Jasonrichardson’s Weblog

Last week I flipped on the Sundance Channel and became engrossed with a documentary about the legendary tailor Jack Taylor of Beverly Hills.  For the back story on his amazing career and in the interest of not writing a biography check this link out.

Besides becoming enamored with the actual footage of Jack Taylor and his impressive clients a few minutes of footage on his process dovetailed directly to UX and create an “ah-ha” moment.  The director filmed a sequence of how Jack starts to work with a new client and focused on showing the fitting process.  What jumped out at me were his “charts” on every client and how similar and or influential these charts can be to personas and user snapshots.  Apologies for not having the clip of the process ready yet, a day or two please.  However, the picture below shows the chart.   Taylor takes various notes on the body type, measurements and other factors that go into customer tailoring.  And he keeps track of everything moving forward.  Your weight is marked.  Gain a few pounds a couple of months later? That is updated along with some advice to only eat half portions from Taylor himself.

So what’s the point of this?  As I’ve noted before in other posts and conversations, UX needs to constantly look around at other disciplines and understand their methods and techniques.  As a practice, we can learn how to improve our own techniques and adapt other styles to our practice.  In this instance, Jack Taylor has been keeping track of his clients for decades.  Beyond the person, he’s keeping track of the fabric they’ve used in the suits for the client.  Each client sheet has a swatch of the fabric used for each suit taped on the back.  Imagine that!  He can go back to someone like Monty Hall and know every suit he’s ever built for him and what it looked like.

When we’re developing applications we too should be keeping track of our “swatches” and decisions.  We should be reflecting back on our work and understanding our users, our decisions and use this information for our future decisions.  Even beyond just recording our past personas and decisions can’t we turn these into a living breathing document and/or site.  For instance, can we tie our site’s analytics to our personas and visual identity documents?  Imagine being able to track a segment of your user population and see what is working for them and where your site is having trouble.

Stay tuned.  There is a lot more that we can learn from other fields and I’m working on a more in depth look at what techniques and ideas we as a practice can learn from Taylor, other fashion techniques and even film directors John Cassavettes and Sam Peckinpah.