Interview with Jan Chipchase
Founder, Studio D
This year we’re celebrating 10 years of UX London! In the run up to our special anniversary conference, we caught up with Jan Chipchase to hear his thoughts on the evolution and impact of UX, and how his own career has developed in this time.
On the evolution and impact of UX
How has UX changed in the past 10 years?
The following taxonomy (building on the work of Panu Korhonen at Nordkapp) helps describe the evolution of the kinds of projects i’ve been tasked with leading over the years. The trajectory is both a reflection of the evolution of usability/UX, and building up experience over time.
- Help us fix this — usability testing
- Help us making this — user experience design
- What should we make — foundational research + ideation + design
- What is interesting and why — exploratory field work (+ideation concepting + prototyping + design)
- What are the implication of x? — speculative design, design fiction, scenario planning
- How do you approach x? — organisational and cultural change
How do you see UX evolving over the decade to come?
To call out two interesting trends.
The first is that UX is increasingly informed and guided by data. Studio D takes the view that the an organization is only as good as the data it ingests and that a healthy organisation requires a healthy data diet — including analytics, quant and richer, more nutritious qualitative insights.
The second is that, due to the scale of platforms and other factors, the distance between the people designing, and those being designed for is growing. For organizations putting products out in the world, this results in missed opportunities, misaligned incentives, social friction and marginalization. We bridge that gap between the designers and users.
On your career
Tell us about your first design/UX role.
I was hired as a usability engineer at Nokia Tokyo in 2000 and rapidly realized that I didn’t have the skills required to answer the questions that were being asked. Been on that journey ever since.
What are the qualities of a good UX practitioner?
In Studio D we look for: innate curiosity; systems thinking; an understanding of how organisations work; cross-cultural experience and an attention to detail. I expect the research leads in our crew to also know how to socially engineer situations and when not to.
How do you motivate your team?
Tap their deep seated motivations.
What advice would you give practitioners who are just starting out in their careers?
Decide whether you want to go deep on a subject matter and community (like UX) or to be a connector between communities.
What does a typical day look like for you? Is it all meetings?
When at my home base of Tokyo, I set aside one day a week for taking meetings. The rest of the week is unstructured.
It is different on client projects. We frame this as structured time (where things are planned) and unstructured time (where things play out naturally). The former feels like work, the latter like fun. We’ve pioneered a process we call popup studios that is designed to align the team to a shared purpose, and is optimized for unstructured time. There’s a whole chapter in the recently launched Field Study Handbook that covers this in detail.
What challenges are you facing at the moment and what are you doing to overcome them?
We have quite a diverse portfolio of clients and projects. This week’s challenges include: figuring out the logistics of getting a chopper into and out of a particular part of Afghanistan, testing new gear for an upcoming expedition to the Pamirs, getting our fixers in place for Field / Phaya Taung retreat, sourcing materials for a new SDR Traveller product, and selecting the printer for the upcoming third edition of the Field Study Handbook. The cadence of communication and the fact that we’re not always sure which timezone we’re on makes it easy for misunderstanding to slip in.
If you don’t know what we do as a studio, you might like a read of the End of Year Report.
What’s your proudest achievement?
It is yet to come.
Anything else on your mind at the moment?
Looking forward to giving my first conference talk in London.
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Join Jan and a host of other fantastic speakers at UX London 2018 — the 10th anniversary edition of Clearleft’s trailblazing UX conference. UX London takes place 23rd-25th May 2018 at Trinity Laban — tickets are on sale now at www.uxlondon.com
