Refresh Portland May: Jared Spool on The Dawning of the Age of Experience May 21, 2009

Join us for a special installment of Refresh Portland May with Jared Spool! We’re going to move the meeting a week back to May 21.

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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.

Official Website: http://refreshportland.org