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Jared Spool – The Dawning of the Age of Experience

A presentation given at at Web Directions North, Vancouver, February 8, 2007.

  • MP3 of presentation
  • Presentation slides (9.7MB)
  • Session description
  • About Jared Spool
  • Session Description

    Experience Design is no longer a nice-to-have luxury of a few organizations with tons of money and exceptional visionary management. It’s become commonplace for organizations that build products and web sites. Experience Design is a centerpiece of boardroom discussions and quickly becoming a key performance indicator for many businesses.

    However, you can’t just hire a couple of “experience designers” and tell them, “Go do that voodoo that you do so well.” Today’s business environment forces us to build multidisciplinary teams, compiling a diverse group of skills and experiences to handle the many facets of the technical, business, and user requirements. In his usual entertaining and insightful manner, Jared will talk about what it takes to build a design team that meets today’s needs.

    He’ll demonstrate how successful Experience Design:

    • Must integrate the needs of the users with the requirements of the business
    • Is learned, but not available through introspection
    • Must be invisible to succeed
    • Is cultural
    • Is multidisciplinary
    • Thrives best in an “educate and administrate” environment

    You’ll see examples of designs from Apple’s iPod, Netflix, the Mayo Clinic, and Southwest Airlines, to name a few.

    About Jared Spool

    Software developer and programmer Jared founded User Interface Engineering in 1988. He has more than 15 years of experience conducting usability evaluations on a variety of products, and is an expert in low-fidelity prototyping techniques.

    Jared is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute and teaches seminars on product usability. He is a member of SIGCHI, the Usability Professionals Association, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the IEEE. Jared is a recognized authority on user interface design and human factors in computing. He is a regular tutorial speaker at the annual CHI conference and Society for Technical Communications conferences around the country.

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Thoroughly enjoyed Web Directions — met some great people, heard some inspiring presenters and added a whole bunch of things to my to-do list.

Joel Roberts Web Developer