Centre UIE: https://www.uie.com/Please consider subscribing to Designed Today any of the popular podcasting platforms.**********************************Ready to join the email list or Slack community, receive your invite here: https://designedtoday.com/community/Designed Today brings you insights to help bridge the world of Design & Business. Learn how you can improve your design, branding, marketing, and advertising skills all in one place. In this show, we'll explore the startup world, flexing the entrepreneurial muscles, from a user experience perspective**********************************Podcast: https://pod.link/designedtodayWebsite: https://DesignedToday.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/Designed.TodayTwitter: https://twitter.com/dillonwinspear

Guide Live B2B Jam Session_ Jared Spool & Srikant Chari See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We got a visit from hall of fame designer (if there is such a thing)  Jared Spool and we chat about User Experience vs. Customer Experience, The UX of a Dashboard, how to display the value of UX with a client/company, and so much more. 

Jared Spool has been doing and defining UX long before many of us existed and/or even knew what it was. He invites us in to hear his fascinating yet seldom discussed UX origin story. He reveals how and why we’re all UX designers. He demystifies the arduous and often frustrating process of landing a job in UX. He articulates what it means to learn how to learn. He addresses the important, but oft-forgotten business part of the design business. He also inspires us to be great design leaders by illustrating what one actually looks like. Jared's Compelling UX Origin Story (5:56) How Do You See the UX Job Landscape Evolving? (14:50) UX'ers Have to Do What We Promised (17:31) Is Everyone a UX Designer? (24:57) If Design is a Team Sport, How Does the Team Win? (35:30) What Makes a Great Design Leader? (38:40) The Most Important Thing Designers Should be Learning (46:22) Best Advice for Designers Trying to Break In and Getting Rejected? (52:10) UX Superhero Name (1:09:23) Check out the detailed show notes including mentioned links, transcript and Eli Jorgensen’s astonishing superhero artwork at userdefenders.com/072 This episode is brought to you by Webflow: The modern way to build for the web. Get a great, Defenders-exclusive offer of 10% off your annual subscription at userdefenders.com/webflow using code USERDEFENDERS. Hurry, offer expires on Halloween (10/31/20)!

This episode was brought to you by https://www.thisisdoing.com - learn new skills in Design & Innovation via live online classrooms with the worlds best trainers Climate change is not seen by most as an immediate crisis, so we don't act with urgency. The digital world is fairly blind to what needs to be done because in digital design we don't think deep, broad and wide enough. Jared challenges us to think longer and broader and deeper, to think more connectedly on an earth experience level. We must rise to this impending global threat because if we don't we condemn future generations to sink in a world we—us, our generation—have wasted. https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/ https://twitter.com/jmspool More from This is HCD https://linktr.ee/thisishcd Join our Slack community / https://www.thisishcd.com/community/join/ Join our newsletter / https://www.thisishcd.com/community/subscribe-to-our-fortnightly-newsletter/   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This episode was brought to you by https://www.thisisdoing.com - learn new skills in Design & Innovation via live online classrooms with the worlds best trainers Climate change is not seen by most as an immediate crisis, so we don’t act with urgency. The digital world is fairly blind to what needs to be done because in digital design we don’t think deep, broad and wide enough. Jared challenges us to think longer and broader and deeper, to think more connectedly on an earth experience level. We must rise to this impending global threat because if we don’t we condemn future generations to sink in a world we—us, our generation—have wasted. https://gerrymcgovern.com/books/world-wide-waste/ https://twitter.com/jmspool More from This is HCD https://linktr.ee/thisishcd Join our Slack community / https://www.thisishcd.com/community/join/ Join our newsletter / https://www.thisishcd.com/community/subscribe-to-our-fortnightly-newsletter/   Become a Premium Member: https://thisishcdnetwork.supercast.tech See omnystudio.com/policies/listener for privacy information.

Yes! Josh & Dalton finally start talking UX design! We jump into a twitter thread by Jared Spool about dashboard design, Google favouring websites that follow proper UX practices, and what it means to be a good User Experience Designer. We talk all this and so much more. UX  Design chats start at 17:20 Jared Spool thread: https://twitter.com/jmspool/status/1293015767038996480?s=20

Tony Daussat is an award-winning designer currently working as a Lead Experience Design Strategist at Bottle Rocket Studios in Dallas, TX.  He has worked with some of the world’s most exacting brands including: Hyatt, KFC, BaylorScott & White, Dave & Busters, Fiesta Restaurant Group, Caesars Entertainment, TripCase, FirstData, and Robert Half, to name a few.He has started and sold two online companies, and is currently the host of the Liftoff podcast, boasting listeners in 150 countries. He is a guest lecturer at Dallas Baptist University, and his public speaking includes Big Design, HOW Design Live etc. In his spare time, Tony enjoys renovating his home and spending time with his wife and two toddlers.TOPICS:4:34: How did Tony Daussat get started with podcasting?8:18: How does Tony Daussat come up with new questions to ask famous guests(eg: Chris Doe, Jared Spool) who have done hundreds of interviews?10:49: Starting from contacting a guest to interviewing them - behind the scenes look at Tony Daussat's process15:30: Tony Daussat shares stats for his podcast Experience Design!18:34: Why did Tony Daussat decide to hire a podcast producer to edit his interviews?21:27: Tony Daussat's podcast setup26:58: Tony Daussat explains how to edit a podcast interview - don't try to remove all the "ums", "ahs" etc.34:02: How does Tony Daussat deal with guests who have a terrible audio setup?35:57: Jayneil Dalal opens up about his biggest screwup in his podcasting journey43:54: How does Tony Daussat wing his podcast interviews?49:38: Tony Daussat reveals the secret to being a great interviewer54:03: How does Tony Daussat plan to monetise the podcast?56:45: Shocking news: Tony Daussat will be sunsetting the Expereince Design podcast!CONNECT WITH TONY DAUSSAT:Connect with Tony Daussat on LinkedInFollow Tony Daussat on InstagramListen to the Liftoff podcastIf you are a designer looking to break into the UX world and get a job, check out Tony Daussat's HiredUX course!!TONY DAUSSAT'S PODCAST GEAR:Rode Podcaster microphoneRode PSA-1 microphone boom armJAYNEIL DALAL'S PODCAST GEAR:Samson Q2U Dynamic microphoneBose NC 700 noise cancelling headphonesMicrophone pop filterCaseling podcast kit to store all the podcast equipmentSquadcast for recording the podcast interviewsSimplecast for hosting and distributing the podcastAuphonic for cleaning up the audio automaticallyDescript for editing the podcast interviewsIf you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to leave a rating and review in Apple Podcasts, or share the episode with a friend. Thank you!

This episode is me apologizing for the literal radio silence and filling you in on all the very valid reasons why I've been MIA with new content here in this feed. I miss you, and I miss putting content out regularly, but there have been (and continue to be) some significant transitions in my own world, not to mention the world at large that have impacted me and this show... TRANSCRIPT Greetings. User Defenders. Remember me? Your faithful host. Well, maybe I haven't been so faithful lately. I have taken a, quite a bit of a hiatus as. I have a feeling you may have noticed. I think the last episode that I released in season was in November with Shaheena. I think that was episode 70 and. Then I released a very special recording live from an event apart Denver in January of 2020. That's when we were all innocent. Do you remember? We were all innocent and we hadn't experienced COVID and, the racial injustice so clearly seen, this year. not that it's new, but it's just been very, very exposed this year. so. All that to say 20, is it safe to say 2020 has kind of sucked so far? I'm usually a really optimistic guy and I. I'm always excited about the new years. I'm always excited about the fresh starts and, and normally they, they shape up pretty good, but this one is really just bit the big one I'm telling you, all that to say, again, I'm still very hopeful. I'm very optimistic. I know things can get better and will get better. I hope, at least, I know that. We've learned a lot, right through the COVID stuff. We've learned a lot. How to, I hate to say wash our hands. I think we all knew how to do that. Maybe we're a little more diligent than we were before. And then these masks seem like they're going to become a mainstay for quite a while for the foreseeable future. all that to say, okay. I, I just wanted to come back on here and explain what's been going on with the show what's been going on with me. Why there hasn't been a new episode in really six months. And, there's a really good reason, not just. Everything. I just explained that's happened this year. That's that's probably, that could be reason enough, I suppose, but I've gone through some significant transitions, myself. this year and actually that it all began actually last year, right around when I did release the last episode with Shaheena in November, I did receive my, my job loss notice, after six and a half years of service, I was being laid off at the company I'd been at. And you know, of course it sucks to be. Laid off right before the holidays. That wasn't fun at all, but the, my company was very gracious. I will give them a lot of credit for giving me plenty of notice. I, my layoff date was January 3rd of 2020. So they gave me nearly two months notice. And, and so they were extremely gracious through, through that whole process. but you know, the, the, the job seeking. The defenders, those of you who are looking or have been looking, especially after COVID I know a lot of you have been affected by unemployment. The numbers don't lie. Right. And I've heard your voices on Twitter and. And, through email and through my DMS and everything and through the community, of course, as well. I know how hard this can be firsthand. I have. I felt your pain. I felt your, just what it's like before COVID I felt how hard it was to find a job harder than I thought it would be. I mean, it's been about 10 years, honestly, since I've had to pound the pavement, because my transition for the six and a half year job before that was fairly quick. So. I've learned a lot and I definitely want to be sharing. I will be sharing with you in the near future. I hope, about what I've learned about job seeking and, in UX. And so be on the lookout for that. my empathy abounds for you defenders, if you're in that situation, Let me just continue my story. I, I was able to find a job fairly, I guess, fairly quickly after my, after my actual release date of January 3rd, I was able to interview with a wonderful organization and I want to thank Doug Collins. Many of you probably have heard of him. I've seen him on Twitter. He's definitely one of our big influencers in UX and I got to know him a little bit through the show and through Twitter. And, he was really instrumental , and notifying me of this opportunity and, in Denver, and I was able to get on board this organization and just super, super challenged. I'm going to read an article in a minute, just really explaining a little more about that, but yeah. That I wrote recently, but I realized that not all of you have read my article, actually, probably very few of you have. So, I feel like it occurred to me. This is the way to communicate with you is through the podcast. Many of you, I should say, this is the primary way because many of you are simply subscribed to the podcast and wait for episodes to come out. And I am grateful for that. I'm grateful for your subscribing and keeping. Keeping alert. And I apologize again for the super long delay and, kind of updating you on what's been going on and why there , haven't been very many episodes, at all in don't while. So, rambling on here. I just wanted to, tell you that, I did land a job that is still, I, I may be transitioning again. I'm not quite sure yet. I did get, another. Notice date due to COVID we were impacted, we thought we were gonna make it, but we were impacted. So I do have a, a, a pending layoff date in mid July. If, if, the another contract doesn't open up for us, which we're trying to pivot to. But all of that to say, I'm going to share an article with you. If you're still with me. Thank you for sticking around. I wrote an article that. It really explains everything. That's, that's kind of taking place here. apart from the recent news, I just shared about, another possible, pounding of pavement for me. So here goes, when I started user defenders podcast in 2015, everything I was learning about being a new podcaster told me that I needed to add a minimum show up every week with new content. I was hearing things like, "If you're not consistent, you're non-existent", so being a naive new podcaster and content creator, I thought I could and must follow this protocol for my audience, you to notice and catch on to what I was trying to do with the show. So that's what I did for at least the first six months or so until I realized firsthand just how much work goes into releasing even one episode and y'all know my episodes. I've got a special artwork that I do for, I try to do for most of the guests and. There's transcripts now and there's show notes and timestamps. And, not to not to mention the editing process is very grueling cause I'm, I'm kind of a perfectionist. I really do take a lot of pride in the quality and in the output. I've done the editing for the last probably 10 episodes or so. And, it's hard, but it's, it's, it's my baby, you know, so , I've definitely, gone above and beyond there, and that takes a long time. So all that to say, I went off on a tangent there briefly. I'm going to get back to the article, but just to explain kind of how much work goes into even releasing one episode. I then changed the frequency of the show to biweekly with no breaks. And then as that became difficult to sustain, I added seasons with up to 12 episodes. And then I brought the number down to eight episodes per season, because like I said before, if it's, if eight is good enough for master of puppets, that's good enough for me. You see, it's not just about me anymore. In fact, it hasn't been since I stood before God and a group of witnesses at the alter in 1999 with my beloved. And I said, I do until the Lord, we do see. So 20 years later, I'm happy to report that I'm still joyfully married. Sometimes it's not, if I'm being real, all right, marriage is hard, but it's worth it when you find the right one. So. our family has quadrupled in size. we have six children in practically, every stage of child development from 18, all the way to three and everything in between. My wife has commented on several occasions that I always tend to start a new venture. Every time we have a new baby notably and she's right. I have. Notably. It was my MySpace famous band, Ralph Hinkley Syndrome in 2009, after our son, Ben was born he's 11 now. And it was User Defenders after our daughter, Emery was born. She's six now, needless to say every single one of my ventures has been a juggling act of family and faith as is to be expected. I'm proud to say that UD has been and still is a labor of love as I've dedicated countless thousands of hours and dollars to get it off the ground , and growing by releasing powerful and inspiring content on a consistent basis for nearly five years now. Up until recently has we know I've hit some recent bumps in life, transitions all eventually good things that have caused me to reflect on the driving force behind every venture I've undertaken until now. And it continues to be...it' s excellence. Just before the holidays, late last year, as I mentioned earlier, after six and a half years of service, my company gave me a layoff notice. Reality check. All of a sudden I'm remembering after not having to pound the pavement for nearly 10 years, how hard it can be to land a job in UX. And like I said before, my empathy now abounds fellow Defenders. After a few emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually draining months of trying to sell myself and convince companies of how awesome I am... I hate that. I was able to get back on my feet again at a wonderful organization that believes in the superpower of UX. So much so that they created a brand new team of specialists with a great leader who has some very lofty goals, especially in the next six months to get our UX practice off the ground. I already know this is going to be the most challenging and rewarding role of my entire career. In fact, I'm convinced. I'm going to grow more in my UX career this year than I have the previous six and a half. And because I believe Oprah, when she says you can have anything in life you want, you just can't have everything you want in order to stay married, focused, and effective at my new job, I'm going to slow down production and future episode releases of User Defenders. And you know that I have, I actually wrote this in March 22nd. Defenders, just for context there. And I know, again, like I said, has been painfully clear that that I have slowed down. and I apologize again, for not being at least a little more communicative about what's been going on. because I love and believe in this show. And especially you so much, I wouldn't do this unless I felt it absolutely necessary for proper balance order and sustainability. I also want to make sure that it's clear that User Defenders is not ceasing, just creating some much needed space and balance. I will still be releasing new episodes. And thankfully my manager has been pretty cool about me doing that on my breaks. I'm just on my own time. So it'll just be when I can, rather than because I can and must. And, in fact, I do have two awesome episodes coming out soon. One with Jared Spool and one with Jeff Gothelf those guys, neither of those guys probably need an introduction. Those are coming up in the near future. I'm actually, I am looking for sponsors for those. So if you or someone, you know, is looking to get their UX related product service or event in front of amazing, amazing listeners, please reach out to me. You can do that. That sponsorship [a t] userdefenders. [co m]. so if my superpower of empathy is still finally dialed in, and if you've made it this far, I can sense your disappointment and feel your pain. I also know that you were very self aware and empathic and believe you also have empathy for where I'm at in this season of life and career. In between episode releases, I'll still be active and user defenders community with the amazingly smart, inspiring, and empathic defenders there of which you are most certainly invited to be counted among us. If you go to community.userdefenders.com, you can get in there and check it out. I do have that episode coming out pretty soon. I've got to record at first, but about, sharing with you what I've learned while trying to land a job in UX. I know you'll find value in it now or in the future. If you ever get your layoff notice or throw cold water in your manager's face, but you'd never do that. Right? Right. So all that to say, I need to slow down for now. Things could certainly change again in the future, as we know, and as I did mention. They may be, come in mid July. We'll see. but I want to close this out by offering a sincere, heartfelt thanks for being on this journey with me. I always say this and I always mean this. You are why I do this. I feel really proud of the fact that after nearly five years of podcasting, which the introvert in me still can't believe I do, I've never paid for one ad to promote this show. All growth has been entirely organic. I'm a firm believer in the paraphrased words of my virtual mentor, Seth Godin. When he says, if you want to be remarkable, you don't have to spam and annoy folks simply make something worth remarking about. Excellence and high quality has always been the benchmark for everything I do on this show. And it always will be, you are also a huge part of the growth of this show by in fact remarking about it. Thank you sincerely for talking about it to your designer, friends sharing episodes on Twitter and other social channels and mentioning User Defenders. Even though the episode releases will slow down during this next season of life, I'll still be active on the User Defenders: Community, Twitter. @UserDefenders, and honestly, not as much on the email list, but I'm hoping to work on that. You know, I really am because I know how valuable that communication can be as well. And I appreciate those of you who have trusted me with your email address. and by the Hammer of Grabthar, I will never sell you out ever. I never have. I never will. So if you want to get on the email list, you can do that at userdefenders.com/join. Reach out to me anytime. I always love engaging with you and encouraging you on your important design journey. And last, but definitely not least fight on my friend, Jason, your host and friend. That's the article I wrote again in March, really when all of this poop was hitting the fan with COVID and everything. So I felt like I, I don't normally do that. I, I don't normally read my articles that I've written word for word. maybe I should, because again, I realized that there's only a small handful of you who actually do read the articles and even know that they're out there in the world. So I may do that more often as another way, even to just stay connected with you and to kind of keep you updated here on this channel. This is really the main channel. You know, I've been doing a lot of things offline. And when I say offline, I mean, away from the podcast feed, I've been doing a lot of live events at the User Defenders: Community, which have been wonderful and valuable. But I realize it's, you know, you really it's the 80/20 rule, right. it occurred to me and it kind of slapped me in the face. Like 20% of the effort should produce 80% of the result, in, in an ideal world. And what that really means is like, find what your core aspect is your core element of your business, your job, your whatever it is you're doing that you're really good at find that 20% that produces 80% of the results. And I realize it's really this feed that I have sadly and apologetically ignored for nearly six months now. And so, I am going to do a better job of trying to put stuff out there in the world, even if it's just, again, like, even if it's reading an article or even if it's just saying, Hey, what's up Defenders...see you later. Hey, Big Gulps. Alright, see you later. Anyway, so I'm going to do that and stay tuned. Please stay tuned. subscribe, even if, even though I know that there hasn't been new new episodes, please subscribe userdefenders.com/subscribe. And I will do my best to continue to trickle out content in the midst of everything that I just shared with you that's going on in my world. And, Again, got some cool episodes coming up with Jared spool and Jeff Gothelf and, I'll, I'll be continuing to do interviews very slowly though. I've been very selective about those because of everything going on. And then again, because of all the work that goes into releasing even one episode,but there will be more content, even that a monologue coming out on the job search, be on the lookout for that. I have learned a lot, I'm not an expert. I don't know if anybody is, and I don't know if anybody would want to be an expert in job seeking. it shows, it kind of says that you can't stay somewhere for very long. And that is a red flag for a lot of employers. So of course we don't want to be experts at it, but we do have to know how to approach this. So. Anyway, yeah. Again, if you know anybody that's you yourself, or if you know anyone that may be interested in sponsoring those episodes, I've got an exclusive sponsor package that I'm working on. That's a month long where I go all in for you and your organization or your event or whatever it is, your service product. And I've got some cool offerings that will go with that. So feel free to reach out sponsorship@userdefenders.com. If that's you so just with all that, continue to fight on my friends continued to. Just go all in on making a difference. This is a really, really strange time to be alive in the world. I'd say even, especially in America, just with everything that's been going on, like all of the racial injustice against black people, and I just been appalled. At what I've seen. even just within the past two months, especially starting with of course George Floyd. And, I mean, and we've all been shocked. I mean, and Will Smith said it, racism hasn't gotten worse, it's just being filmed and it's gonna change and it has to change. Right. So keep fighting on, keep doing good. There's a lot of good in the world still. And I know those of you listening. You are the good that. That we need to see in the world. You are the good, you are the change. So keep fighting on in that. Keep, keep being there for one another. I hope you're well, I hope you're healthy. I hope that you're. Your family is doing well, your loved ones, your friends, again, feel free to reach out any time, if you need encouragement, or if you're, this is all mentally, very mentally taxing for all of us. It's, it's been, a big trial. So I know that all of us have been rocked by this and by this year. So, but we're going to get through this, like I always say, and it's so true. I believe it we're better together. So let's get better together. And, again, the User Defenders: Community is open where we have been able to encourage each other through this time. I'm here for you and it's, there's always a brighter day. that's the voice I heard in my head when I was going to drive off an overpass at my darkest darkest moment in my life. this was a long time ago, but I heard this voice and I know whose voice it was. I know that. That voice came from heaven. It was in my heart and my ears saying, Hey, if you do this, there's never, you can never make it right. There's always a brighter day. And I believe that I know that's true and I hope you do too. Again, I'm here for you. I love you. And I'm grateful for you and seriously, sincerely last but not least fight on my friends.

Design is a process where we finely tune our intuition to create great user experiences. Yet, sometimes, what we think is best rivals the metrics. What do we believe – our gut or the data? This talk from Jared Spool will teach you: What easily-collected analytics, like bounce rate, actually tell us about our users' experiences Why techniques like a money-left-on-the-table analysis can show us how metrics impact design Why asking, ”Would you recommend this?”, is a bad way to measure brand engagement Recorded live at Business of Software Conference USA in Boston, MA 2018 For more great videos of BoStalks, visit businessofsoftware.org/videos --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/business-of-software/message

On May 5, 2020 UX Backstage hosted a private conversation with Jared, Amy, and Max about hiring in UX. This is an extraordinary episode to address the current COVID-19 situation and provide some guidance for designers and hiring managers.

In the first deep dive of Season 2, Jonathan explains the Principles of Human Centred Design according to design standard ISO 9241:210. Read ISO 9241:210: https://www.iso.org/standard/52075.html Read '5 Design Decision Styles. What’s Yours?' by Jared Spool: https://articles.uie.com/five_design_decision_styles/ Have any questions or topic suggestions?

My guest today is Christian Crumlish. Christian has led product and design teams in organizations ranging from startups to large tech companies. In this conversation, we delve into the relationship between digital product management and information architecture, and how we might be more empowered as users of these systems. Listen to the full conversation   Show notes Christian Crumlish (mediajunkie.com) Dungeons and Dragons Paladin Yahoo! Design in Product Slack community Richard Saul Wurman Understanding Context: Environment, Language, and Information Architecture by Andrew Hinton Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences by Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati Reframing Information Architecture by Andrea Resmini (Editor) Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge Arango Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, Second Edition by Marty Cagan Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work That Matters by Ryan Singer Basecamp Objectives and key results (OKRs) Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr Amazon Kindle Matte Scheinker Airtable Asana Tinderbox The Informed Life Episode 6: Beck Tench on Tinderbox Notion Wikis From UX to Product (Christian's video series in the UIE All You Can Learn Library) The Information Architecture Conference Web Directions Product Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the full transcript Jorge: Christian, welcome to the show. Christian: Thanks Jorge, I'm happy to be here. Jorge: So, for folks who don't know you, would you please introduce yourself? Christian: Sure. My name is Christian Crumlish. I'm a writer, product and UX leadership consultant, information architect and I guess I do other things too, but that's plenty. Jorge: I've been privy to the arc of your career over the last, I would say 15, maybe 20 years? No, 15 years. And you're one of the folks out of several that I know that have focused on product. And I was hoping that you would tell us a little bit about that aspect of your work. Christian: I'm glad it's only been 15 years, because sometimes the spans of time are starting to freak me out a little bit. But I think for me, a lot of what my title has been and what sort of roles or jobs I've done in companies and at other times as a consultant or you know, agency designer or strategist, the titles have evolved over time or changed. And in fact, when you mentioned that arc to my career, I thought like, if only you had my career had been in the shape of an arc, that would be so cool. Cause it's been more like a zigzag down or up, you know, along some rapids or something. I feel like I've shifted gears a number of times. I was talking to a D&D… A person who also had played D&D as a kid, and we were talking about the paladin-type character that you have to cross-train in like several different… You know, you have to learn, like to be a religious person and also a night and there's probably a third thing, and how it slows you down in a sense. You know, you don't do that. Like people who knew they wanted to go to med school when they were six and have stayed on that straight path their whole lives. My career has been like a path of discovery. But along the way, I've been given a lot of different titles, or I've asked for or invented titles as needed. And so, I was a content strategist back before that was almost even a thing, around 2000. And I was an information architect, and that was my title for a while. And I was a director of strategy, and I was in an interaction designer, and I was a design pattern library curator, or pattern detective, as I liked to say at the time. And along the way I started noticing that the frame of a product — that talking about what was being made a software as a product — was a fairly dominant kind of lens that was being used in the businesses I was working in. And I think I first really came to my attention at Yahoo when I was there for about three or four years. And the product organization was sort of on a par with the tech organization, the UX part of the shopper, UED as they called it, was itself really just a subdivision of the product organization, and ultimately always reported up to people with product management titles. The deep history of that at Yahoo was that they had people called “producers” early on, and in certain nineties in the web, if you made content there was often more of a television medium terminology and so producers of content. But half the people who had producer titles at Yahoo became front end developers because they'd actually been making the content, and the others evolved into the product management role. And that also took from a program management role at Microsoft. There's a lot of antecedents to this. But ultimately, the first thing I saw was that at least in these larger companies, user experience design was at the table, but they're sort of the kiddy table. And that they had these parents called product people. And so that made me think just from the desire to get close to the decision-making or to be able to make an impact, I thought, “I have to learn more about product, or why it's called product or what product management is.” Along the way, these practices have continued to evolve and in relationship to each other. I think there's a very active conversation right now, about the boundaries or the intersection between product and UX. Enough so both, I witnessed this conversation and I have it come to myself personally when I speak, or when I'm out there connecting with people. So, I actually ended up setting up a community on Slack called Design in Product, just really to have a place to discuss that. And for some people that means kind of following this career path I've been on, of going from UX design or UX management roles to product management or product leadership roles. And other people deciding they don't want to do that, or they want to come back in the other direction. And a lot of negotiation over what is the shared common ground of those roles and where are their responsibilities and their points of view quite different. My roots go back to this information architecture tribe and people who have a point of view. And you and I have been friends for a long time, but I'm also essentially a student of your writing and your thinking and that of a number of other people who've really shaped my thoughts about information architecture. I don't know if other people call it this, but I sometimes call it like “third wave” information architecture, with the first being, of course, the initial… Spacing on the TED Talks fellow… Jorge: Wurman? Christian: Yeah, sorry. You know, that's literally an architect saying, “Hey, making maps is really important,” essentially. And that maps are going to be important information as well. And that they all sort of a share a semantic and kind of wayfinding and meaning-mapping kind of frame. And so, I think he kind of coined or crystallized the concept of initially. And the second way was sort of the world-wide-web-filtered application of information architecture, and just some often very tactical or pragmatic, but even then, with sort of this big-IA kind of dream of being the overarching backbone of things. And then what I think it was the third wave, is this sort of academically kind of sound and intellectually very rich notion of information architecture as still a way of mapping meaning and, and, and crafting spaces that are information, but I think less bound to some of the literal artifacts of the seventies or the nineties. And I don't want to do short shrift to other people who thought long and hard and debated these things. You kind of need to go to the books and read Andrew's books and yours and Andreas's and a number of other people to get caught up in that conversation. But I feel, again, that that conversation has a lot to say about product. And it's not just through UX. I mean, I think information architecture is a thing UX designers need to think about and be good at and use in their work. And UX then as a way of influencing the product management or product strategy and the product practices of companies. But I think IA is also a tool in the toolkit of the product manager herself. It's not just something that they should let designers mediate for them. I think they should be firsthand users. You know, architects of information — people who think about the way the information and the meaning and the knowledge and understanding and the positioning of people's bodies and of spaces made out of information are going to play out in the product that they're building. If you were redeveloping the waterfront and putting hotels up and walkways and places for cars to drive, you know, you're thinking about how are human beings going to flow into the space? What kind of experiences are they going to have? What is it going to do to the economy? What secondary effects are going to happen? You know? And that's an architecture, traditional built architecture. And I think that when you're making software, particularly the kind of social software that I've typically been involved with… It's a metaphor, but it's not simply a metaphor. It's literally the same thing. You're going to build an environment. People are going to flow into it. They're going to have experiences. There are going to be secondary effects that you didn't anticipate and systematic ecosystem effects. And you need to do information architecture or have someone who's a really good information architect at hand, I think to get a grip on that. Or you make it sort of like primitive, you know, “We're just going to put the waste affluent in the river kind of kind of building.” You know? Without thinking about the larger picture at all. Jorge: You talked about how information architecture could inform the folks who are managing and designing products and building them. Because I'm on the IA side of things, I'm interested in the converse, which is about learning about product and learning how those roles work and how the process works. And in the past year. I've read a couple of books on this subject, and I have a specific question that I'm, I'm teeing up with saying this one is the second edition of Marty Cagan's book Inspired and the other is Shape Up by Ryan Singer from the folks at Basecamp. And one thing that struck me in reading both of those is that… And by the way, I'm not claiming that the latter uses anywhere near like the same framing as the Inspired book. Christian: Right? Almost by definition it wouldn't. Jorge: But I just bring them up because I see them as examples of what I see as advocacy for a type of approach to the work that is very much bottom up in my perspective, in that you're working within a relatively small problem space and you iterate on that. And you may be doing that in parallel to a lot of colleagues who are working in other projects of similar scope. And the question that I had in reading both of those books was, “Where within this framework is there place for looking after the coherence between those things? Right? Like especially if they're part of some kind of ecosystem or family of products. Eventually those things need to cohere at some level. Christian: So, one thing about Marty Cagan is, anybody interested in product management should be familiar with Marty Cagan and should read his books and also follow him. He teaches, he's out there still influencing people. Silicon Valley-style product management is done in his image. It's done essentially in a framework that he established. It's also important to understand that he represents kind of a reforming notion of what product management should be from an earlier, slightly more, I'd say kind of enterprise, kind of static-MBA style product management. So, he represents the school of thought of, get outside of the building, and iterating on small things. Basically, in line with the lean and the agile trends that we all have probably been around and been part of it had been grappling with how do you do UX? How did you research? How did you plan? How do you think big or system systematically when things are being done often in these small incremental bits, as you asked? A big part of the product manager's role is actually connecting those levels of meaning, or those levels, those scales. There's this almost fractal-like scale of decision-making that goes on. And one great thing to know about product management as it differs maybe from UX and UX roles or your jobs, is that it's very much a decider role. You make decisions constantly. I don't like to stereotype people or professions or anything, but having been in them, maybe I'm a little bit more allowed to speak, you know, to tease ourselves. But what UX designers like to say, “it depends.” They don't want to get things wrong. They want to figure it out correctly. They want to apply the proper techniques. They want to take time and do things well. And I think that that's an important set of values and forces to have represented in the process. I think product managers or product management does not always value all of those things as much and believes that you get diminishing returns and that being decisive sometimes with less than complete information is sometimes more important than being 100% sure about what you're deciding. And that comes from having to make decisions all the time. If you make, if you make 15 decisions in a day, you can't fool yourself into thinking that they're all 100% right and perfect. You have to know that you're going to have an error rate, and hopefully you keep it manageable and you're good over time. Just to go back to this. Those decisions can sometimes be, “Is it okay to ship this next release with a bug, with this bug? We haven't fixed it, but you know, we really want to ship. Or is this bug a showstopper and we can't release it until this particular one is fixed? What we built, does it meet the requirements adequately enough to move forward or not?” You know, those sorts of decisions that are sort of tactical, but tied into important, larger overarching questions, up to the next level is sort of, “What should be in the next sprint? What's the next thing that we should work on?” And there you're at the level I think you were asking about, where things seem to happen very iteratively and without too much regard to the bigger picture, but just kind of down in a trench trying to polish a local maxima or run some tests or ship a feature or something like that. And those decisions also have to be made. Again, they can't be theoretical. Something's in the sprint or it's not, and either the last sprint went well, or it didn't, and stuff fell into this sprint from that. What I mean, you're dealing with a tangible reality all the time, and then the buck stops with that product manager. But those decisions again should be made with reference to, well, “What are our goals this quarter or in this time period? And why are we building this feature? And how many people will be affected by this bug? Is for those people, giving them a bad experience, an acceptable price to pay towards the larger goal?” So, there's a sense in which often the product manager is the person in the room who's supposed to be looking levels and levels above the current moment to figure out a decision. In some ways you'd say the UX person is doing that in a different sense: they're going out to like what people think or what we know from our users or they enlarge the question in a different way. But I think the product manager says, “Well, the company's strategy is this. And that's informed the product strategy, which I'm familiar with. Because either I'm the head of product and I own the roadmap or I'm on a well ordered product team and the head of product has communicated the roadmap and my portion of it to me well, and I have autonomy to execute my part of the roadmap.” So, there are actually these tools and mechanisms that that ladder up and down from like the very biggest picture of the company's dreams and yearly goals and quarterly goals down to what should we ship? Now, like any of these kind of project management or information management processes, like a roadmap or a sprint planning process where you're relying on a person to kind of make all those times connections, it is vulnerable to becoming kind of just a thing on autopilot, where it's just all happening, but nobody is really saying, are we on track? What's the meaning of all of this? Does this add up to anything? And I'm not some sort of spotless paragon myself. I've found myself sometimes leading a product team, doing lots of things well and correctly, and still taking a step back at a certain point and saying, we're off track. We've gone off track, and enough of these yellow flags have now… Or funny feelings in my tummy have added up to the point that, you know, if we continue like this, we're not actually achieving our goal. And they're none of my official signals yet say that we're off track, but the fact that I did step out of the day-to-day and look at a different timescale or a larger question that we were supposed to be answering has woken me up. And there's this danger sometimes of getting too attached to these techniques and processes, but at best they do help things stay in a line. And if you have a healthy team and you're reporting up and down the line, and there's somebody with authority who is watching the biggest goals, I think there already are methods that can work, you know? But you have to assess the kind of health of that on any product team, how well they do that. I know you're more interested in the product management side than the IA side, but you could say sometimes a lack of that… That no one's written down a map. Like we talked about it, we have our OKRs, blah, blah, blah. But no one's really done that IA work of saying, “And this is what it's going to look like,” or “This is the part where we're in, this part of the map now, and we're trying to get over here.” And helping to kind of do that communication to everybody so everybody can agree on what the mission is. I think maybe that's like a lymphatic system that's missing, so that you've got a circulatory system, but somehow, it's not a healthy creature, you know? Jorge: Yeah. As you were describing this up and down reporting structure and things like goals, it made me think of another book that I read last year,  Measure What Matters, by John Doerr, which is about OKRs. And one of the things that I got from that book was that there are mechanisms to scale OKRs up and down the organization. And my sense is that the goal there is to make sure that everyone is pointing in the same direction. And I guess the concern that I have is at a different level of granularity, and you called it out; the information architecture per se. My favorite example of the lack of such a thing is Kindle. I've been using Kindle for a while to read books, so I should be familiar with it. And I use Kindle in three very different device platforms. I have a dedicated Kindle reader, I have Kindle on my iOS devices, iPad and iPhone. And I also use Kindle on my Mac, and I find things like navigation structures to be different in all three Christian: Navigation within books or between books? Jorge: More so within books. I recently upgraded to a… I had a very old Kindle device and I recently upgraded to a newer one. And the operating system has changed a lot between the two versions… Christian: You're kind of… Okay, I'm going to sort of defend imaginary product people or UX people or tech leaders in companies like this. Some of this is a big company problem. You know, like big enough that you have teams that… The left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, or they have their own agendas. So, in theory, they're all the same experience. And there should be someone saying, “Hey, we have a fundamental experience and you can express it differently, but we all agree it has to XYZ in common.” There are usually efforts to do that. And when I was doing the pattern library stuff, that was a version of that kind of thing. Nowadays, design systems are a version of that kind of thing, but often they're still about the interaction and not how it all fits together or how it works. But there are natural tensions. Teams are going to say, “Yeah, but that doesn't work for my device,” or, “But I have reasons for this,” or “It's always been this way on our sub platform. You bought us and now you're trying to make us be part of you.” It's non-trivial — especially in a larger organization — to just, you know… Everything's constantly shifting. It's a system. You could gradually maybe bring it into harmony, but I think you just have to have some tolerance, therefore. The consumer has every right to expect it to be perfect. But I, know, from being inside the sausage factory, how much that can almost never happen, especially in large organizations that have probably completely different orgs making those things, and maybe not enough cross team alignment. Every big organization I've ever been in is literally either in the process of becoming a little bit more decentralized or more centralized, or it's finished doing one of those things and it's about to start doing the other one. And they never find the perfect amount of decentralization and centralization for all these different overlapping things. So, you get matrix reporting. I have my boss, but I also have my practice leader. And then one day my practice leader is my main boss and I'm embedded in a team and we're a service bureau. And it's like, none of these models are right or wrong, but they produce software like that or experiences. And this has definitely been… And I'm sorry to rant like this, but this has been like a hobbyhorse for me for a long time, particularly when I started doing mobile and cloud type stuff, which was what I was calling holistic UX. Meaning that you don't do the UX of your Kindle on the Mac and you don't do your UX of your Kindle on the Kindle and your UX of the Kindle on the iOS, on the iPad or whatever. Kindle should have a UX, you know, and Kindle should have an information architecture that is one big map. And then everything should be some articulation of that or some expression of that. And yes, there will be compromises, but they should always be the sense that… But “should” is easy to say. When I was at AOL, I think, working for a fellow named Matte Scheinker, who taught me a lot about product, I remember telling him like, “There should be information architects, like that should still be a job.” I was having that old argument, like, should that even be a job title? And I'm like, “Yeah, there's some people they should just do it.” And he's like, “Well, how many? How many do you need? How many IAs does this company need?” And I was like, “Well, at least one.” You know, and maybe it needs to be the chief IA or the one person who just sits there near the CEO or the CPO or whatever and is just making that big map on some level and communicating it. Yeah, I feel like that's lacking. But again, that sounds utopian to me. Nobody understands that they need that in some sense, or it's hard to prove that having that is going to help some team meet its quarterly goals. Jorge: I think it's pretty clear that that's what's going on. And in fairness to the Kindle teams, the individual apps in the different platforms are coherent internally. It's this… I think you put your finger on it, it's the talking between them that seems to be not happening as much. Christian: But were you pointing out… Somebody online was recently pointing out that Kindle also gives you no way to organize your library. It's just a giant list of everything you either have downloaded or ever, unless you delete things, I guess. And there's no grouping, or if there is, it's hard to use. I'm not quite sure what the story is on that. Jorge: Yeah, I remember that tweet, and I think it was around the ability to do so in the Kindle devices themselves. And the reason I remember that is, I actually posted in reply to that that I could easily see how that could be the case, because — to your point earlier about the constraints in different form factors — there was a generation of Kindle devices that didn't have keyboards, and you had to type by moving a cursor around with a four-way pointer thing, which made it really awkward. Right? So, you did not want to be editing a lot of texts, so it made a lot of sense in those to not have it. And perhaps the newer ones, which have touchscreens, don't have it either because it's an artifact from that time? I don't know. Christian: I also think sometimes you get into the difference between power users and ordinary users. So, I've worked on software where we burned a lot of cycles at times thinking about how to make the switching between your two accounts' experience better, or the managing your multiple accounts. Until somebody looked at the data and saw that only 2% of the users have even the second account, let alone multiple. So, I hate to say it, but maybe the long tail of Kindle readers don't have more than one screenful of books or whatever, and investing in a great system for organizing your huge Kindle library just isn't going to satisfy big enough fraction of their user base. Jorge: Yeah, that makes sense. Folks have got to make choices, right? And at least my experience in working as a consultant with product organizations, there's always more to be done than there are resources and time to do it. Christian: I think that goes back to like, what are the incentives? And you say, of course, Amazon doesn't have an incentive to focus on that problem. They've got so many other, you know… Or Kindle, or whatever sub-team you're talking about. But somebody out there could be making it so that ordinary people have a lens they can put in front of anything they're consuming and organize it for themselves. And that may take different forms and it could be a plugin or an add on, or it could be another app you use instead, or it can… There's a number of different ways to give people bookmarklets or things that put a little more power in their hands. And I think this is a longer-term agenda that I've always been fascinated in, which is like, “Where's the Excel for data or for information or for lists, multi-dimensional lists and nodal, you know, nodally-connected things?” There's a lot of tools out there, but there's not sort of like this universal structure that people start to learn as a literacy thing. So, I feel like people are overwhelmed by their information as soon as it becomes more than one list, or have has to be managed dynamically, or anything like that. I actually would say, to be honest, I think something like Airtable is the closest I've seen, not to endorse a product specifically, but when I've used that, I've thought this is giving people who aren't database architects the ability to create structured data with relationships in a very copacetic way. And so, I'm hopeful about that. But you know, to just kind of go off a little bit more on a tangent, I've had this side project, hobby horse of mine that I returned to whenever I get some free time, which fits that model of sort of ideally being something that you could put in front of any other list or any other, you know, like a to-do list or a project list or something like that, which I call “One Job.” My shorthand for it is one job, like “you had one job.” But the log line of it, and you can see this'll date to when I first had the idea, originally, I would describe it to people as “Tinder for tasks.” You know, basically meaning that even… Personally, like I'll use Asana, I've used it as a project management tool in jobs, but I've used it for my own personal to dos kind of convenience. It's a nice kind of just sortable list, but with recurring things. But I still find psychologically that looking at any large group of things — and this could be the backlog for the product that I'm planning the next sprint for or the accumulated ideas that have piled up in my road mapping tool, or my personal list of just, you know, household tasks I want to do — that it's kind of anxiety-provoking to see anything you ever thought of and anything you might consider doing or, or might get to if you get to it. You know, if you do 10 things, do they, here's the 11th thing. Like, that's a lot to have on your screen in front of your face and trying to get your attention. And so, the original idea for this One Job thing was just that you have a stack. You know, essentially you can only see one thing and either that thing is the most important thing on your list, so just do it or, you know, swipe it away, put it to the bottom of the stack and look at the next thing. But eventually you should hit a thing where you're like, “Oh, I can call mom. I could do that now.” Or, “No, I don't feel like calling mom.” You know, whatever it is. And if you get all the way to the bottom of the list and you're back at the top, then you've got to start doing your psychological work. But more generally, I feel like, how can we be empowering end users rather than leaving it in the hands of the businesses to always give the information the exact way everybody wants it. You know, like, I think this has gone back and forth in the browser world. You know, in the early days it was like controlling your own layout and look, I want this type face, I want this backdrop. And eventually that kind of didn't work as it would break the magazine design of the website, you know? So that kind of fell by the wayside. But I think you get that more with people maybe wanting to have more control over their privacy or how their data is going to be used, and there's a market maybe to give people the tools that come between them and the mess kind of product and help them manage the relationship with it better. Jorge: Yeah, I agree. There is a gap in the market. You've already pointed to Airtable, that's one that immediately came to mind as a possibility. Another one is perhaps Tinderbox, which we've highlighted in a previous episode of the show. Christian: I've tried to use that, and I think for me… I have sort of like a law of personal information management systems or whatever, which is that you have to go all in. And no matter how good or bad the system is, they only work if you go all in. And if you partially commit, and continue to partially use other systems at the same time, then you don't get any of the relief that it's all in one place, and that you can stop worrying about it, and you'll have more and more and more systems to track and manage. Jorge: Another product that that came to mind, I don't know if you've had a chance to play with it, is Notion. Christian: Oh, you know, I've been reading about it a lot lately, and I've seen people promoting it, but I'm not quite familiar with how it works. Jorge: My sense is that — and I have not used it extensively, I've kind of played around with it — but from the videos and tutorials that I've read, it strikes me that it that Notion is to something like your notepad as Airtable is to Excel. Where in Airtable and Excel the primary information objects that you're dealing with are some kind of a table-based structure, Notion is much more freeform and more text-centric. But the principle seems to be fairly similar, where you enter information and allow the structure to emerge as you gather more of it and start tagging it on the fly. So, it's intriguing. I do think that there are gaps in the market for such tools. Christian: Yeah. I see it kind of plays into the wiki paradigm too. I used to use a personal wiki, and for a long time, that was another great, infinitely malleable, networked thing. But again, I think these things work if you just commit to using them there's an expression in 12-step programs that is, it works if you work it. You know, physically like if you go all in and embrace the system, you can make almost any system work for yourself. Jorge: That seems like a really good place on which to wrap our conversation. And I feel like we have much more to talk about, and perhaps we will at another occasion. But for now, Christian, where can folks follow up with you? Christian: Well, you can always check out my personal website, which is mediajunkie.com. And if you're near Richmond, Virginia in February, I'm doing a workshop there, but this may not be out by then. I've got a series of videos coming out with UIE, with Jared Spool's website, in their all-you-can-learn library on product management for UX designers. So, people who are coming from a UX design background and want to understand product management better, may want to consider making career in product management or kind of a hybrid product design career, might find some value in those videos. I hope they do. If you have a chance to make it to the IA Conference in New Orleans, which is in April, I'll be giving the closing plenary there. So, some of the things you and I have been talking about, and probably a couple of other things reflecting on social software, mental health, vulnerable populations, things like that, that relate to my recent work. I'll be talking about those things as well. And if you're in Australia, I'll be in Melbourne in late June, early July at a Web Directions Product, giving a keynote there. So that's probably a lot of ways to find me in the near future. Jorge: Well, fantastic. I'll be in New Orleans at the IA Conference, so I look forward to seeing you and hearing your presentation. Christian: Great. Can't wait to see it then. Jorge: Thank you for being on the show. Christian: You bet. Take care. Thanks for having me.

Hey folks! Thank you for tuning in! Today I had an awesome guest Libby Yeh who shared her story of transitioning from a career in Account Marketing to first a programming school and then UX. She also provided valuable advice for people who are just graduating college or are also contemplating a career change. It’s a fascinating conversation from which I learned a lot myself and hopefully you will also find it very informative. Tune in and thank you for listening to our podcast today! Notes: Twitter UX community people mentioned in the episode: Jared Spool, Nick Finck, Joe Natoli PS If you enjoy listening to this podcast, please consider leaving a 5 star review on the platform of your choice. It would mean a lot to me and it will also help get these valuable conversations to reach more people out there.

Jared Spool returns to the Intercom podcast to discuss diversity through education, experience visions and why design in a team sport with Jonathon Colman.

For nearly 40 years, Jared Spool has been helping publishers and software developers create better experiences for their users. Along the way, he has also helped companies apply UX design principles to the process of creating content for their customers. Jared is one of the best-known and most widely cited practitioners and educators in the UX field. We had a wide-ranging conversation on content strategy and how it manifests in user experience design.

Jared Spool (@jmspool) of User Interface Engineering and Jeffrey Zeldman (@zeldman) discuss the goals and workings of Center Centre, a new school Jared cofounded with Dr Leslie Jensen Inman to create the next generation of industry-ready UX designers. Topics include "teaching students to learn," what schools can and can't do, working with partner companies, "Project Insanity," and designing a program to make students industry-ready. Links for this episode:Jared Spool (@jmspool) | TwitterUIE Brain SparksUIE (@UIE) | TwitterUser Interface Engineering - Usability Research, Training, and Events - UIEAll You Can Learn - HomeCenter Centre (@CenterCentre) | TwitterCenter CentreUX Immersion Mobile 2015 — April 13–15, 2015 — Salt Lake City, UTUnicorn InstituteOver 1,500 names are on our Wall of Awesomeness — Unicorn InstituteSponsored by DreamHost (Use the code TheBigWebShow395 for top rated web hosting for just $3.95/month and a free domain name) and Thinkful (Visit the link to get 10% off).

We’re joined by usability grandmaster Jared Spool. Inspired by a tweet we asked Jared to join us to dive a little deeper.

Jared Spool is a writer, researcher, speaker, educator, and an expert on the subjects of usability, software, design, and research. He is the founding principal of User Interface Engineering, a research, training, and consulting firm specializing in website and product usability, and the largest usability research organization of its kind in the world.

Welcome to episode #226 of Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast. I last connected with Jared Spool on episode #77 of this Podcast (it has been a while and the world has changed a lot). If you're interested in the Digital Marketing spaces and curious about what makes customers click (literally), there is probably no one better in the world to help you understand how to make that happen than Jared. His company, User Interface Engineering, is known globally as the place to learn about user interface design and beyond. He also happens to be a very funny and enjoyable person to follow on Twitter. Happy Halloween! Here are some real digital treats for you. Enjoy the conversation... Here it is: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast - Episode #226 - Host: Mitch Joel. Running time: 43:17. Please send in questions, comments, suggestions - mitch@twistimage.com. Hello from Beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at iTunes. Please visit and leave comments on the Blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on twitter.  Six Pixels of Separation the book is now available. Episode #37 of Media Hacks will happen soon and it might feature:  Chris Brogan - New Marketing Labs - Co-author of Trust Agents, Man On The Go, Human Business Works, Third Tribe Marketing and Escape Velocity. C.C. Chapman - Managing The Gray - Digital Dads - Content Rules. Hugh McGuire - LibriVox - iambik audio. Christopher S. Penn - Blue Sky Factory - Marketing Over Coffee. Julien Smith - In Over Your Head - Co-author of Trust Agents. In conversation with Jared Spool. User Interface Engineering. Follow Jared on Twitter. Check out some of Jared's presentations on SlideShare. This week's music: David Usher (with Marie Mai) - 'Je Repars' (in French). Download the Podcast here: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast - Episode #226 - Host: Mitch Joel. Tags: advertising bite size edits blog blogging blue sky factory book oven cast of dads cc chapman chris brogan christopher s penn david usher digital dads digital marketing escape velocity facebook facebook group hugh mcguire human business works iambik in over your head itunes jared spool julien smith librivox man on the go managing the gray marie mai marketing marketing over coffee media hacks new marketing labs online social network podcast podcasting six pixels of separation slideshare social media 101 social media marketing strategy third tribe marketing trust agents twist image twitter user interface engineering

Welcome to episode #77 of Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast. There is a great conversation with Jared Spool from User Interface Engineering that happened at PodCamp Boston 2. Along with that we've got a brand new Greenfields Report from Ireland. I babble on about my speaking event for Google at the Googleplex, and there are some great audio comments too. I think there are some worthy discussion points including twitter versus Jaiku and who will use these best - Marketers or Public Relations practitioners. I also should mention that I forgot to talk about my amazing dinner in California with Shel Holtz (and his wife, Michele) from the For Immediate Release Podcast. I will discuss that next week. In the meantime, enjoy this conversation... Here it is: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast - Episode #77 - Host: Mitch Joel. Running time: 50:04. Audio comment line - please send in a comment and add your voice to the audio community: +1 206-666-6056. Please send in questions, comments, suggestions - mitch@twistimage.com. Hello from Beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at iTunes. Comments are now live on the new Blog - sixpixels.com/blog. Facebook Group - Six Pixels of Separation Podcast Society - please join (we have over 1135 members). Check out my other Podcast, Foreword Thinking - The Business And Motivational Book Review Podcast - sponsored by HarperCollins Canada. Foreword Thinking - episode #7 is now live and features Ben Mezrich - author of the books, Rigged, Bringing Down The House and more. Toronto PR run for Windows Live. Get you new email address here: Windows Love Email. Googleplex trip review - CommerceThink '07 - Google. Audio Comment – Steve Garfield. Greenfields Report - Bernard Goldbach - Podcasting.ie. Audio Comment – Michael Netzley – PR Junction - Singapore Management University. PodCamp Boston. In Conversation with Jared Spool -  User Interface Engineering from PodCamp Boston 2. Six Points of Separation – Six Ways To Think About Website Development: 1. Search Engine Optimization. 2. Tagging. 3. Design. 4. Linking. 5. Technology. 6. Flash. Please join the conversation by sending in questions, feedback and ways to improve Six Pixels Of Separation. Please let me know what you think or leave an audio comment at: +1 206-666-6056. Download the Podcast here: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast - Episode #77 - Host: Mitch Joel. Tags: advertising bernard goldbach business digital marketing facebook foreword thinking google googleplex itunes jaiku jared spool marketing michael netzley motivational books podcamp podcast podcasting pr junction singapore management university six pixels of separation social media marketing steve garfield twist image twitter user interface engineering windows live