Interview with Josh Clark

Founder, Big Medium

This year we’re celebrating 10 years of UX London! In the run up to our special anniversary conference, we caught up with Josh Clark 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

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?

The earliest definitions of user experience defined it as the whole gamut of experience with a system or company. It was said to be the full adventure of hardware, interaction, and visual design — but also customer service, retail experience, packaging, manuals, everything.

In practice, though, mainstream UX design a decade ago tended to be smaller… less ambitious… almost always tied to a narrowly described screen interface. In 2009, most UX designers rarely had the chance to venture into strategy or have an effect on anything beyond a wireframe. Although good design had already begun to emerge as a competitive advantage in 2009, the common complaint of UX designers was still of too little influence: “we deserve a seat at the table”.

How has UX changed in the past 10 years?

UX got its seat at the table! As companies grew their own internal design teams, UX became the glue that aligned design with strategy, marketing, and customer service. There’s something even bigger, though: as digital became the core channel for nearly every industry, UX rediscovered its original definition and came to own the overall customer experience with a company or service. The discipline finally transcended wireframes.

I see little difference now between user experience, service design, and product design, though all came from different places. The best UX leaders wear all three hats, influencing the whole breadth of experiences people have with a company or product.

How do you see UX evolving over the decade to come?

The last ten years have seen UX shape traditional realms of business. The next ten years will see UX reshape the digital realm it came from. Digital interaction has moved beyond the screen; we’re interacting through speech, through objects, through data. We’re soaking in interaction — much of it invisible to us, especially data gathering. UX will play a crucial role in determining how this evolves, establishing not only the best practices but the responsibilities and values this emerging world will adopt. This new chapter will look very different from the screen-bound experiences that preceded it. It’s exciting and uncertain.

What’s the future of UX in one word?

My sincere hope is that it will be “respectful”.

On your career

Tell us about your first design/UX role.

I didn’t start as a designer. I began as a newspaper journalist and then a TV producer and filmmaker. When the web became popular in the mid-1990s, it struck me as a venue for a new kind of storytelling. It was wonderfully chaotic: there were no conventions for design or UI, and even better, anyone could publish to it. My first websites were hypertext historical documentaries I created myself. It was a refreshing departure from the PBS documentaries I worked on at the time, which cost millions of dollars and followed a strict Ken Burns template. Uncovering new kinds of storytelling — and I definitely think of UX as storytelling — is one of the threads that connects my entire career.

Another thread is building enabling platforms. It’s a pattern I only recently recognized, but it started early. When I first learned to program in the early 1980s, I built lots of text adventure games, and I finally decided to write a program that would build the games for me. It was a homespun CMS to host adventure games. Suddenly all of my friends were using it to make their own games, using the common commands and design patterns of the day. Without thinking about it, I’d built a platform to enable creativity and take the friction out of game design.

Fast-forward a few years to 1996, when I created a website for runners. I was a newly minted runner with the zeal of the convert. I wanted to help others discover its pleasures, too. So I created a schedule called Couch to 5K (C25K) to help people get started. It was an onboarding process for running. So C25K is an enabling platform, too — a system that establishes confidence and familiarity through early victories in order to build habits and skills.

Other projects followed. I created a commercial CMS to let everyday folks publish to the web in the days before Wordpress. And now much of my work revolves around design systems, which I consider yet another way to clear out unnecessary friction and allow designers to do their best work without constantly reinventing the same design elements over and over.

For my own UX practice, those themes of storytelling and systems thinking have really carried me through these two decades of practice.

What are the qualities of a good UX practitioner?

The work of UX is to find and clear the narrow path that connects business goals to user wants and needs — and then light that path as brightly as we’re able.

I think many UX designers think of themselves as user advocates — and sometimes that’s a necessary role when nobody else will speak for the user. Too often, though, I think that puts UX into an adversarial role with business interests. In the end, design is commercial work that has to serve its patron. So rather than user advocate, I consider myself a reconciler. How do I reconcile and connect the needs of the business with the needs of the customer? That takes careful listening, empathy, strong facilitation, and the love of a gnarly puzzle.

It also demands a deep understanding of the specific interaction — and the role it has in the user’s life or context. What is the interaction really for, and what need does it serve for all involved? The answer is always changing as digital interactions evolve, and as they become more deeply and broadly embedded in our lives. That means we can’t sit still. We have to get out from behind our desks and see how people really use this stuff in their natural habitats.

How do you motivate your team?

It’s all about the love of the puzzle. I’ve never designed an app or a website the same way twice, seriously. Every puzzle is different because every organization, product, and audience is different. The people I seek out for my teams are people who love a new puzzle, and it all comes together from there. As a design leader, I don’t see my primary job as coming up with the answers, but coming up with tantalizing questions that teams are eager to solve.

What advice would you give practitioners who are just starting out in their careers?

The field is so different now from when I started that it’s hard for me to imagine what the experience must be like now for newcomers. But as I think back through the struggles and mistakes I’ve made over the past 20 years, there’s definitely a list of evergreen advice I’d share:

1. You are not your work. Your immense value as a human being is completely unrelated to the worth of the things you make. The success or failure of a project, the presence or absence of attention, the silence or applause of an audience… all of these things are useful commentary on your work — but your work is outside of you. Success doesn’t make you a better person, and failure doesn’t make you a worse one.
2. The best best practices change over time, as assumptions and givens change. Don’t get so hooked on a single technology that you’re not ready for the next thing. Keep moving. Always keep moving.
3. Don’t be afraid to quit. If the design doesn’t work, if the business doesn’t make money, if the job doesn’t fit, move on. Failure is powerfully disappointing, but not as disappointing as staying stuck in it.
4. Your work is much bigger than the current project. Your work is to cultivate your craft, and that craft goes beyond the screen. Get your head into the real world and enjoy life around you. Don’t be narrow. Indulge your curiosity, and cultivate broad pursuits.
5. You might think of yourself as “creative,” but that doesn’t also mean you’re not good at “business.” Business is mighty creative itself, full of storytelling and design opportunities.
6. On that note: the crux of design is selling. The design needs to sell its subject (this is commercial work, not art) and you need to sell that design. For the design to be a success, you have to pitch the project, sell your solution to it, and persuade your boss or client to adopt it.
7. That said: fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Learn to connect with other people about the problem. The best design comes out of lots of conversation.
8. You’re better and smarter at more things than you might expect. You’re also worse and dumber at other things than you think you are. Get to know your strengths and weaknesses so that you can better appreciate the talents of others.

What does a typical day look like for you? Is it all meetings?

Ha, well I guess you could say that my day is full of meetings, yes. But they’re not the kind of toxic meetings that are endless conversations about work instead of actual work. My meetings tend to be conversations about the problem to be solved, the job to be done. To me, that exploration is the majority of design work. So I’m constantly talking to stakeholders and users to understand what they need from a product or service. I’m talking with designers and developers to help them find their way on that elusive path between business and user needs. These are meetings, yep, but they’re rich in meaning and value.

But I still do nitty-gritty design work in collaboration with my teams: interface sketches, bot scripts, prototyping, user flows, “mission statements” for individual interactions and views. I try hard to carve out time for writing and thinking, too, to give myself space to think beyond the urgent and instead focus on the important. Where are things moving, what comes next? The motto of my design studio Big Medium is “design for what’s next.” As a consultant, my work is to figure out how to help companies prepare for things they don’t yet know how to do internally. So a big part of my work is trying to peek around the corner, fetch the near future, and bring it back to my clients to work with.

What challenges are you facing at the moment and what are you doing to overcome them?

For the last year, I’ve been deeply engaged in exploring the role and responsibility for design in a world powered by machine learning. Where do we fit into systems where machines generate the content, the results, the conclusions, and even the interactions? My conclusion is that the presentation of data is just as important as the underlying algorithm. There’s tons of work to be done here by designers and UX researchers to make sure data-driven products address the right problems, and address them for all. I’ve been doing a lot of prototyping, writing, and speaking to explore how we can fight the dark patterns and bad players that we’ve seen emerge to game our algorithmic systems. This is a big part of the work of UX going forward. If mobile defined the last decade of UX, I believe products powered by machine learning will define the next.

What’s your proudest achievement?

Professionally, it’s probably the creation of the Couch to 5K running schedule over 20 years ago. It’s been amazing to see millions and millions and millions of people change their lives through a simple onboarding process for fitness. I’ve heard utterly remarkable stories from people who have changed the course of their lives by changing their view of themselves, starting out with a few steps in the C25K program. It’s something I shared with the world as a young man, and it grew into something so much larger than me. Absolutely humbling.

Personally, though, my proudest achievement is somehow convincing the astonishing Liza Kindred to marry me. Besides being outstandingly fun and vivacious, Liza has had a huge effect on how I think about my responsibility as a designer, as a man, and as a white-man-designer with some influence. Thanks to Liza, I do everything with much more intention now. So: thanks, love!

Anything else on your mind at the moment?

Only to say: Happy birthday, UX London! I’m delighted to be part of this tenth edition. Thanks so much for having me.

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Join Josh 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