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Jared Spool Profile picture
@jmspool
Aug 15, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read • Read on X
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More from @jmspool

Jared Spool Profile picture
Jun 1, 2022
I’ve never felt comfortable with the “Five Whys” approach to identifying problem root causes.

Let me tell you why.

The approach is that you ask why 5 times.

The first why gets you a immediate cause of the problem.

The 2nd tells you what causes that immediate cause.

1/
The 3rd tells you what causes the 2nd. And so on.

And that's fine. The goal is to get to something that is distant from the cause that, if we solved it, would remove all the intermediate causes too.

The problem I have is this:

What if that first answer is wrong?

2/
That first answer is often an assumption, not on facts.

Five Whys puts all the weight on that first answer.

Why are users leaving our site?
Because it's slow.
Why is it slow?
…

Now we're focused on performance.

But what if performance has nothing to do with it?

3/
Read 12 tweets
Jared Spool Profile picture
May 8, 2022
The opposite of user research is guessing.

Ironically, many organizations base their most important decisions (what to build, how it should work) on almost no user research (who are the users, what would improve their life?). Complete guesses.

Don’t guess.
Do the research.
In my experience, the most disruptive ideas come from a deep understanding of the challenges your users and customers face today.

You can’t get that deep understanding through guessing or “instinct.”

It has to be informed through research.
Using “intuition” to direct where to do research is a great approach to make sure you’re always looking in the wrong places.

It’s far more interesting to look where your instinct told you not to. That’s where the really confidence builders are.
Read 4 tweets
Jared Spool Profile picture
Jan 14, 2022
A lot of my work is talking to UX folks about their next job.

Many struggle with "deciding what I want from my next employer."

I've come up with a way to get them past this and to start thinking about where to look first for opportunities.

1/
Thinking about their next job inevitably leads many folks down the path of "what would I like in a place to work."

This gets into lots of touchy-feely attributes about the work environment, but what's almost always missing is what they'll actually do when they get there.

2/
Don't get me wrong: there's a lot to be said about working in a high-quality work environment.

However, that environment isn't going to hire someone out of charity.

The org is hiring someone to get a job done.

That's where the job hunt needs to start. What will you do?

3/
Read 14 tweets
Jared Spool Profile picture
Dec 15, 2021
I see the same mistake repeated across many of the UX job ads I review.

The job ad describes the JOB, yet highly-qualified candidates want to learn about the WORK.

These are very different things.

1/
What we hear from candidates:

Tell me what I'll be working on.
Tell me how my work will have an important impact on people.
Tell me what makes the work challenging, especially for someone at my experience level.
Tell me what makes this work unique.

This is the WORK.

2/
UX job ads rarely talk about those things. Or maybe they give 1-2 sentences about it.

Here's one example I just found. They give 1 sentence to what the company does. The rest of the paragraph could be describing any company on the planet.

3/
Read 14 tweets
Jared Spool Profile picture
Nov 30, 2021
I pine for the day when UX research is no longer sold as a way to “validate” the designs of products or services.

This thinking limits what teams deliver.

Going down this path just to get a foot in the door creates so much extra work later on to break away from it.
Put another way:

If “validation” is the first time any team members are getting direct exposure to users and their problems, you’re doing it wrong.
I spend most of my time these days helping extremely frustrated UX leaders try desperately to push past the “research=validation” boundary with their leadership.

It’s really a dangerous mindset to let grow.

There are better ways to position research. We’re much smarter now.
Read 5 tweets
Jared Spool Profile picture
Nov 22, 2021
NPS, UMUX-lite, SUS, CSat, CES…

These are just tools for producing a number that will send your team off optimizing the wrong things.

Best thing you can do is just ignore them.

(If there’s a follow-on ‘verbatim’ question, spend your time there. That could be useful.)
The problem with ‘satisfaction’ is it’s a meaningless term.

Are you satisfied with this conversation?

If you gave me a 7, how is that different than if you gave me a 6? Or a 3?

Everyone brings a different meaning of satisfaction to the survey. We don’t know their context.
When every respondent brings their own meaning and context to a question, you can’t aggregate the answers. You’re aggregating apples, oranges, watermelons, and bees. What’s the average of all that mean?

Satisfaction measures are literally garbage measures.
Read 6 tweets

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