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The Dawning Age of Experience
In Seattle's Web Design World 2007, Jared Spool shows you what it takes to build a successful, multi-disciplinary experience design team that will best meet your users' needs.

Web Design World Seattle, July 10, 2007

Jared Spool Founding Partner User Interface Engineering

Listen to the audio and watch the slides! (Running time: 1 hour, 4 minutes)

Experience design is no longer a nice-to-have luxury for 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 is 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 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; is learned, but not available through introspection; must be invisible to succeed; is cultural; is 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 the Speaker
Jared Spool has been working in the field of usability and design since 1978 -- before the term "usability" was ever associated with computers -- 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 is a member of the Tufts University Gordon Institute faculty.