Recently, Jared Spool wrote a provocative article decrying the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework as an occasionally useful UX gimmick.
While JTBD does force a user-focused approach, he argued, it also has numerous pitfalls. Actually uncovering the core functional job that users of a product hire the product to do far harder than most pretend. More important, Spool argues that JTBD can become a crutch. Practitioners of JTBD often fail to learn other useful approaches that work better in situations where user motivations are less rational.
Fellow designer Coryndon Luxmore provided even more damning criticism on Twitter. JTBD, he argued, is intentionally dehumanizing:
“It appeals to executives because it forces human goals into simple rational transactional behavior allowing them to side step emotions and empathy.”
But is this really true?
I agree with Spool and Luxmore that JTBD advocates often oversimplify the process. Simply uncovering what users of a product want to accomplish by using that product is a fraught and nuanced process. Understanding why they would hire one product and fire another is even more so. User motivations are inherently varied, frequently subconscious, and not always entirely rational.
Why do I prefer Instagram over Facebook? Is it because I’m hiring Instagram to help me do the job of feeling engaged in distant friends’ lives? Or is it simply because I’m tired of the endless political bickering and spam on Facebook? Or maybe it’s simply that Instagram is more addicting on some core psychological level.
I haven’t given that particular question much thought, but I do think it’s fair to say that, at least initially, I hired Instagram to do a job. It may have been something as simple as getting people to stop telling me I needed to be on Instagram.
And herein lies my point. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with the JTBD framework itself. I think it’s fair to say that people hire products to do jobs. But those jobs are nuanced, varied, and ever changing. The reason we use products today may not be the same reason we used them yesterday.
It seems like the real failure here isn’t the framework of JTBD, but the simplistic one-size-fits all approach to teaching and implementing it. Of course the framework falls apart without empathy. I’m hard-pressed to think of a business activity of any kind that doesn’t.