Feature: Jared Spool, a Man with a Task

Take equal parts determination, curiosity and mischief. Mix in frustration with system design that takes no heed of end-users. It's a successful recipe for running User Interface Engineering, the Massachusetts-based Web research and consultancy company. The man in charge is Jared Spool.

I talked to him on his recent London visit (see the UN news story: 'Back' Button and Search are Kiss of Death to Ecommerce, says Spool). It was a discussion peppered with asides and digressions, but most notable for its humour. About half way through our chat, I asked Jared whether he thought I should write our conversation up as a formal interview or keep the tone. I was thinking of other interviews I'd read where he talks at length about his research, sounding eminent and serious. Actually, much of the time in the flesh, Jared sounds gleeful or indignant. He is clearly passionate about enabling users to complete the tasks they have set themselves in as seamless a way as possible. But his first response to questions is often to play with them while he thinks. Well, Jared, I took your advice – I've kept the tone. Research should be gleeful.

We start our conversation with his view of usability and that brings us quickly into this mix of the trivial and profound: 'I think it's a wonderful word. It just rolls off the tongue. But I don't really know what it is. I've always been amused by the phrase "Do you do usability?", "We do usability", "We spent two weeks in usability". It's this word that wants to be something, but can't seem to find out what it is.'

He turns it round – he says he's often thought it should be something like "anti-un-usability". 'While a double negative often equals a positive, the positive doesn't seem to mean anything because really what usability seems to be about is the elimination of un-usability. It's the absence of frustration. Maybe we should just call it "frustration elimination".'

Later he describes his work proving the overriding importance of the user's task. It accords with his perspective of seeking to remove all obstacles. It is about stripping away the irrelevant. I sense that ideally it would be a job of engineering precision.

Unsurprisingly, he is also highly critical of the increasingly popular term "user experience". 'I don't know what that means. It's one of those terms that is so broad as to be without use. In America, we refer to things like this as "Apple Pie and Motherhood". Our definition of usable is: "Can the user accomplish their goals?" It's a simple definition. It's easy to measure. You take a design, you find a user who needs that design to accomplish their goal, you ask them to accomplish their goal with the design: if they can do it it's usable; if they can't it's not.'

He develops his theme. 'We've just been absolutely floored by how much completing your goal changes your perception of the thing you use to complete it. Technology is so frustrating today that every time you succeed it's such a major win: it doesn't matter what the price was, it doesn't matter what the design was: it was fun, it was cheap, it was wonderful: "I'm not going to say anything bad about it, because I won: I beat the computer".' Jared giggles.

He's been able to show that download times are (within limits) irrelevant to users' satisfaction in using the Web. Satisfaction correlates with successful task completion – not in itself surprising – but he has found that so does the belief that the sites are faster and, for ecommerce sites, also cheaper. It is a powerful effect.

'I think you can go all the way back to pure old Skinner-based positive reinforcement' says Jared, laughing a great deal this time. 'The thing works on such a basic level. The fact that people see systems to be substantially faster if they complete the task than ones where they don't complete the task, goes back to the 1930s. There's nothing new here.'

We digress for a joke. There was an article flying around in the States on April 1st (which in both the US and Britain is a day for tomfoolery). It describes a developer challenged to see if he could build anything in Flash: he decides he's going to build a house he could live in. 'It's very funny: you could never figure how to get from one room to another, but you were always happy where you were. When you get to the front door, you have to wait for five minutes before the doorbell presents itself.'

But it's not really a digression; just further proof of the man's intolerance for frills. I test this. I am intrigued by the possibility of building positive perceptions of a site by ensuring the successful completion of tasks. I push Jared.

'It's not just randomly completing a task that shapes perception, it’s completing your task. The fact is that users complete tasks all the time on the Web.'

He likens much experience on the Web to rushing, hungry, into a Burger King, where staff, knowing that you require some immediate satisfaction, give you a small essay to read. 'All you really want is your meal – that's the only task you can have for that restaurant and pretty much anything else is a distraction.'

He suggests designers might watch people going to the movies and sitting through previews (trailers). 'If the previews themselves are entertaining and relevant, they're thrilled. If not, they're very impatient; they're very annoyed.'

He moves on to the revived practice of showing a short film to accompany the main feature. 'I never heard anybody complain about it. It's short, it's entertaining and you come to the movies to be entertained, so it just enhances the experience. You can do things like that, but you have to pick and choose.

'People are very goal directed when they come to sites. They're on a mission. Anything off that mission is an inherent distraction and because the Web by nature is so distracting all of the time – everything about it is constantly trying to distract you – it's frustrating for many users and that just makes them more directed and more goal-focused as a way to deal with it.'

Jared is more certain of all this than most of us, for it is, in part, work that UIE has carried out which convinced the rest of us. What he cannot tell me is how to ensure that users meet their goals. But he is unapologetic – he would like to see everyone accepting how little they know about usable design, and doing more research and less evangelising. As his contribution, he is turning his attention to helping people find the pages they want on the sites they visit.

He draws on observation of people using sites to tell me that search is a last resort. 'I think search is such a dismal experience that it's very much correlated with rejection. People only use search when things have gone bad and then search just makes them worse.'

He disputes that there are search-dominant people, although the idea that some people prefer one, rather than another, navigation technique was established until he challenged it. Some people have learnt to be readier to use search when the given navigation does not help with their particular goal, he contends; others will spend longer experimenting with the paths offered them. But in a well structured site, people use the structure provided – not search.

So he is researching how to categorise in such a way that search becomes redundant. Key to this is the labelling of categories. The next three years are to be spent exploring what makes a good 'trigger' word so that these can be used as the basis for categorisation and labelling. 'No one actually wants categories; they want the one word that takes them right to the place where they actually want to go. The only reason to have categories is because the site offers much more than that one thing. How do you get the user to that thing when you've got over a million pieces of content? That’s the question we want to answer.'

There are a small handful of pages that everyone thinks are most important, he explains, and a large number of pages that only one or two people ever find useful. 'That means that not all pages are equal. That small handful of pages? They should be direct links from the home page. News editors have been doing it since the dawn of time. What gets put on the front page above the fold is very different to what goes on page 27. And things are constantly being readjusted up till that press starts. Everything is in flux.'

I suggest that one of the exciting things about the Web is that the press never starts. It is more like a 24hr news programme.

'Well, I'm not sure that editors always think that's so great' he comes back at me. 'It's one of the things that frustrates the hell out of the editing community: that you don't have press time; you never freeze it. There's never that moment to go get a drink at the pub because you did a good job today. One of the things we've done is we've destroyed a sense of completion with technology.'

We compare preparing a document using word processing and using longhand writing. 'I'm not convinced we're any more productive than we used to be,' he says.

Have we digressed from usability, I wonder? 'Not at all, we're talking about it in big terms, we're talking about how design affects society. And in essence, unless we start taking a long-term perspective in the usability world we're going to be stuck in this hole,’ he says.

I suggest that what prevails is a great deal of interest in short-term information, such as how to conduct tests. He agrees: 'Because there is a desperate need for any sort of information.'

One problem in pinning down reusable information is the speed with which technology moves. 'When do we have something where we can go "OK, now we can fix that."?'

Perhaps we can regard previous versions as the prototype for the next, I suggest? 'That's exactly what it is,' he says, 'but the problem is we often take our prototypes and thrust them onto users.' He hardly pauses: 'But that's not the evil crime. The evil crime is then we don't see how they use it. We just go and work on the next one.'

We pause at the horror of this prospect. It's great. Jared is bringing melodrama into usability. But Jared is no stranger to drama – like others in the business he was in theatre in his early years. And he says many of his staff have come that way too. He enjoys their good sense of backstage and front, of deadline, of illusion.

'Design is all about illusion. When I'm making a reservation on a travel site, I'm not really making a reservation – there's all sorts of things that still have to happen. Even files on a disc are an illusion; it's just a bunch of 1s and zeroes. When you delete a file it doesn't actually delete anything. When you move something from one folder to another, nothing actually moves. It's all theatre. You create this mass illusion that people buy into.'

Perhaps it was an early sense of audience that decided Jared's fate as a software engineer. 'I was being pushed in a direction of designs that would appeal to the engineering team. I couldn't believe that anybody outside the walls of the engineering group would ever, ever to be able to produce productive work with them. So, the whole idea of usability became very interesting to me, though at the time we didn't have words to describe it.'

Now he's researching the precise nature of the illusion required. We return to engineering and he likens the gap in our knowledge to what is needed to build a bridge without having the cars fall off. He describes the state of testing at present – not building right first time, but assembling the product and watching the cars plummet. 'We watch them plummet into the water and we say "Ha, do you think we ought to fix that?" And then we go and build another bridge and watch them get a little further, or potentially go off the bridge even sooner, because these cars just happen to drive a little differently. And you can't build bridges that way. You really can't create websites or software that way.'

So I ask him whether his team will be the one to find out what designers and other usability companies need to know? 'Yes. Ideally that's where we want to be,' he says. So I push him again and ask for some answers. But he won't be drawn. 'No,' he says. 'I don't know anything. I'll give you good questions.' And he giggles again.

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