On Tuesday eve, much of the design community from Co-op Digital and the wider north west attended User Research North’s event to hear Jared Spool’s talk.
Over the years, Jared’s influence and presence in the design world has been widely felt and acknowledged. He co-founded Center Centre, a school to train user experience designers and ultimately, Jared helps designers help their organisations deliver well-designed products and services. You can read more about his work here.
We learnt a lot from him.
In this post, a handful of Co-op Digital colleagues reflect on what they learnt on Tuesday and how:
- their new knowledge will help them with their current Co-op work
- knowing this earlier would have helped with past work
Experience design: all the moments, all the gaps
My big take away from the talk was this quote:
When we think in terms of experience, we’re thinking of the entire flow: all of the gaps, all of the moments. That’s what we mean by experience design.
In Co-op Health, we’re providing a service for people who want to order their repeat prescription through our app. This is the front stage – the part the end user sees.
But the back stage of the service needs to be considered to fulfil that entire flow so every moment is accounted for. For example, when you order a prescription, this needs to talk to the NHS and the GP surgery. The prescription order then needs to be made and checked by a pharmacist before it’s picked up by the Royal Mail and delivered. All of those aspects of the service will impact the experience and service we’re providing for people.
Jared’s talk made me think even harder about the importance of collaboration, inclusivity and co-creation across teams and external organisation – it’s a good place to start to ensure the overall service is the best it can be with ‘moments of delight’ Jared mentioned.
Lucy Tallon, principal designer
Demonstrating difficulty is worthwhile
I loved this analogy from Jared. I’ll paraphrase:
A tightrope walker’s act is to walk up and down a rope in a circus. Realistically, keeping their balance and walking the length of the rope is easy for them – they can do it without any trouble. But, if their act appeared to be super easy, the audience is less likely to appreciate the tightrope walker’s skill because the difficulty in doing such a thing isn’t being amplified. The ‘act’ of ponderous steps and motioning a wobble every now and then, which in turn prompts a drum roll every time they do so, is meant to produce suspense and show how hard the task is.
We can learn from this circus act. We too can show the challenges of a design process.
What we do is hard, but to people whose expertise aren’t in design, most websites and apps seem easy. Working in the open; being transparent about how we make decisions and why we’ve made them; ensuring that we have a diverse set of people in the room helps everyone understand the process. Blog posts, week notes, putting our work on the wall, inviting feedback, seeking out stakeholders who haven’t been involved in the design and taking them on research are all things that help. The talk highlighted the importance of continuing to do these things.
Nate Langley, principal designer
Context is where design happens
Jared spoke about the importance of context when solving design decisions.
He showed examples where designers had made improvements to designs from other organisations that they had found particularly poor.
But, although the designs used user-centred design techniques and looked more appealing, they were not feasible in the context in which the organisations operated. The hardware the organisations used, the interconnectivity of their systems, the constraints of their tools and processes, rendered the suggested ‘improvements’ to designs almost impossible (and would cost far too much). As Jared said in a related blog post:
“Often when we see usability problems in designs, it’s because the design team didn’t know something about the context that they should have. Teams with a strong awareness of the different contexts that will crop up are more likely to produce designs that will consistently delight users.”
I’m working on the new Co-op Health app. The majority of the team are new to working within health. And, because we connect to NHS systems, there are a number of constraints that are out of our control.
Jared’s talk reminded me how valuable it is to get as many people involved in the research and design process as possible. Doing this not only allows us to understand the technical constraints and challenges that our designs must operate within, but diverse perspectives help us design for the different personal contexts of our users too. By understanding the challenges that we and our users are facing, we’re able to design solutions that meet both our operational goals and the needs of our users.
Joanne Schofield, lead content designer
From ‘unconsciously incompetent’ to ‘unconsciously competent’
I’m working on a Co-op Food project with people from across the organisation whose expertise are in many different disciplines.
Jared explained that everyone needs to be involved in the design process in order to deliver a successful service. He said that everyone is a designer – we’re just at different stages of the 4 stages of design understanding.
Jared talked about how organisations sometimes use strategies or ‘plays’ (an American football analogy) to help teams improve their awareness.
It’s our job as designers to help people who don’t identify as designers move from being ‘unconsciously incompetent’ at design to being ‘consciously incompetent’. This highlighted the importance of exposing the wider team to journey maps; the concept of story mapping and involving them in user research so they see how people are using a service first-hand.
From now on, I’m going to start identifying activities in our playbook that Digital team members can use when we need to help colleagues jump between stages. Some ‘plays’ may not be effective, but that’s OK, we can try another until we’re all playing as one team in perfect formation.
James Rice, lead designer
Changing the behaviour of others… with our thoughts
Jared talked about an experiment where a group of rats were labelled as ‘smart’ or ‘dull’ and what people were told about the rats affected the result of the experiment. Sounds like nonsense, but I’ve seen this happen.
This is down to something called the ‘expectancy bias’. Your expectations of people or a team will affect how they perform. If you go in believing someone is not a designer, and therefore not capable of creating good design, they won’t.
“Expectations can change outcomes,” Jared said. “Our expectations can change our team’s outcomes.”
I’ve noticed that when I go into something assuming the worst, whether it’s a stakeholder who I presume has bad intentions, or a team I think aren’t capable of making a good product, I tend to prove myself right. Now I try very hard to assume the best possible thing of people and, even if they have different motivations to me, they believe they’re doing the right thing.
I once worked on a product with a very inexperienced design team, and quickly got very concerned we couldn’t deliver the design. When I forced myself to think positively, I saw a significant change in the quality and output of our work, and we delivered.
Katherine Wastell, Head of Design
We’re always interested in hearing about great speakers and significant talks that have changed your way of thinking and working. Comment below.
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