I saw Jared Spool speak at last week’s Refresh Seattle conference put on by @nickf and the @blueflavor people and, as expected, it was wonderful. I’m always amazed at how professional speakers who give similar talks over and over, and yet make it seem just as fresh and relevant as the first time they gave it. Now, I know why — an honest, true message just never gets old.

Embraceable Change

Jared’s talk focused around designing “embraceable change” — developing an increased awareness of your audiences’ varying levels of education. It’s such a simple, elegant and important idea.

If you present problems to your users to solve (fill out this form, I’ll give you a cookie), you have to consider what knowledge they bring to the table. You must design around both ends of the problem — you need to both lower the knowledge required from the user, and assist them to increase their ability to solve the problem. Some choice screens from Windows95 helped illustrate the point (I’m a sucker for PC nostalgia).

Just like Steve Krug’s still totally awesome “Don’t Make Me Think,” Spool’s message and focus is grounded in the reality of how design is actually used, not merely how it looks or how we might hope it to be used. As designers, we make fundamental mistakes when we forget to “look, listen, and observe.”

One line is all you need

However, far and away the best nugget from the entire talk came near the end, when he was speaking to how we must ‘frame’ design projects:

“How will we know if we’ve done a good job?”

Marinate on that one for a just minute. It’s the perfect rule to follow for all design projects. It’s a comfortable motto, one that anchors everything you do — every pixel you push or line of code you write — around the idea of solving a real problem. It’s sound advice.