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Watch, listen & learn from the world’s best UX experts.

Expert: Jared Spool

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Jared Spool took UX to a new level in 1988 when he launched UIE. And by, "to a new level," we mean "validated UX as a vital component of our work, then spent the next 25 years conducting research and writing tirelessly to keep validating it."

Fortunately, for users everywhere, his continued efforts are still paying off.

Jared often can be found onstage, where he captivates crowds with stunning data that reveal how UX can affect a company’s bottom line. He's helped thousands of companies worldwide to increase their profits, identify interaction failures, and integrate UX research and design into their product development cycles.

Reaching designers is a priority, too—aside from these virtual seminars, Jared and the UIE team organize annual conferences chock full of hands-on, practical workshops led by the best industry minds around.

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Jared Spool

From UI21: Is Design Metrically Opposed?

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Jared Spool

The world of metrics and analytics have often been at odds with how designers work. Design is a process where we finely tune our intuition to create great user experiences. Yet, sometimes, what we think is best rivals the metrics. So which do we believe-our gut or the data?

In the world of measures, metrics, and Key Performance Indicators some practices, like the growth hacking approach to increasing Monthly Average Users (MAUs), have hurt the online experience of Instagram and LinkedIn. While alternatives to satisfaction and net promoter score give insight into the design process and help designers have better instincts.

If you’re ready to talk to your teams about what you really need, help management interpret the data, and create analytical experiments that provide design insights, don’t miss this talk.

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Jared Spool

Is Design Metrically Opposed?

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Jared Spool

What You’ll Learn

  • What easily-collected analytics, like bounce rate and time-on-page, actually tell us about our users’ experiences
  • How we construct true KPIs that can predict the future patterns of users
  • Why advanced techniques, like a money-left-on-the-table analysis and the CE11, show us how metrics can impact design
  • Why asking, “Would you recommend this?” isn’t an ideal way to measure brand engagement
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Jared Spool

How Do We Design Designers?

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Jared Spool

What You’ll Learn

  • Why design students coming out of school don't know about responsive design or creating mobile apps
  • What's causing our self-taught hackers and C.S. grads having a tough time keeping up with the pace of technology innovation
  • Why our tendency to focus on skills alone isn’t sustainable
  • How we can start investing in the ways we create designers and fuel their growth
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Jared Spool

It’s a Great Time To Be a UX Designer

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Jared Spool

There’s never been a better time to be a designer. After years of wishing we’d have the recognition and appreciation for the value we bring, we’re now highly sought after for our talents and skills. A growing number of organizations have seen success through great design, from Apple to Cirque de Soleil to the White House. Others now want to get the same results. The demand for great designers has never been better.

Yet, as the proverb says, "Be careful for what you wish for, lest it become true." Now that everyone expects us to deliver great things, are we ready? While we’re presented with more opportunities than ever, we also have increased challenges.

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Jared Spool

Search, Scent, and the Happiness of Pursuit

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Jared Spool

What You’ll Learn

  • Form a search implementation strategy around your customer's mission (and why that's the fastest way to success)
  • Find a hidden resource on your server that shows you exactly how to make search more effective
  • Understand why focusing on "searchers" is a design strategy that gets teams into trouble
  • Put together your own Search benchmark test, that will give you regular feedback on how well you're doing
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Jared Spool

The Road to Informed Decisions

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Jared Spool

What You’ll Learn

  • Tailor specialized research techniques, such as Five-Second Tests and Inherent-Value Tests
  • Build out your analysis toolbox, with easy-to-execute techniques, such as conducting a pair-wise comparison or building a weighted decision matrix
  • Bring your entire team to consensus on the most important design issues in under an hour
  • Compare multiple design alternatives using solid user research quickly and cost effectively
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Jared Spool

Testing Your Critiquing Skills: Site Navigation

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Jared Spool

What You’ll Learn

  • Encourage other team members to use critique to look at other on-going work
  • Use critique to encourage designers to become introspective and revisit underlying precepts of their design
  • Give great critique and encourage the designer to be receptive and engaged in the discussion, instead of being defensive and argumentative
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Jared Spool

Galleries: The Hardest Working Pages on Your Site

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Jared Spool

What You’ll Learn

  • Utilize the Scent of Information to ensure the user’s trigger words are present
  • Understand how galleries help users make confident choices
  • Identify the key elements that search result pages borrow from the average gallery (and what makes them different)
  • Use strategies for ordering links for easy findability. (Hint: Alphabetical order isn’t one of them!)
  • Know when images help and when they get in the way
  • Understand how dynamic Ajax elements can help or hinder a user finding what to click on
  • Take advantage of when users are scanning and when they are reading
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Jared Spool

Strike Up the Brand: How Smart Design Can Strengthen Your Brand

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Jared Spool

What You’ll Learn

  • Recognize the two important outcomes of branding efforts -- affinity and dispositional returns
  • Understand why 'message' branding doesn't strengthen engagement, but 'experience' branding does
  • Understand the important role that user experience research plays in the design process for branding
  • Measure brand engagement to show the effects of a design
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Jared Spool

The Analysis Toolbox: Making Sense of Usability Test and Field Study Data

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Jared Spool

Are you overwhelmed by the incredible amounts of data you're left with after performing a field study or usability test? Can you effectively analyze the data you've collected, and use your findings to successfully guide your product development process?

Field studies and usability tests produce a vast amount of quality data. However, these techniques produce a vast, often overwhelming, amount of quality data. Interacting with users provides great insights, but making sense of what you've learned is often a huge challenge that many teams find difficult to overcome.

Part of the secret to good data analysis is preparing properly *before* the study begins. Preparing a good set of focus questions, putting together data collection worksheets, and carefully studying participant recruitment will simplify the post-observation analysis. This in turn will help you understand how to spend your observation time more productively. In the first part of this presentation, Jared will walk through these techniques, providing examples as we prepare for a real study.

Once you've collected your observational data, the next challenge is to turn it into information the team can act on. In the second part of our seminar, Jared will explain some classic techniques for turning qualitative observations into quantitative analysis. He'll demonstrate participant pairing to extract attributes, attribute ratings, Pugh diagrams, and the K-J Analysis technique. All of these are essential tools for any team's analysis toolbox.