Jesse James Garrett: Author of The Elements of User Experience – Episode 123

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In the late 1990s, as digital practices like web design and development emerged, experiences were being created and users were getting attention, but the practices that guided that work had not yet been articulated.

That’s when Jesse James Garrett wrote his book, The Elements of User Experience. After sharing his ideas in numerous client pitches and sketching them on whiteboards for his co-workers, Jesse collected his discoveries into a manuscript that would become the first textbook for the new field of UX design.

We talked about:

• his content origins as a journalist and web writer and how that led to the narrative focus of his design work
• the origins of Adaptive Path, the UX consultancy he co-founded in 2001 and sold to Capital One in 2014
• how his book, The Elements of User Experience, began as a whiteboard drawing that he used in team meetings
• the origins of his five-planes model as a way “to disentangle all of the different kinds of problems that you have to solve and questions you have to answer along the way as you’re creating an experience”
• how he saw his role as an information architect as a connector between strategy and implementation
• his delight at the emergence and formalization of new content design and UX writing roles
• the unique practice lens that content people bring to the UX field
• how the explosive growth of software contributed to the growth of UX
• thoughts about how product people see the value of content in the way they deliver value
• how his model has provided a scaffolding that facilitates the new kinds of collaboration that digital work entails
• how he originally wrote his book as a primer for executive-level clients and how that approach serendipitously ended up making it a good textbook for people new to the UX field
• his current work as an independent leadership coach and his focus on helping foster relationships and connection
• the difference skill sets that become apparent when skilled designers end up in design leadership roles

Jesse’s bio

Jesse James Garrett has been one of the most prominent voices in digital product design for more than 20 years. His career highlights include co-founding the groundbreaking UX consultancy, Adaptive Path; writing the foundational book The Elements of User Experience, whose iconic five-plane model has become a staple of the field; and defining Ajax, the dynamic interaction model that transformed web technology and design in the Web 2.0 era. His work has been published in more than a dozen languages and he is a frequent keynote speaker on making designers and organizations more human-centered in their work.

Connect with Jesse online

• JesseJamesGarrett.com
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Finding Our Way – Jesse’s design leadership podcast with Peter Merholz, his Adaptive Path co-founder

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 123. Twenty years ago, the field of user experience design didn’t exist. People were building websites and making software, but new design practices were needed to take those digital experiences to the next level. Few could envision or articulate those new practices. Jesse James Garrett could. So he wrote a book: The Elements of User Experience. In this conversation, Jesse reflects on the book and talks about his delight at the recent emergence of new content roles in the UX field.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode number 123 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Jesse James Garrett. Jesse is currently an independent design leadership coach. He’s best known, to me anyway, as the author of this book, The Elements of User Experience, which came out about 20 years ago now. So anyhow, welcome to the show, Jesse. Tell the folks a little bit more about your coaching work.

Jesse:
Thank you. Well, it’s great to be here. I’ve been working in digital product design and content both for more than 20 years now. I actually started out working in content. My background is in journalism. And started out as a writer, working for websites, doing marketing communications kind of project work. And from there, got into design as I was collaborating with designers a lot as a content person.

Jesse:
And since then, I think that I have kind of taken that mindset, that sort of narrative oriented mindset into my work first as a designer. And then I co-founded a company called Adaptive Path in 2001. We were one of the very first UX consultancies back when we had to explain to everybody what that was, what that was about, why we were there and what the value was that we brought. And that provided for me, I think a different opportunity for me to use my storytelling skills.

Larry:
Yeah. Hey, let’s go back because we were talking just a little bit before we went on the air about that you had actually come up with the insights and started the book before you started Adaptive Path. Like the book predated-

Jesse:
Yeah, that’s right.

Larry:
… Adaptive Path. I want you to talk a little bit about the book and then about Adaptive Path, because Adaptive Path was such an influential agency. But first the book and your insights about UX and how you articulated them.

Jesse:
Yeah, well, as I said, my approach to design was always very much through this lens of narrative. I was always looking at experiences as stories about users before we had the concept of user stories, per se. And I found as I was collaborating with designers from a content mindset, content sort of orientation, I had a lot of explaining to do. I had a lot to help both the designers as well as the engineers that I was working with to help them understand what I was doing at the table as the content person. And that really informed the development of the model, The Elements of User Experience, which I started, honestly, just as a thing that I would draw on the whiteboard during meetings to help people understand these are all the things that we’re thinking about, and this is how we’re approaching it as a team, so that everybody could understand kind of where their place to contribute was.

Jesse:
And that went really well and I started sharing that outside of the company that I was working for, and it went viral, again at a time when that was not really a concept that we had yet. And it led to me being introduced to the people who would become my co-founders in` Adaptive Path in 2001, as the .com bubble was first thing here in San Francisco. And we were all finding ourselves out of work or soon to be out of work, and decided that rather than competing for the dwindling number of available full-time jobs, that it would be better for all of us to band together and see if we could, see if we could find work as a creative agency. And that has been very successful, or it was very successful. Adaptive Path was an independent agency for 13 years before we were acquired by Capital One in 2014.

Larry:
And were all the principles still around at that point, because-

Jesse:
Yeah, at the point of the acquisition, I was the last of the founders remaining with the company.

Larry:
Hey, I want to go back to that story of the… Well actually I want to go back to the model itself, because we’ve talked about that it exists and it’s going to be hard because this is mainly a podcast. That’s going to be hard, it’s very visual artifact. But can you talk about the five layers that make up the model?

Jesse:
Sure. So the elements model, it’s a conceptual model that articulates the considerations that go into creating user experience for digital products. There are people who have used the model in other contexts, in non-digital context for other kinds of product and service delivery and it maps very well to those other contexts, but it was really created for digital product design. And the aim of the model is to disentangle all of the different kinds of problems that you have to solve and questions you have to answer along the way as you’re creating an experience.

Jesse:
And it visualizes it as this set of these kind of five planes that kind of build on each other, like a layer cake from bottom to top. And toward the bottom, we have our more abstract and strategic considerations. And as we get closer to the top, things become more concrete and they become more real and more visible and visual. And so each of those five layers of the model, we are answering a set of questions. We’re getting a little bit more refinement, a little bit more understanding about what our intention is and what our users need. And then we’re turning that into more and more detailed understanding of what we’re creating together, which is really what the model’s intended to facilitate, are those conversations about exactly what we’re doing together.

Larry:
Yeah. I think I use a lot of artifacts like that and I always think of them as conversation starters. It’s interesting to hear that that’s the same way you think of it. And I can see that because as you said, it’s a great tool for disentangling. And I think we were all, like I was doing web stuff in that same era, the late 90s, early 2000s. I come from publishing, you come from journalism. You said you kind of started as an IA, as an information architect, in that era, which is interesting to me because that’s right the middle layer of your five planes. Was that a way to kind of orient yourself?

Jesse:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think so. I mean, I think that I was working with people who understood the top of the stack, where you’re doing visual design and you’re doing pixels and colors and fonts and typography and all of that more graphic design kind of oriented stuff. And then I had people who deeply understood the bottom of the pyramid or the bottom layer of the model, which is the stuff that’s about product strategy and product direction and so forth. But bridging the gap between those things often ended up being my job. The information architect often sits between strategy and implementation. And again, I needed a way to explain to everybody what I was doing there and what the value was of my participation in the process.

Larry:
That’s really interesting to hear that because I’ll just say that right now there’s a little bit of an identity or some kind of professional crisis happening in the information architecture world these days that it feels like a lost profession in some ways. And there’s information architects, even though they’re some of the most accomplished practitioners in the field of user experience design, they don’t feel as visible as they used to. What do you think happened there? How did that core linchpin activity become kind of secondary?

Jesse:
Well, I think that there was never as much demand for information architecture work from businesses, as there has been evident need for information architecture work on the part of those businesses. They just never got religion about IA, the way that they have done about Agile and UX and all of these other things that have come along in the meantime. And so what you have, I think are a lot of individual practitioners for whom IA is very core to their practice and it’s part of how they deliver value, and so it’s a little bit invisible in that respect because none of them has an IA job title. None of them has IA in their job description even, but it is a fundamental part of how they do the job of being a UX person, product manager, content, strategist, whatever the thing is.

Larry:
Right. Well, and it’s the kind of work that I think much like content work used to be, it’s sort of part of other people’s jobs. So it hasn’t always been teased out and articulated as a separate position or separate scope of job duties. And kind of related is the thing I was really excited to talk to you about today is that, and when we first connected, we talked a little bit about this, the rise of the content designer or the UX writer, that there’s a number… Those are the two main terms to describe this whole new field. As a content person, it’s just been really gratifying to watch us finally get a real seat at the table in the sense that there are lots of jobs out there. It’s a fairly well articulated profession at this point.

Larry:
And it’s really interesting to me too, that you come from a content background, and you did. I did the same thing in the late 90s, early 2000s. I just became like this web project manager, a webmaster guy, I don’t know what I was doing. But you obviously had a clear picture and I appreciate your book for helping get me squared away on that. But tell me what you make of this new role, the emergence of the content person in UX teams.

Jesse:
I am very happy and excited about the emergence and the formalization of this role. It’s exactly like what we were talking about just a minute ago. The fact that there aren’t a lot of people who have IA in their job description means that those organizations don’t get to really reap the benefit of that deep IA work. Now they’ve had the same need in terms of UX writing and content design and more of the linguistic aspects of IA work. But that’s an area where businesses have been able to see the value and they have been able to see that there’s something there.

Jesse:
And so that fits the excitement on the part of business for the role, that gets me excited for the possibilities for design, honestly. Because design needs content. Design needs content’s help. Content people have a way of seeing the world and a way of seeing problems that is different from and delivers different value from the ways of seeing and the ways of thinking that designers bring. And so what I would love to see is more designers who think like writers and more writers who think like designers. And this UX writer, content design role is exactly in that sweet spot.

Larry:
Right. And I think that’s on the best teams. I think that’s how it works. That there’s a real mind meld kind of collaboration happening between the interaction designers, the visual designers, even the researchers and the content designers in the best situations, and I think this is why it’s taken off, are just filling right in with that capability. And what do you think makes that sort of unique point of view that content people are bringing to the UX table? Do you see something that maybe triggered the awareness and appreciation of that?

Jesse:
Well, we have seen such an explosion. There’s so much software now. And just think about how much software there is now in the world compared to when you and I started our careers in the 90s. Every company that does anything else at any kind of scale also necessarily has to be in the software business. So there is so much software now. We use software that is made by sporting good companies and airlines and television networks and all of these companies that never used to provide software for us before. And so we have all, I think, collectively come to understand as consumers, that technology is not even where the value is, that a lot of the, especially the smaller, newer companies, the startups, the startup products that have sort of taken the world by storm have done so not by bringing some breakthrough groundbreaking technology to market and not by finding some miraculous new business model that nobody’s discovered.

Jesse:
It is simply the reframing of existing things that people do or want to do in the world in new ways that delivered new value for people. So, like we all had cameras on our phones for years before Instagram came along. Instagram showed people a way of thinking about the camera on their phone that was different from the way that they had thought about the camera on phone before. When you get into that kind of stuff, that conceptual work, this is the natural sweet spot of a writer, anyone who deals with language and meaning and concepts has the opportunity to inform product strategy in some really important ways. And I think that more and more organizations are seeing that.

Larry:
Yeah. And the way you just said that, I’m all of sudden rethinking, like there’s this conventional wisdom, like I think Twitter and the iPhone that we introduced in roughly the same year around the same time period, but the way you just said that insight, that was really Instagram who really showed people how to use their camera. It seems like there’s a lot of these, and again, it’s to what you were just saying, it’s not really technology driven. It’s more experience design driven that people figure out what to do with that technology. And can you talk a little bit more about, because, I know a ton of… We all do. Plenty of really smart, creative experience designers and engineers… Do you feel like bringing content into the mix, it’s kind of like a chicken and egg thing? Are they bringing the content people in because they need to explain all this awesome stuff they’re doing better or are things getting more awesome because there’s more content people involved?

Jesse:
Yeah. Well that is an interesting question. And then I think there’s the third player in the mix there, which is product. And how the folks with responsibility for product, to what extent do they think of content as being central to the way that they deliver value through their product? And again, going all the way back to elements, a big part of what I was doing with that model was justifying to people who thought they were building a pure technology product that they had still had content and conceptual considerations as part of what they were doing. And to help people understand that there is a necessary place for that kind of work conceptual work.

Larry:
You mentioned product a few times now and startups as well. And one of the kind of prototypical product people is like the visionary who founds a startup. And is there something to look for in those people? Because I know a ton of those folks and most of them think of… Many of them, not most. Many of them think of content as like marketing material and that’s it. That’s how they feel. Do you think one, is it just a matter of helping them see content differently or are there people who just kind of innately get the benefits of a good content element in their design practices?

Jesse:
Yeah. So much of it has to do with the specific background and orientation of those leaders, especially in smaller organizations. But across the board leaders are so… The specific characteristics of the person in that seat end up having such an enormous influence on the rest of the organization and the way that the rest of the organization chooses to go about doing what it does. You have a product leader who comes from a strong engineering operations background, for example. It might be a little more challenging to help them understand the value in the role that content plays. If somebody has a background, which is very much steeped in consumer brands or media kinds of properties, they’re going to have a totally different relationship to content. They’re going to see it really differently. And so I think that for people who are in these content design roles, it is critical to understand where your leaders are coming from to be able to know how to pitch them on what you’re doing.

Larry:
You’re making me think now about the enduring impact of your model that like, because we all come from different places, engineering, product, media, publishing, journalism, and as we design experiences, we need some kind of thing to aggregate or congregate around to learn these new practices. Have you got feedback about your model? Is that sort of how it’s been used by people coming from all these different disparate places and doing this new thing? Is that kind of the role it’s filled?

Jesse:
Yeah. Yeah. I would say that in cases where people are engaging with doing new things they’ve never done before, doing it with people that they’ve never worked with before, especially, which happens a lot, some kind of scaffolding is needed. Some kind of support structure is needed to help facilitate that collaboration because otherwise the fear and the uncertainty just shut everybody down. So you have to have that baseline agreement on here’s the landscape. Here’s what we’re working with. Here’s what we’re working on. Here’s what we’re trying to accomplish together. And the model provides a useful tool for people to find that common thread.

Larry:
Yeah. And the way you, when you talked earlier about the genesis of the model and how it was to sort out those different things that were going on, I remember a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt back then, because we were all making it up. Some people had imposter syndrome and some people had know-it-all syndrome, but either way you needed something to tie it together. So I love that, and I also love that it provides a scaffolding for collaboration. Were you thinking about it that way or at the time or is that an insight you’ve had since then?

Jesse:
Yeah, it’s more has to do with what other people have done with it more than for my own… I mean yeah, to some extent in my own direct experience. But I was literally just trying to explain why there was a non-designer in the design meeting. And other people have taken that and taken it in many more directions than I ever could on my own.

Larry:
Yeah. And when you say that in that old context, that means you were in a room full of graphic designers and pixel pushers or not pixel, but people who were more versed in layout and just the visual, your top layer than the whole-

Jesse:
And also the clients. Also the clients who were used to dealing with that, who thought that was what they were buying. And so to help them understand that they were not buying pixels from us, but there were deeper layers of thinking that were required to deliver what they wanted. That was I think a big part of it.

Larry:
… Interesting. Yeah. I’ve done some consulting and that client education is always a challenge in having something like that, to explain that. Did that work for y’all at Adaptive Path? You mentioned the whiteboard earlier and-

Jesse:
Yeah. Well, so I had created the model as basically as a one sheet kind of thing that you could print up and put up on the wall, kind of cubicle art kind of stuff. And then when I wrote the book, I wrote the book for our clients at Adaptive Path, and specifically it was intended as a tool for client education. So it was written for an executive audience with no prior understanding or experience of digital product design at all in any way. And it’s deliberately, it’s a very short book. It can be read in just a few hours. It’s got a lot of illustrations in it. It’s meant to be that starting point, that entry point for clients. And as a result, it turned out to also be those qualities also made it a very effective textbook for people who were new to the field, which was not even who I was thinking about when I was writing it.

Larry:
… Yeah, the way you said that, and this is where your journalism training probably came in handy, you were able to write this sort of executive summary of user experience design practice. And originally for these executives at the companies you’re pitching, but then it turns out to be useful to all these other people as well.

Jesse:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s been really extraordinary. Yeah.

Larry:
I love that. What a great journey. Is there anything, like what else, it’s such an, as a conversation starter that you said that in sort of a collaboration tool, how has it impacted your subsequent development as a UX practitioner and coach and mentor?

Jesse:
Well, I’m still talking about it 20 years later, so there’s that. I think that for me, it is part of a larger pattern of trying to help people, trying to create understanding between people through my work. And that has continued on from, we started Adaptive Path and nobody knew what UX was, which meant that we had to educate everybody. We had to educate the clients. We had to educate our fellow designers. We had to do a lot of beating that drum. And in the course of that, the aim was always to give people tools that they could take back with them and they could connect with the people around them using the different methods and the processes and all of the things that we created.

Jesse:
And now as an independent leadership coach, so I work one on one privately with leaders of design teams, helping them to create more connection among the people on their teams, because that’s what keeps teams resilient. The difference between a team that falters and fails and breaks down and everybody quits as soon as the project is over, and a team that is healthy and growing and delivers one success after another, it inevitably in my experience comes back to the skills of the leader, especially the interpersonal skills of the leader in helping to navigate and negotiate and foster healthy, trusting relationships among the people on their team and between their team and the other parts of the organization that they have to work with. So in a sense, there is a straight line trajectory from elements through Adaptive Path all the way to the work that I’m doing right now, and it’s all about connection.

Larry:
Right. And that the way you just said that, I can see that main benefit. And so the work you do with your clients is mostly around that, the interpersonal communication and getting those skills together. Are there other aspects to the coaching? Because I think a lot of people listening to this will appreciate that insight. But are there other elements of that, of your coaching practice that really help design leaders?

Jesse:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, one of the big things about design leaders is that at this point, at the moment that they become leaders, they have almost no actual preparation for the actual job. Most design leaders became design leaders because they were very, very good designers and they got promoted. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they know how to be leaders at all. It’s a whole different skill set. And so what happens often is that they naturally, as we all do, they emulate what they see and they emulate patterns of leadership and ways of interacting that may or may not be appropriate to design work as opposed to other kinds of work may or may not be appropriate to the organization that they’re in. But importantly, they end up adopting ways of being that may or may not be appropriate to who they are and what their strengths are.

Jesse:
And so you have a lot of people who they get a couple of years into leadership role and they hate it and they don’t know why they hate it. And they don’t know why they wanted it, and they don’t know what they should want next because they have fashioned for themselves an idea of what the role is and what the role entails and what the role asks of them. It’s not true to who they are. It’s not true to the genuine value that they have to bring. So helping leaders connect to their own strengths, their own authentic value that they have to bring, and their own sense of purpose of what they want to accomplish in the world, those things are, I think the really critical things that I work on with all of my clients, that help them to lead their teams from a stronger place.

Larry:
That’s great. I think that’ll help both. I know that a number of content leaders listen to this podcast, but I also know many more aspiring content leaders. And the way you just said that, I think can maybe help them get a little bit better oriented before they start ascending the ladder there.

Larry:
Jesse, I can’t believe it. We’re coming up close to time already. I want to just check in though. Is there anything last, anything that we haven’t mentioned that you want to be sure we talk about, or just on your mind about UX designer leadership coaching these days?

Jesse:
Yeah. I think that it is very easy for us right now at this stage in the development of things to get discouraged about the ways in which this work is not yet living up to its promise. And I totally understand and feel where that comes from, and I believe that we have so many people engaged in this project now. And so many people doing so much good work and bringing such a diverse range of perspectives to this work that will inevitably strengthen it, strengthen the work, make it better, make it stronger. And that continues to excite me every day.

Larry:
Nice. Well, thanks so much. Oh, Hey, one last thing, Jesse, what’s the best way for folks to get in touch if they want to connect online or just follow you, what are the best ways to connect?

Jesse:
Yeah. Yeah. You can find me on your major social networks as @jjg and you can find me on the web at jessejamesgarrett.com, you want to know more about my coaching work.

Larry:
Great. Well, thanks so much, Jesse. Really enjoyed the conversation.

Jesse:
All right. Thank you.