Web Directions North » Blog Archive » Web Directions North Closing Keynote: Jared Spool

Since we announced the conference only one spot has been vacant - our closing keynote speaker. We’ve been working hard to find a speaker able to close such a star studded lineup, and in Jared Spool we’ve found just such a speaker.

What we sometimes forget in the web arena is that human computer engineering, user interface design, call it what you will has been around for a long time. Jared has coming up to 20 years of professional user interface engineering experience. His experience is just about unparalleled, and it is a rare privilege for us to be able to bring him to Web Directions North.

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.

Jared will be closing Web Directions North with “The Dawning of the Age of Experience”

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.

We are honored to have Jared close Web Directions North, and are really looking forward to “The Dawning of the Age of Experience”

Posted by John on 13/12/06 at 11:29 pm