A transcript of Episode 195 of UX Podcast. James and Per talk to Jared Spool about the growth stages understanding and the growth states of UX in organisations.
This transcript has been machine generated and checked by a human.
Transcript
Computer voice
UX podcast episode 195.
[Music]
Per Axbom
You’re listening to UX podcast coming to you from Stockholm, Sweden. We are your hosts Per Axbom and James Royal Lawson with listeners and 177 countries from Denmark to Armenia.
James Royal-Lawson
Jared Spool is the founder of UIE and co-founder of Center Centre. He started working in the field of usability and user experience in 1978. Before those terms even been associated with computers, we had Jared on the show before to talk about UX strategy and Net Promoter Score. First one there was way back in Episode 88, and then more recently in Episode 179. So we have the bonus that is a second time this year we’ve had Jared with us. Yeah. But this time, we got to sit down with him in person in Stockholm for the From Business to Buttons conference earlier this year.
Per Axbom
And Jared gave his talk entitled beyond the UX Tipping Point. And he was arguing that we are now at a point in business where UX is a primary differentiator and every single part of the organisation must be infused with an understanding of great design. So in this interview, he walks us down the path of infused UX design, protectionism, maturity, and not quenching enthusiasm. He even gives us a brief tutorial on how business and finance works.
[Music]
Per Axbom
So you took us through a couple of models in your talk. And so we went from the dark ages of UX design, and we’ve talked so much about this we need to actually make the designers a part of the team inside the company. But then you’re saying, well, we can’t stop there. The next step is infused UX design. What does that mean?
Jared Spool
So infused UX design is when you have it, the team that’s producing all the people who are influencers on the team, even the ones who aren’t designers are now designing this sort of goes back to the mantra that that I get in trouble for, which is everyone’s a designer.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And you actually had a quote at the end around. Imagine if you could stand at a whiteboard and just draw a concept, not even a sketch maybe right concept, and the developers in the room would just get it and design it the right way from the get go.
Jared Spool
Yeah and the product manager would immediately say, right, that’s what we should do, even if it takes longer and, and the legal compliance people would be able to look at it and say, right, that’s, that’s going to meet our goals of making sure that we do all the things that we need to do to comply and that’s what a design infused organisation looks like. Everybody in the team understands design.
James Royal-Lawson
You say you get a lot of stigmas…and everyone’s a designer. I mean, everyone, everyone’s taking part in design decisions in an organisation that’s designing stuff. So what kind of stig do you get for saying that everyone is a designer?
Jared Spool
Oh, because people are, are tied to the role. Well, if everyone’s a designer, what do I get my raise for?
James Royal-Lawson
I’ll say title-itis.
Jared Spool
Yeah, it’s it’s, it’s this notion of roles over skills. And the people who get very upset is that they don’t…they worked very hard to get, you know, a business card that said designer which by the way, if you go to Moo, and you pay $19, you can get a business card that says designer on it, they don’t even let you pick from any of 20 fonts. So this argument is is one of protectionism. Yeah, right. It’s, it’s if everyone’s a designer, I have no place in the world and I get that that and, of course on Twitter, you’re not allowed to be nice to people, so you can’t comfort them. And tell them no, this is not necessarily true. But but the… and the thing is, is that is it so many things are not getting fixed in the world that we know are broken. And we’re not getting to them because they’re big, hard problems. And we spend all our time drawing dialogue boxes out of 17 different states.
Per Axbom
It’s interesting, because when people when I talk about ethics, people say, well, that’s not my responsibility, because somebody else took that decision or made it. So that’s excellent. So that’s actually counter to what they’re saying. Because then so you’re saying you’re not the designer then.
Jared Spool
Exactly, exactly. It’s amazing how we are the advocate for the user until it actually requires we’re responsible. And then oh, no, no, no, there’s a product manager who makes decisions for me. I don’t have any authority and I like it that way.
James Royal-Lawson
how do you connect it to the whole vision thing, design vision, because of course, if you’re, if you’ve got your focus on your title, and have your titlelitist, and this is my realm, right, then you’re you’re you’re not sharing the vision enough.
Jared Spool
No, you’re probably not you’re you’re probably keeping it to yourself because there’s power in secrets, right? If I’m the only one who has the vision, then I get to say, and no one can figure out how to replace me. So, so I think there’s something to that. But the vision for it to work has to be everywhere. Everybody needs to understand what the vision is because they all have to march towards it. If they’re not marching towards it, they’re not going to get there.
Per Axbom
And that connects really well to what you were saying that the team’s maturity is based on the least mature person on your team, right? They need to understand it or else it’s not going to work.
Jared Spool
Right. Yeah. I mean, this is this for a lot of teams is a revelation, this idea that they can’t ignore that person, they have to actually help educate that person. And if that’s their job, is to do that and if that person is, is not getting design, it’s your fault, not theirs.
Per Axbom
And then you’re saying, so what’s our job done as design leaders? It’s not to design but it’s actually to teach.
Jared Spool
Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s to help organisations become more design mature. And you do that by first making them literate, so that they can tell the difference between good and bad design and then making them fluent so they know how to make design decisions. And then eventually, they can they can start to master the craft. But if we can just get everybody to fluency, that’s going to be huge.
James Royal-Lawson
Because it’s our communication, because if we’re helping drag up the people that will lower down if the people who are lower down in an organization is fluent.
Jared Spool
Yeah! if you think about sitting in a room with a bunch of people who don’t speak the same language, and nobody is fluent in anybody else’s language communication goes a lot slower. And, and so this is, you know, that pushback that I get on well, you know, I keep saying that designers that were into code are more valuable team, because suddenly you’re speaking somebody else’s language. Yeah. And people say, Well, nobody ever talks about how developers should learn design. And I’m like, No, actually, I have whole talks on this topic. I just gave one. In fact, the developers should learn design because again, if as soon as people in the room have a common language, and it doesn’t matter what that common language is, communication gets a whole lot more effective. And design is really just about communication.
Per Axbom
So are designers getting it?
James Royal-Lawson
Wait, this is where we High Five
Jared Spool
This is like the shortest shortest podcast we’ve ever done
James Royal-Lawson
that is…that’s a bit true.
Per Axbom
Sooner or later, we just know what where we go. So I guess that’s it. No, but but are designers having a trouble understanding that this is the direction they need to be going or are they fighting with their organisations around it?
Jared Spool
I think there I think what happens is a lot of designers are so in the weeds all the time that they are resistant to having to learn anything that gets them that is more than what their daily routine is. And the idea that they have to learn to be influential in an organisation is really hard. And it’s not something that they weren’t in design school, if they went to design school, it’s probably not something that you can easily pick up through osmosis if that’s how they picked up design. So so it requires a set of skills that are very foreign. And I think people are naturally resistant to having to do that, particularly when you feel like you’re running at 1000 miles an hour and only getting a few metres every day. (I just mixed units I’m sorry) It really is what design was really about.
If we really want to make change in the world, if we want to make the world a better place, we have to think on a bigger scale. And we can’t just keep immersing ourselves in the day to day but because of our practices, we we actually keep ourselves down, keep ourselves immersed in the day to day because we don’t work to getting the people around us more literate and design more fluent in design, which requires that we have to do all the talking. Yeah, and we have to describe everything out in excessive detail because they won’t understand it. If we don’t do that.
James Royal-Lawson
I think you’re right there about that, when you when you’re in these like middle stages of UX design as a service and and embedded UX design, then you are so…you potentially, so many designers are so swamped in the operative. You’ve got you’ve got teams that are demanding 17 sketches of…
Jared Spool
Yeah, and and part of it is is that is that to be good at UX design as a service or to be good at embedded design is actually different from each other, and different than the next level. And so you actually have to shift gears and start behaving differently. The behaviours that got you here and not necessarily the behaviours that will get you there.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. You can’t You can’t continue if you if you just continue fulfilling those stages, you can never lift to the next one. It’s not an it’s not a gradual evolution to the next stage from there.
Jared Spool
Exactly. That problem is a tricky one. It requires that you keep doing what you’ve been doing, but also do this other thing. Yeah. And slowly shift to it. And this takes time. This is this is these are, these are not things that you do in a weekend. And this is not you go the off site and you come back and everything’s different.
Per Axbom
Do you think you’ll progress naturally? So it’s not a question of it, if it will happen. It’s how much time and effort should you put into it happening?
Jared Spool
I think it progresses naturally but there are also lots of forces that are always trying to keep it back. You have to always be mounting a resistance to it. Otherwise you’ll you’ll just, it’ll just overtake and and you’ll be you’ll be stuck where you are the push to optimise having a design team and optimise all the different ways that that design team serves all the other teams actually is resistant to a team that says, You know what, we don’t want to use your design team anymore. We want our own designers. The first reaction is no, you’re not allowed to do that. Because all of our internal systems break. And the problem is is that when you go to embedded UX design and you have embedded folks, you have to still connect them to that design team and the design team now…you know, this, this this discussion that we’re having around design ops and things like that, that’s sort of that, that realisation that we have to support these outside teams.
James Royal-Lawson
The design hub,
Jared Spool
Yeah, the design hub concept, we have to support these outside teams, we have to form a community of practice and, and they report to the people inside the team, with a dotted line report to the design folks, and they need to be in touch with what other teams are doing. Because if they’re isolated in silos, we’re back into spot UX design. So we can’t we can’t have them be isolated. We have to have them communicate, but that’s a whole different communication structure than when we were all co-located and everybody was switching up and and we were just doing utilisation hours. And so there’s there’s lots of different issues that that come about, because we are not we’re not thinking in those terms. And when you’re embedded, and you’re the designer in the team, you’re resistant to the idea that a product manager might make a design decision because, you know, what, what’s my job, if the product manager makes design decisions, right?
And, but we want the product manager to make design decisions, we, you know, at the same time that were resistant to the product manager making designing decisions, we complain every time they make the wrong decision. Right. And and, you know, we see ourselves as the you know, that we’re wearing the designer cape and we come in and we you know, we’ve got our designer pyjamas on and we are solving the team’s designer villain issues and and that’s our job is to fight crime and why are they you know, they just should stand back while we fight crime. And, and, but that approach doesn’t work. You know, we if, if everybody fights crime, it works a lot better. So, so And if we just educate everybody, so the criminals just don’t realise that they’re they’re bad doers, then we were better and I think I’ve taken that metaphor far too far.
James Royal-Lawson
So, getting to getting over the tipping point, and when you.. you worried me a little for a little while today, when you said you had 130 different kind of players. I was worried, I did think that I might want to lunch now. Well, you thankfully, just just three of them.
Jared Spool
Just three. So there is 127 more. Yeah.
James Royal-Lawson
So let’s take another four or five, seven now. Okay. The three the three that you shared with us today. What are they?
Jared Spool
Why you want to ….. he’s got pictures.
James Royal-Lawson
I’ve got my notes
Jared Spool
The three that I shared today were immersive exposure, shared…
Per Axbom
shared experience vision
James Royal-Lawson
He’s got notes.
Jared Spool
And a culture of continuous learning.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, the immersion, the immersion we’ve talked about previously there is a need of everyone getting out there and meeting meeting real users or people in your team. But today, I think that an extra take him on that one for me was the fact that you got to get make sure that’s the way you are bringing up the people lowest in your team, right focus on those ones, those ones that need to get out there first.
Jared Spool
Exactly. Yeah, I mean, those are those are the ones that make all the difference. And we you know, anybody who’s been doing this for a while has had the experience of getting a stakeholder to come to some sort of user research session. And it’s like a religious experience for them. They walk out of there going oh my Yeah, I can never let that happen again. We need to why why have we not done this before? Why did it take us two years to do this ?
James Royal-Lawson
Then you have the challenge. You’ve got to get them to slow down because they want to fix absolutely every single thing.
Jared Spool
No, let them absolutely let them , I don’t understand this slowing them down thing let them. And then say, okay, we’re going to test your ideas. Let’s do it. And then they will see what happens. They will naturally slow down. Right? What? Why hold them back. I mean, it’s like, I don’t understand if someone’s got passion and energy to make things better, let them make things better, even if you think it will make things worse, let them try because chances are won’t be any worse than them not doing anything. And the last thing you want to do is, is quell their enthusiasm. And our Swedish word for quelling enthusiasm?
James Royal-Lawson
Dämpar…
Per Axbom
…Entusiasm.
James Royal-Lawson
I fell straight back into whole title thing or at least the realm, being scared of my realm, because you know, you see them stakeholder goes out, stakeholder goes to the session, sees lots of real user behaviour and has completely seen the light, come back wants to fix everything and I’m thinking, oh my god, they’re going to disrupt everything while fixing it, but you want to be brave, then. That’s the thing. We need to be brave designers.
Jared Spool
Let them disrupt everything.You know, it’s it’s someone’s just learning how to cook. And they go to the restaurant and and they get their favourite food, you know, Swedish meatballs which I now here are Turkish. And so they get their favourites formerly Swedish meatballs formerly known as Swedish.
James Royal-Lawson
Our former king stole them from Turkey
Jared Spool
and and sorry for your loss by the way, my thoughts and prayers, they they have that dish and they go home and they try and make it and it’s not as good as what they made. Right? Do you say to them Don’t try to make it don’t don’t you will never make it that good. Let the professionals do it you will never make meatballs that good or do you say no, no, let’s take it apart. Let’s go back. Let’s taste the spices. Let’s take let’s see how long they they simmer the meat Let’s, you know, whatever it is, let’s try and understand it. And now it gives you a chance to have a conversation about the next level of skill that it takes to get there.
Let them have that, that failure. Right. You know, for how are they supposed to learn if we’re always protecting them. And at the same time, we talked about how important failure is I don’t understand this this dichotomy, right? I you just let them do it. We did it. None of us, you know, the sun kept rising. It rises on schedule every morning. Well, not here but everywhere else. Here it only rises two thirds of the year, but the ….the universe will not change. If the actually make it worse for a moment except for the fact that they will now understand that this is harder than they thought. And they will have more appreciation for the skill that goes into it. And then you want to encourage them to continue.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that takes into… the culture of continuous learning. And it feeds into that.
Jared Spool
Exactly. I mean, who stopped us from making those mistakes? And yeah, we think we didn’t make those mistakes. We’re fooling ourselves.
Per Axbom
Now, you made me think about how because you also made the point about people saying it’s okay to ship something, even if the design is not finished. Even if you’re not satisfied with the design, you think, well, we can fix that later. So it seems that it’s okay to be failing in design continuously, but everything else has to be on par before you release it, like the brand and the engineering and the code and everything, but design, not so much.
Jared Spool
Yeah, I think I think the organisations that learn how to experiment with design but not ship and do much better than the ones who ship their experiments and…I think that the ones who ship their experiments…they’re just building up design debt. And that design debt gets more and more expensive down the road. Because you have some users who learn the crappy way, because they have to use the product and they master it. And then you when you go to change it, you get them all angry.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Because as soon as you’ve released the design is a design. It’s out there. It’s been used. Yeah, it’s no longer an experiment,
Jared Spool
Right? Or it’s not being experienced, and you’re never going to get them to use it again.
James Royal-Lawson
Everything’s an experience.
Jared Spool
Right? How many products have you tried when it was version one and you’re like, not interested?
Per Axbom
Our version of Craigslist actually. You’re looking around like something’s happening.
Jared Spool
Yes, you probably can’t hear the speakers that that indicate that we are now supposed to be somewhere else. They are starting the show back up.
James Royal-Lawson
We had a question from last time that we wanted to ask.
Per Axbom
Yes, one question.
James Royal-Lawson
So how do we communicate our value more? Or was that the question you want to ask now?
Per Axbom
Yeah, it’s around. Really our value to the business.
James Royal-Lawson
This is how we are helping the organization move on.
Per Axbom
Because we are so bad at these conferences and understanding how do we fit into the business? We talked about design, how we design well, but we don’t talk about how we fit into the business, and we don’t spend time as designers understanding economics, finance. How do we get there?
Jared Spool
I mean, sure. So short answer. Yeah. Yeah. You learn. Yeah. Right. I mean, the business is not complicated. It’s obviously not complicated business people learn. The thing about business is that it, it has a different vocabulary. So you go through the same stages, right? And first you have to learn about the vocabulary. And you have to learn the difference between a good business and a bad business. And people don’t understand the simple things about their own businesses like, you know, how does the business stay in business? Right? Where, where does the money come from? You work for a bank, how does the bank actually work? Where’s the salary money coming from? People don’t understand this. Right. What is? What is the notion of profit for bank?
You work for a non-profit, how does the nonprofit’s stay around? How does it continue to, to you know, people donate money, okay, I get that. You spend it on that whatever the mission of the business.. of the nonprofit is. But there’s all sorts of stuff that isn’t the mission that goes on. I mean, you’re maintaining a website, you’re building apps and you know where’s the money for that coming from? And how come there isn’t more money for that? And you don’t understand how what that how that works? And what those are your you’re just going to wander around wondering, can I do this? Can I not do this? Is this feasible, is is not feasible? or how can I help do it better? Right?
If I can, if I understand how donations work and how fundraising works, I can actually potentially change the amount of the design to make fundraising less frictionful and make it easier to get money into the organisation, which might mean we get more money and which might mean we can spend a little bit more money on making a better website, or or, you know, buying some tools that I wouldn’t get to use otherwise, or whatever it is. And if we don’t have that knowledge, we’re, we’re failing, right, so so we need to, we need to understand how the business works. So you start there. By just getting basic literacy, you know, can you read an income statement, they’re not that hard to read. They’ve got all the ways you make money followed by all the ways you spend money. And then at the bottom, you take all the money that came in, and you subtract it from all the money that you spent. And that’s either a profit or a loss.
That’s how that works. Yeah. And then there’s something known as a balance sheet and you have assets and liabilities and equity and assets always equals the liability plus the equity. That’s why it’s called a balance sheet because they’re always in balance means that that whatever you have, in assets, you have to have balanced in either things you owe other people or money or assets you’ve stored away. And if you can’t make that work, there’s something out of whack about the business. Once you are in those basics, you actually have a lot of room to do some magical things, because you can talk about how this expense will become an asset. If you you do it right.
Per Axbom
So what I hear you’re saying actually is, which is really good. We don’t need to learn about business to communicate our own worth. We need it to become better designers.
Jared Spool
We need to become better designers, we needed to be able to talk the language of the business people, because it’s way easier for us to learn how to talk their language than it will be for us to try to teach them how to talk our language. Again, it’s about getting in the room and having a common language. And we don’t have to be Yeah. I know lots of people who English is their second language, who do just fine in 99% of the conversation that we have. And they learned English and I did not take an effort to learn their language, the only language I’ve ever studied is Spanish and I studied it for three years. And all I can say is I have a red pencil, and it never comes up in conversation, primarily because I never have a red pencil. And the…but if I can’t speak a word of Spanish. Not true i can i can order chicken in a restaurant. But if they can speak English, now we can have a conversation.
And if I bother to learn Spanish, if I was in a community where I needed the people around me to communicate, and they don’t know English, my learning Spanish would be the easier way for me to accomplish that versus me sitting them all down and trying to teach them English. Yeah. That’s how that works. And so I need to, to learn the language of business. It turns out that once you learn the language of business, you realise that executives only care about five things. They either care about increasing revenue decreasing costs, increasing the number of new customers that come into the business, increasing the amount of revenue that comes from existing customers, and looking after the long term’s viability and sustainability of the business which they, they use the phrase “shareholder of our values”, which wigs out people who don’t want to be capitalists, but it’s not a capitalist thing. It’s just a code word that everybody in business uses for long term sustainability. And that’s it.
Once you learn that those are the only five things you can start to recast business. So if I’m working on a design, how is this design either going to increase revenue, decrease costs, increase how we get new customers, increase the money we get from existing customers, or help the long term sustainability business? If I can’t put my design idea into one of those one or more of those five categories? There’s no way any executives going to pay attention to it.
James Royal-Lawson
And I think that is the real seat of the board. That understanding, learning that understanding of the business, you don’t need an actual seat on the board anywhere as UX. Understanding this aspect of business is is our key to that door.
Jared Spool
Yeah, I mean, I don’t think we need to be in that room
James Royal-Lawson
No we don’t, because if you understand this, that need vanishes
Jared Spool
Yeah, you know the executives are actually talking about this stuff all the time. They’re always telling us what what their priorities are, we just are choosing not to listen and we just okay, but let’s talk about type. Okay, so how does type help me increase the number the amount of revenue decrease the cost, increase..the number of new customers increase the existing business long term sustainability? If you can tell me how type does that I’m all ears if you can’t tell me how type does that why are we talking about type and, and you know, we can take a design system.
And we can say, well, design system will decrease costs because they’ll allow developers to get things up faster, we can get things that fit the look and feel of the product better. It will actually help us with existing customers because we can actualy get them to use parts of the product they’re not using today because it no longer looks completely different. And they can use the things they learned in that part of the product over in this part of the product.
So we suddenly get new customers from existing customers from that it will help with new customers, because it will make us look like we are a thoughtful, coherent business. So we will actually attract customers, because they will see just in the demo that everything feels and looks the same. And they won’t have to learn new things every time they move to a new set of the menus, which is going to increase overall revenue. Oh, and by the way, this is going to help our long term sustainability because keeping the costs down, right? I can put that design system in that phrase, and I can talk about it in terms of the business and never even utter the phrase design system. And the exec doesn’t give a shit about the design system. They care about how I am decrease costs, how am I going to increase new business? How am I going to increase existing business? How am I going to increase overall revenue? How am I going to get shareholder value and that’s the the conversation and it wasn’t that hard to learn. We, it’s only hard because we’ve never thought about before and 90% of what we do, we can’t put into that model because we’ve never put into a model because we’ve been unconsciously incompetent about business.
Per Axbom
And in the show notes will link to that blog post you wrote about 10 – 12 years ago about exactly this, which I have been stealing from since then. There you go.
Jared Spool
Yeah, I’ve been mumbling about this for 12 years and damn it, No one listens.
Per Axbom
Well, we’re listening now. Thanks so much for joining us, gentlemen. So nice to see you in Stockholm
Jared Spool
It was very nice to see you in Stockholm
[Music]
James Royal-Lawson
One of the things I’m thinking about there is that often I find that one of the most satisfying things about the work I do is when other people, I’ve got other people to make, you know, good design decisions. I think it’s, it’s kind of ironic, really that the, the most satisfying part of my job sometimes is when I don’t do my job.
Per Axbom
Yeah, but though I know what you mean, because I, I really felt something when you said that about the whiteboard, you you walk up the whiteboard, you draw something, and the team just gets it and then you can just walk out and my work is done here.
James Royal-Lawson
But the even better part is when one of the other members of the team walks up to the whiteboard, does that little bit of sketching, and you just sit there in silence
Per Axbom
and you do absolutely nothing?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that’s what you’re saying. Exactly. That that you know, because because at that point, you get that you get a feeling you see them and go, that they’re there. They’ve you know, especially if it’s a someone you’ve been working with for a while, and you’ve gone through the other stage, you’ve been there and you’ve done the kind of frustrating amount of minutes in front of the whiteboard in front of another tool, trying to kind of create something that communicates what you’re trying to achieve. And then that day when you can sit there in the meeting and almost be completely silent and it works that is incredibly satisfying.
Per Axbom
Yeah. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more.
James Royal-Lawson
But this, I think is one of those interviews one of those shows where there’s some really good stuff that Jared said and said in his talk. And I think we we’ve skimmed over it fast or it’s worth giving a few more minutes to just taking a breath and listing it maybe bit more structured.
Per Axbom
Yeah, I agree.
James Royal-Lawson
So, one of the things that we talked about was growth stages of understanding. And I think we mentioned it briefly toward the end of the interview with him. And these were the personal growth stages. So Jared talks about how you have unconscious incompetence, and you know, you’re rubbish and you don’t know it,
Per Axbom
Right. So before you learn how to drive a car, you don’t know how bad you are driving the car?
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, you just give you are compeltely oblivious. Then you have conscious incompetence. This is where you’re rubbish and you know it. Yeah
Per Axbom
Your first driver’s ed lessons. That’s what I’m thinking.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And then then we got conscious competence. You’re good, and you actually know it.
Per Axbom
And you’re doing well.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. Then we have….
Per Axbom
But you still have to concentrate to do good.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, exactly. So that moves you then onto unconscious competence. When you can be good without thinking about it.
Per Axbom
Right. You’re habitually just awesome.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. So so this is the year four growth stages, the personal growth stages that Jared went through. It’s very good to think like this. Everyone, everyone probably is in one of these four places. … then go on.
Per Axbom
Now he was also saying so when it was when you were moving between those stages. He also taught us you’re moving actually from Literacy to Fluency to Mastery. Yes. He used those words in the interview as well.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, exactly. And then we get the language analogy, which I think is an excellent analogy that Jared uses both in the context of design and also business.
Per Axbom
Exactly. And even this aspect of should designers learn how to code and will that make them better designers. It makes them better designers, because they now can speak the language. So it’s all about communication. Yeah, better the communication is between team members, the better results you will get. That is what he’s after.
James Royal-Lawson
Exactly. So if you can learn to speak French and Spanish, you can talk to people better, who have French and Spanish is a native language. Just like if you learn more about programming and learn more about business, you can speak more clearly and easily with the people from those worlds. Yeah. So then we move on to Jared’s growth stages of organisational UX, right? This is this is kind of UX maturity in organisations. So in the very beginning you have the Dark Ages where there’s no UX design at all.
Per Axbom
And then you have the spot UX design. He used that term, where there’s occasional UX, you do some UX, that you’re aware that there’s something that is UX, and you you incorporate it into some of the work you do.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah. And then UX design as a service, we mentioned this during the interview, where a UX team is serving projects. And this is true, this is for a long time where we thought was the kind of end of the maturity scale that we’ve, we’ve we’ve got there with people are listening to what people are asking us to do stuff. We’re, you know, job done, but it goes on.
Per Axbom
Right. And then you have embedded UX design, which we also talked a bit about, but that’s when the project teams get their own resources so you’re actually more self sufficient. You take care of your Team and you can actually make decisions. You’re not being requested to do stuff by other people.
James Royal-Lawson
But even that isn’t the end. There was one, there was one more stage that Jared mentioned, which was infused UX design. This ties in with what we just talked about with language, that is what every project team member has fluent design skills. And so everyone in the organisation is capable of making design decisions, though they think about the user in every aspect of what they do.
Per Axbom
Right? So and this is where you as a designer, your job would basically be making sure that everyone in the organisation understands the value of designer how to make design decisions.
James Royal-Lawson
Everyone is fluent in everyone’s language.
Per Axbom
Yeah, exactly. Wow.
James Royal-Lawson
It’s a bit it’s the Babel fish of UX.
Per Axbom
Can it be done?
James Royal-Lawson
Done everything we’ll see. Oh, then, I think to wrap up the very end of our interview, Jared gives us a run through a little business lesson and talks about the 5 things that matter in business. I know you’ve repeated them several times it was the end, but Jared did it very fast. So we can do it again now put a little bit slower.
Per Axbom
Yes. So the first one is increase revenue,
James Royal-Lawson
and then decrease costs.
Per Axbom
Increase how we get new customers,
James Royal-Lawson
increase the money we get from existing customers.
Per Axbom
And then the long term sustainability of the business which can translate to shareholder value.
James Royal-Lawson
Yeah, that was wonderfully educational. Yes. Slowly delivered.
Per Axbom
Well, I can hear all those pencils, jotting down all this stuff now.
James Royal-Lawson
The clutter of little keyboards. So, thank you for listening. We love to hear from you. So you can you can email us at hey@uxpodcast.com. The email address should be visible or even linked in the episode that you can see directly in your podcast client,
Per Axbom
remember to keep moving.
James Royal-Lawson
See you on the other side.
[Music]
Per Axbom
Knock knock.
James Royal-Lawson
Who’s there
Per Axbom
Amish?
James Royal-Lawson
Amish? Who?
Per Axbom
Really? You don’t look like a shoe.
This is a transcript of a conversation between James Royal-Lawson, Per Axbom and Jared Spool recorded in May 2018 and published as Episode 195 of UX Podcast.