Highlights — A Conversation with Jared Spool
In today’s episode, Mixed Methods founder, Aryel Cianflone interviews Jared Spool about his life and career in user experience design. Jared is the co-CEO and co-founder of the Center Centre and found of User Interface Engineering, a user experience design firm. Jared has contributed to our field for almost thirty years. His earliest days were spent in software engineering. There is a solitary goal behind his work: to eliminate all bad design from the world. As user experience professionals, we know this is no small task.
This article features two excerpts from the podcast. The first excerpt offers a personal history regarding Jared’s motivations in his user experience design practice. The second excerpt offers a story about the ordinary details in our field’s disciplinary history.
A Personal History
Aryel: How did you get the goal of eliminating all bad design?
Jared: I had this tragedy in my life. My first wife passed away and she wasn’t supposed to die. She had at the time, and for many years before, she had multiple sclerosis (MS). It is a debilitating disease, but it doesn’t kill you. It just makes you miserable for much of your life, but she had complications due to MS, and part of the reason that she had complications was due to computer system failure.
My wife had maintained her quality of life with regular physical therapy and occupational therapy and those were expensive, difficult sessions. The insurance company looked at the sessions and the computer decided that multiple sclerosis is a disease that can’t be cured, so therefore it doesn’t make sense to keep paying for these sessions.
The computer system started rejecting payments and my wife and I didn’t know it for months. Ultimately, we had to stop the physical therapy sessions and the sessions stopped for one year and a half. In that year in a half, her mobility dropped tremendously to the point where she struggled to just do basic things that you and I take for granted, like getting out of bed, getting on and off the toilet, things like that. When your mobility drops and you spend a lot of time in a wheelchair, you end up getting rashes in parts of your body that come in contact with the chair and those rashes develop, if they get bad enough, they develop into open sores and then in one of those open sores a bacterial infection crept in and that killed her. The really sad thing was, was that about a month before she contracted the infection and died 24 hours later, a month before that we had convinced the insurance company to assign us a human case representative. They looked at what the computer had decided, decided that it was wrong, and reestablished the occupational therapy and the physical therapy, but it was too late.
At that point, or at a very short point after that, I came to the conclusion that it was poorly designed computer systems that had killed my wife. And it wasn’t the only story I’d heard about that, I mean I heard this story from lots of people very similar things happening and realized that we had to rid the world of all the badly designed things.
Aryel: That’s an incredibly powerful story, such an incredible and personal start to your career.
Jared: In some ways it wasn’t the start of my career. I’d been 20 years into it at that point, but it definitely reframed why and how we were doing what we were doing and it gave us whole new meaning. Up until that point UIE, the company that I started in 1988, my wife died in 1996, so up until that point the company was basically just a design services firm. We did usability testing and some design work and things like that, but after that point our mission became much more clear and it’s not just about doing any usability design. It was all about how do we figure out what the bad design in the world is and then how do we start to eliminate it. We knew at the time that this was probably an impossible thing to do, but we decided what the hell.
This excerpt is exemplary of the stories Jared uses to relate his personal history in user experience design and research. Much of that conversation was at the same time intertwined with a disciplinary history in the formation of the profession of user experience design and research. As the next excerpt demonstrates, sometimes that history is quite humble.
A Disciplinary History
Aryel: You’ve had the benefit of seeing the industry change so much. […] I would love to hear what your conception of UX was when you were starting out.
Jared: Well we didn’t think of UX when I was starting. That was not even a term that we thought about. The word usability didn’t even really come in to common use until later.
At the time it was called software human factors, and it was an extension of the human factors works that had started in the 50’s and 60’s and early 70’s. […] In the 70’s there was a big push towards ergonomics. […] So in that period we started working on software ergonomics and software human factors and trying to understand how do you make software that accommodates the form of the human just like we’re making physical things that accommodated the form of the human.
It was a branch of sort of cognitive psychology though at that time. Cognitive psychology had not thought about design. So this was all fascinating right, because there was nowhere you could go to study this, no programs and no schools. I ended up studying social psychology because social psychology was the best place to learn experimental design and I was interested in the experimental design portion of it. Could we iterate over designs and change something based on a series of experiments and that fascinated me. That’s where I got started.
When I studied experimental psychology I would tur around and apply [these concepts] to designing software. Nobody knew how to do that. My colleagues and I were inventing it. I was in the very first usability tests that were ever done on computer software.
Aryel: That’s amazing.
Jared: Yeah. It’s weird to think of it. I just happened to be in the room. I was one of five people who were involved in that project.
Aryel: [Laughing] No big deal.
Jared: Yeah. At the time it was no big deal, right? It was just a bunch of us in a corner not knowing that this was going to become an industry. It was quite the opposite. In fact, the first usability lab for software ever built was an air conditioning closet. We had to shut the air conditioner off in order to conduct the usability tests.
Aryel: That’s the reality of experimentation and discovery and exploration is like typically you don’t know that you’re participating in this moment in history.
In wrapping up his story, Jared goes on to describe touring the refurbished building twenty years later as part of a speaking engagement. He describes when he enlightened members of a current usability practice (located in the very same building) about this little known piece of user experience history.
In combination these two excerpts are exemplary of the intertwining personal and disciplinary histories of user experience design and research so nicely illuminated in Jared and Aryel’s conversation. The podcast episode also covers a look ahead to the future of user experience design and research and the role that formal and informal education will play.
Listen to the full conversation here. We hope you enjoy the episode and look forward to your feedback in the comments.
(Note: Excerpts from podcast is edited for clarity and concision.)
