The Dawning of the Age of Experience

When: 
Thursday, February 15, 2007 - 7:00pm
Lecturer(s): 
Jared M. Spool, User Interface Engineering

Joint Meeting with IEEE Computer Society

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 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. 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 multi-discplinary + 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.

Lecturer Biography: 

If you've ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he's one of the most effective, knowledgeable communicators 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, helps clients understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual User Interface Conference, is on the faculty of the Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.