Interview with John Willshire
Founder, Smithery
On the evolution and impact of UX
Thinking back to 2009, how and where did the discipline of UX sit within the industry, what role was it playing in business at that time?
From a broader business perspective, I think back then a lot of companies thought that merely having a presence on a digital platform was enough — a kind of ‘digital signalling’ if you will. There weren’t that many companies giving the deeper experience much thought at all, even businesses or brands who would have said they prided themselves on things like ‘superior customer experience’.
How has UX changed in the past 10 years?
I would hope, in the best cases, that ‘User Experience’ now means just that; the end-to-end relationship between a customer and a company, through whichever devices or interactions they choose, in order to create more value for both parties. ‘Value’ is a pretty fat word, of course, but I mean anything from ‘the simple emotional joy of using something that’s really well designed’ to ‘the process that takes as little of my time as possible so it is barely noticeable’. There is a substantial growth in the presence of UX in the business mindset. To employ a shonky metaphor, in the past ten years it has gone from being a hot underground band to selling out decent-sized arenas.
How do you see UX evolving over the decade to come?
I’m sure others will respond with opinions on bright shiny futures, many of which I’d no doubt agree with, so let’s look at a negative one. I fear some bright spark may work out a way to start listing the investment in UX for a business in their balance sheet (much as brands themselves became listed as a company asset). After all, it’s an established and repeatable pattern of behaviour that generates goodwill from customers towards that particular service, and so could be argued to be of value outside that journey in its own right. That way madness lies, of course, but it doesn’t usually stop people, does it?
What’s the future of UX in one word?
Reinvention. For better or worse.
On your career
Tell us about your first design/UX role. Who did you model yourself on?
Ha… my career path is a bit strange in that respect. I went to uni to study English, left with an Economics & Econometrics degree. I then went through a graduate scheme of a Market Research company, then moved to a strange backwater of the Viacom empire. Then I spent seven years leading Innovation at a media agency, before setting up Smithery in 2011 (initially as an innovation studio, morphing into a Strategic Design Unit after a couple of years as I discovered where we best created value for clients). If you were being generous, you would say it’s ‘being a generalist’, but equally you could certainly use the phrase ‘a chequered past’. As for inspiration, I can’t really say it’s modelled on anyone in particular, but across a wide variety of domains finding people whose work or though processes offer inspiration and things to reach for.
What are the qualities of a good UX practitioner?
Others will be much better at answering this specifically. But you can’t go wrong with evidencing what you know, recognising what you don’t, and establishing practical ways to fill that gap.
How do you motivate your team?
Because of our ethos (Make Things People Want > Make People Want Things), we have a really small permanent team, and then build out teams to meet specific different briefs. It’s like the original Mission Impossible TV show; collecting people with very particular skills to meet the challenge. As such, motivation becomes really project/location specific. But having a common framework or map is a useful way of creating collective belief in a direction. The most beneficial skill I learned from Economics was that simple visual models based on a set of assumptions help you to tell stories that prompt hypotheses or decisions.
What advice would you give practitioners who are just starting out in their careers?
Find yourself. Discover what works for your work, and find a way to share that with people you work with with as plainly as possible. Check out Cassie Robinson’s great “A user manual for me” as an example.
What does a typical day look like for you? Is it all meetings?
Too much of my day is spent peering into glass surfaces. I’m always trying to change that, and I’m rereading Cal Newport’s Deep Work to find more ideas.
What challenges are you facing at the moment and what are you doing to overcome them?
The reason Smithery works, for us and for clients, is because it is the size it is, and works the way it works. It is always tempting to scale, so our challenge is always to resist that.
What’s your proudest achievement?
Watching attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion was pretty special. It was a long trip back in economy though.
Anything else on your mind at the moment?
We spun out a little side business from Smithery, called Artefact Cards. It was based on a way we ran a few workshops where we made our own materials. People started asking to buy them, so it became a separate online business. Due to demand, we’re moving into retail, which is a really different experience designing something that sits on a shelf in a shop rather than via an online site where you can surround something with context. So if you’re coming along to UX London, you may find something in your bag which is part of our research… please let us know what you think.
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We hope you’ll join John 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 www.uxlondon.com
