The main goal of a product designer is to solve people problems. The jobs to be done framework is used to identify what someone is trying to accomplish in a given moment, and then build an experience to help them achieve that goal. If the goal is to get from point A to point B, Uber or Google Maps will help accomplish that goal by providing or identifying transportation options. I think of this as short-term intent: a people problem that can be mapped to a finite user journey and solved with a single user experience.
Most software today was designed to solve short-term intent. Whether translating a phrase to a new language, tracking your budget and investments, or getting analysis on a workout, there are countless of these kinds of problems that are solved with technology and apps today.
However, many of the highest value problems can’t be solved in a single interaction. Learning how to speak a new language is different than translating a single sentence. Tracking individual expenses doesn’t tell me if my spending habits are setting me up for future financial stability. Understanding one workout doesn’t tell me my training trajectory. I think of these as long-term intent: goals that can only be solved through countless decisions and actions over time. The user journeys that map these goals are not clean or finite. They are winding and inconsistent and humans aren’t good at seeing these patterns ourselves. Designing for long-term intent means connecting the individual moments of short-term intent to the broader long-term intent over time.
This is the design space I am interested in exploring. I believe that highest value problems are solved by navigating long-term, messy user journeys. I believe that new forms of technology like intelligence, wearables, spatial interfaces, can be combined to design new innovative interfaces that to bridge the physical and digital world. I believe that these interfaces can be designed to fade into the background while helping identify and connect the dots of short-term intent into long-term value.