Jared Spool, founder of User Interface Engineering (UIE) gave his talk titled “The Evolution of a New UX Resolution” to UX Speakeasy members at Qualcomm in San Diego Tuesday night.
His talk gives us all a better understanding of the growing field of Experience Design (XD) and its practices.
Jared organizes User Experience (UX) design problems and solutions into the following four levels of resolution: Screen, Application, Organization and Ecosystem.
Jared used his forensic analysis of last year’s Hawaiian false missile alert to illustrate levels of design resolution.

Screen, Application and Organization Levels
Each level of resolution has it’s own focus and tools, including our earths ecosystem.

Seeing pollution at different resolutions. Photos from Eames Powers of Ten™ (1977) .
With technology, the screen level resolution focuses the User Interface (UI). At the application level, we focus on information architecture and UX design and use tools such as wireframes and card sorts.

Focus and Tools at Application and Site level.
The Organization level focuses on Service and Experience Design. Some tools at this level of resolution are User Journeys, Ethnographic Research and Design Thinking.
Hawaii was given the horrible false alarm that day mostly because there was no clear authority. Each organization had it’s own procedures and designs in place, but there was no plan or design for the organizations to work together to alert the public.

Many large capable organizations and valid designs were involved in this case.

The tools to coordinate these organizations were not in place.
For systems that require organizations, or even countries, to coordinate with each other we need design and governance.

UX and Design for all levels.
Now that we see these huge, ecosystem level, design problems and recognize the need for organizations to design together, we will have pioneers, settlers and planners ala Simon Wordley.
Jared introduced a few amazing Pioneers in ecosystem design today:
- Ariel Kennan who is tackling complicated issues like homelessness.
- Traci Walker US Digital Procurement.
- Dana Chisnell an expert in usability for older adults and Designing Government.
To quote Jared: “We’re going to have to solve problems at every resolution. We need the skills to be able to do that. Ecosystem wide design is the next frontier.”