Ben Judy designs software for “professionals” — anyone who does a job that requires a deep domain knowledge and a high level of skill. To share his knowledge, he and Alan Baumgarten, principal UX strategy lead at Sabre Airline Solutions, co-presented “Designing for Professional Users: A New UX Playbook” at South by Southwest Interactive.
“Almost all of the advice, methods, and best practices you hear promoted within the UX community today are oriented toward designing for a consumer user base,” Ben said. “Based on our years of experience as user-centered designers, we believe that highly skilled and knowledgeable professionals — tax preparers, for example — have unique needs. We need to adapt our user-centered design approach accordingly.”
In the Q&A below, Ben discusses his journey from broadcast production to his career as senior interactive designer for Inuit’s Pro Tax Group. The Texan husband and father of two is focused on designing for professionals of all kinds. This is the first in a four-part series about SXSWi.
Nicole Baptista: Born in Florida, raised in Iowa, and a college student in Ohio, how did you land a career in interactive design and how have your hobbies accelerated your career?
Ben Judy: In my late teens I thought I was on a path toward a career in radio/TV/film production. I soured on broadcast journalism when I discovered how biased and political that business is. 
Then I soured on media production when I discovered how little money you earn in your first 20 years, unless you’re really lucky. Halfway through college I recognized that this stuff I’d been doing all along, just for fun — messing about with computers, tinkering with code, making terribly broken little websites — was something I could actually get paid for, and do quite well.
During and after college I spent about five years making awful websites for small businesses in Flash and HTML — back when you had to test in Netscape and Internet Explorer. I also designed some software interfaces for CD-ROMs. Amazingly, people paid me to do this stuff. Looking back, I realize now that’s when you know you are on a good career path — it doesn’t feel like work. When I started working for bigger companies and discovered the field of user experience design, everything clicked. About 10 years later, I joined Intuit.
NB: What does your role entail?
BJ: I help our software product teams design awesome solutions for tax professionals. Think about hiring an accountant to prepare and file your personal or business taxes. I help design the tools they use to understand your financial situation, perform tax calculations, fill out the forms, and keep the government off your back. However, some of the software I contribute to is used by non-professionals — average Joe taxpayers. This is where understanding the distinction between designing for professionals versus consumers becomes very important. Understanding the end-users, who they are, what they are doing, and in what context, is foundational to my work. My day-to-day can be quite varied, which is an aspect of the job that I enjoy. One day I might be interviewing or observing tax preparers and their clients. The next day I might be sketching out part of the software interface, perhaps creating prototypes. Almost all of my work at Intuit is highly collaborative.
NB: Why is it important to design for professionals?
BJ: First, let’s define what we mean for “professionals.” These are people who have a lot of specific knowledge in a particular industry or career field. Their industry could be anything: healthcare, travel, some kind of science, finances, entertainment, etc. The job they do can’t be done by just anybody.
Also, the professionals we’re designing for have neither too much nor too little digital literacy. On one end of the spectrum, if they can’t even turn on a computer, software isn’t going to help them much. On the other end, if they dream in code they might not want a graphical user interface at all. So, we’re looking at people with high domain knowledge plus moderate digital literacy.
The problem we see with the UX design industry is that professional users are ignored. Today’s top design books, conference talks, podcasts, blog articles, and so on almost exclusively focus on commercial products or services. The experts put forth advice and best practices oriented toward solving for a mass audience; what you might call consumer user personas.
Out of the hundreds of sessions at SXSWi this year, our session was the only one directly addressing designing for professional users. However, the importance of designing for people doing a job — a difficult job that requires significant training and experience to do well — cannot be overstated.
What if the Apple Watch was poorly designed? A lot of consumers may be disappointed, and Apple’s stock would dip. But we wouldn’t lose much sleep. We would just wait for the next, shiny new gadget that captures our fleeting attention.
Compare that to the consequences of air traffic control software systems being poorly designed: planes crash. Or tax preparation tools: you might get audited and face stiff penalties, or you might significantly overpay your actual tax liability. Or health records software: you might die because the doctor can’t find out what she needs to know quickly enough. The stakes are often exponentially higher when bad design affects professionals at work.
Conversely, the upside of well-designed software for professionals can be enormous. Entire industries can be made more effective and can better serve countless customers, all because of good UX design. Ironically, the customers almost never see the software. They just know whether or not they’re having a good experience.
One thing that makes this kind of design difficult for designers is lack of domain knowledge. There’s an old UX axiom: “You are not your user.” But we know that sometimes in the consumer space, this rings a little hollow. If I’m designing an online shopping experience or a game, I could be a pretty good stand-in for the ideal user. I shop online. I play games. I know what that’s like. But I can never stand in for the professional. It would take me months or years to become an expert at supply chain contracting or gene sequencing or analyzing transportation logistics. So how can I effectively design for those needs? There are critical research and design skills that can make me successful, and there are rookie mistakes I can make if I’m not used to “playing with the pros,” so to speak. At this level, I need a new UX playbook.
NB: What were some of your largest insights from speaking and attending SXSWi?
BJ: SXSWi is much too big for its own good! The upside is, you’ll find a little bit of everything as an attendee. Some of the major themes I enjoyed were around business and entrepreneurism and cognitive and behavioral psychology. Also, I picked up on a diverse but distinct thread around “framing” — looking at art, design, innovation and creativity through different lenses. How we tell stories and frame problems or concepts is a critical part of design work, especially in a collaborative company like Intuit.
NB: Any session, in particular, that caught your attention the most?
BJ: I was totally intrigued by a conversation between Brian Grazer and his co-author. Brian — an Emmy and Oscar-winning Hollywood producer — said, “Curiosity is the source of all of my success.” He made some great points about how persevering with a curious spirit is a skill that anyone can grow. Curiosity is free, and it can open doors you never dreamed you’d be able to walk through. This is very inspirational to me because I recognize that much of the success I’ve experienced in life has followed moments when I got curious and acted out of a bold, “let’s see what’s around this corner” kind of attitude.
5 Tips for Designing for Professionals:
1.) Build domain knowledge fast
2.) Watch professionals work
3.) Understand that professionals define “easy” differently
4.) Reuse screen real estate
5.) Design for collaboration
Tune in next week for more on SXSWi.
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