The Secret Lives of Links

When: 
Thursday, January 19, 2012 - 7:00pm
Room: 
Constant Contact
Lecturer(s): 
Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal, User Interface Engineering
Jared Spool

Links are the molecular bonds of our web sites, holding all the pages together. They are the essence of a web site.

Yet, what do we really know about them? If you create great links, your users easily find everything they need on your site. If you do a poor job, your users will find your site impossible or frustrating. We never discuss what truly makes a good link good. Until now. Jared will show you the latest thinking behind the art and science of making great links. Join him for this entertaining and amusing look at the secret lives of our site's links.

Constant Contact requires us to provide a list of attendees in advance, so if you want to come, you need to register at http://ieeemeetsjaredspool.eventbrite.com, but admission is free.

We will be taking Jared to dinner at the Green Papaya after the talk at about 9pm.

Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at http://www.gbcacm.org. You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational emails about future talks at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/gbcacm, our self-administered mailing list.

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, 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 and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time.