Jake Mitchell and his journey with User Experience

Jake Mitchell, was a very enlightening guest speaker that came to my User Experience class at Virginia Commonwealth University. Mitchell currently works for CarMax as their principal product designer and wants to make people more aware of buying used cars is reliable. There was a lot of talk about the product and how what matters is the end result. When evaluating a product there is certain criteria that is applied which is, is it valuable, feasible, and usable. The three people that make up a product is the engineer, designer, and product manager. Another thing about products to remember is “Don’t use products no one uses”. I feel like this should be a common first thought when starting to create a product. Mitchell also talked about user personas and how he utilizes them. His user personas were very in depth and had lots of detail about their characteristics. Another word to use when thinking about a user persona is a design target. This to me sounds like a broader term than user persona and can really interpret it in many different ways. When talking about the user experience world and which companies are rising and falling, it was interesting to find out that the three companies who are currently rising in user experience are Facebook, Spotify, and Amazon. They are currently going up and becoming more successful in the user experience field. At the end of the talk Mitchell said one thing to me that stood out which was knowing how to understand the outcome and being able to look at the big picture. If you can’t look at the big picture you will constantly be nitpicking the small stuff and not looking at the overall production of the product. I have learned so much more about this field and loved hearing from Jake Mitchell and his journey with user experience.