The Dawning of the Age of the Experience with Jared Spool

Keynote: The Dawning of the Age of the Experience with Jared Spool

• study how people interact with technology in ‘98 started workig with web stuff
• this is a snapshot of where we are in a multi-year project
• talk about the sansa sandisk mp3 player, they think it has what it takes to take on the industry
• two people in the audience only have a sansa. all have or know someone with an ipod.
• itunes, apple has turned ipod into a fashion statement
• apple has turned the ipod into an experience
• have sold over 2 billion songs
• hadn’t sold a song 4 years ago, now #1 online retailer.
• #6 music distributor
• sold more than 2 every second last christmas season
• noticed by wall street. everybody wants to be the ipod of the industry.
• blockbuster allows you to have movies mailed to you… but #1 in the industry is Netflix. Have 6 million members.
• Netflix use metrics, surveyed, many started up due to hearing it from friends and family
• 93% of subscribers say they evangelize Netflix to friends and family. Only interface is the web site. no stores.

Experience Design Disasters

• $100 million on a design that lost 20% in revenue
• lawyer firm lauched new intranet with sharepoint and employees revolted.
• sharepoint is a very powerful application. like friend dropping you off at Home Depot and telling you “everything you need to build a house is here”
• successful experience design = integrates the user and the business
• for about six weeks there’s no way to tell the gender of a chick. there are some people who can tell with about 97% in about 2-3 weeks. These people are called Chicken Sexers.
• standing next to other sexers, you’ll everntually get up to a 90% accuracy.
• like WWII plane spotter or a sushi chef
• Successful Experience Design is learned yet not open to introspection
• nobody mentions the social networking or the ajax or the info bubbles about what they love about netflix
• Successful Experience Design is invisible

Experience Design

• copywriting, IA, Iteration, Usability Practices, Interaction design, Information Design, Visual Design, editing
• ethnography, domains, analytics, marketing, business knowledge, ROI, social netowkrs, technology, use cases,
• Successful Experience Design is Multi-Disciplinary
• (example showing diagram of aneuryism
• (example from FEMA)
• Successful Experience Design is Cultural
• Components: Communications
• clear vision, focus on vision. (what do we want the experience of using our stuff to be like in 5 years)
• Good feedback loop; fast iterations, need to have the right people involved.
• Design / Use (circle)

Making fast iterations happen

• don’t do major redesigns, design challenge into small chunks
• too much risk redesigning the whole thing
• emphasis on feedback mechanisms (select as much infromation as possible) can’t get it from the logs, get it from people who actually use the site
• bad design happens from misinformed designers.
• get everyone involved - decisions happen everywhere

Approaches to facilitiating experience design

• consulting approach - design team can only handle a small number of projects
• review and improve - makes design team into a bottleneck preventing progress
• educate and administrate - entire organization focuses on successful experience design
• (avis example) use of asterisks to denote optional

Successful experience design

• integrates user and business
• learned but not open to inspection
• invisible
• multi-disciplinary
• cutltural
• still learning - and we’re getting better everyday

Posted by Jonathan on 13/02/07 at 11:22 pm