Jared Spool
The Dawning of the Age of Experience
2007
About this talk
Experience design is no longer a nice-to-have luxury of a few organisations with tons of money and exceptional visionary management. It’s become commonplace for organisations that build products and websites. 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 multi-disciplinary 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. See how successful experience design integrates the needs of the users with the requirements of the business. See how it is learned, but not available through introspection. Learn how experience design must be invisible to succeed and why it is cultural, multi-disciplinary, and 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
If you’ve ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he’s probably the most effective, knowledgeable communicator on the subject today. What you probably don’t know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He’s been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term ‘usability’ was ever associated with computers.
Jared spends his time working with the research teams at the company; he helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, and explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about. Jared is a top-rated speaker, and presents at over 20 conferences every year, and is the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual User Interface Conference. Jared is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and even manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.
