Jess McMullin: The ‘double-S curve’ of a UX career

Jess McMullin describes himself as “a thinker, researcher and designer who helps organizations innovate services, systems and policies to create a better world.” The term “UX” isn’t in there, but he manages to convey everything about what the work he does should do.

Among many other things, McMullin is the founder at the Centre for Citizen Experience, a consultancy dedicated to transforming public sector service delivery and policymaking through design innovation. He also recently become a CommerceLab advisory board member, which is one of the reasons we recently spoke to him by phone in Edmonton to get his perspective on UX in the public sector and in general. This interview has been edited and condensed.

CommerceLab: What are the primary ways you engage with the public sector as a UX design professional?

Jess McMullin: I end up working on three kinds of initiatives with public sector clients. The first are projects, and those tend to be on service improvements — how can we actually transform how public sector services are delivered? The second kind of engagement is in building internal capabilities. I do a lot of training and workshops and coaching and mentoring. There’s so much work to do that I certainly I can’t do it all, and we need to grow that capability in the public sector if we want to make this a regular way of doing things. And the third way that I end up working with the public sector is more at a policy and strategy level, not only how to tackle projects and build a policy about designing, but how to use design to create better policies and better organizations of all kinds. It’s more of a strategic design perspective than how we design a particular product or service.

CommerceLab: When you look to when you first began working with public sector clients, how much of an education process do you still have to do to make the business case for UX?

JM: I think the education process that UX practitioners need to pay attention to is their own. (laughs) Very often we think it’s up to us to educate these poor folks about the power and value of user experience, and there is tremendous power in design, but we’ll get opportunities to apply that and to build buy in when we work to educate ourselves about the needs of the people we’re trying to serve. It’s easy to focus on advocacy, when what we really should be doing is practice what we preach and thinking about those people we want to work with — those executives, those decision-makers — as another group of users. To understand what their language and their context is and then, and only then, can you have a worthwhile conversation about educating them.

When a public sector organization tries to transform a service and to deliver better services by taking in user experience, the things a UX project is going to surface are things that are going to require the organization to change. So there needs to be that expectation up front that this isn’t just about improving a service, where it’s going to be prettier and easier to use, but that we are going to have to change as an organization to support that kind of experience. And that kind of commitment, both at an executive level and throughout the organization is really important for success.

CommerceLab: What might be the barriers that prevent UX designers from practicing what they preach?

JM: There’s something I call the “double-S curve” of UX careers. The first curve is your learning curve, where you’re learning new skills and really excited about this. You’re learning about user experience design or interaction design or usability testing. You start to learn this stuff, you get excited about it and you realize how valuable it can be. Then you star to tell other people about it who might not be as excited as you, and the curve starts to taper off. Your skills grow, but you get frustrated because they might not see those things with the same importance. Then you end up grumbling and the classic line becomes, “Well, they just don’t get it.” Anytime we say, “they don’t get it,” it really means, “We’ve abdicated from explaining it in a way they’ll understand.” You can be stuck on that first curve. The next curve isn’t about user experience of users or user experience practice of wireframes or things like that. It’s about how well we can work with the business, how well we can work with the organization. About 11 years ago, I started to think a lot more about business fluency — how can we better understand the dynamics of an organization, how we can grow influence, and understanding the value we can bring to an organization is as important as the technical skills we might be developing. Until we get onto that second curve we’re always going to have pushback from people who think, “I’m hired, I’m good at my job, and now you’re telling me that I’m doing things wrong and that we should change how we do things here.

CommerceLab: Are there ways organizations can establish better mentoring other kinds of support to help them along that journey?

JM: The models that I see in the public sector specifically is there’s often a core team — it’s often not that huge, anywhere from eight to a dozen people within a certain jurisdiction, provincially or federally — that becomes a resource for the rest of the organization. They will often work on projects for a certain ministry or department or branch, they’ll bring a third party vendor, which might be how I get involved. That provides some continuity and some institutional memory for that central group, who becomes a core part of the organization’s capability. They can then become mentors to various folks who are in the front lines or in a particular service area. That’s the coaching and mentoring by doing. I think it’s really important that public sector organizations commit their own people to get involved so they grow those skills internally rather than just relying on a third party, whether that’s some sort of central group within government or a third party vendor.

CommerceLab: How do you see the UX career path evolving?

JM: I think user experience is getting more and more recognized. Certainly when I got started out in 1996-1997, it was sort of the “lone voice in the wilderness” a lot of the time, particularly here in Canada. We now have a lot more acceptance and understanding and demand for user experience design.A lot of that demand  is bringing UX closer to production, by combining UX and development or visual design roles. But even more exciting for me is a the trend for UX designers to tackle more strategic leadership challenges like service design and even policy or organizational transformation.