Jared M. Spool
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UIEtips article: Can I Trust You? How Anticipating Problems Can Help Your Brand
--Every year, I ask each of my graduate students to interview four of their friends, finding what brands they love and what brands they really despis...
SpoolCast: Design Patterns and Anti-Patterns with Bill Scott
--In this week’s SpoolCast I had a chance to speak about Design Patterns and Anti-Patterns with Bill Scott. Bill is the Director UI Engineering at Ne...
Upcoming Presentations - May thru July 2008
--My late spring / early summer isn’t as busy as the first 4 months of this year, but I’m still getting out and about. Here’s where...
IA Summit Keynote: Journey to the Center of Design
--On April 12, I gave the keynote at the IA Summit. It was my second time keynoting this event and a real honor for me. The audience was great and it...
Wanted: Amazing Top-Quality Product Manager
--We’re looking for someone special and I’m hoping you know this person. We’re growing our very successful Virtual Seminar program ...
Wanted: Amazing Top-Quality Product Manager
--We’re looking for someone special and I’m hoping you know this person. We’re growing our very successful Virtual Seminar program ...
SpoolCast: Reviewing Mental Models with Indi Young
--In February we held one of our most popular Virtual Seminars ever, Mental Models: Getting Into Your Customer's Head, presented by Indi Young. We ha...
Upcoming Workshops By Steve Krug and Lou Rosenfeld
--This spring, our good friends, Steve Krug and Lou Rosenfeld, will offer a two-day workshop series on the topics of discount usability testing and s...
UIEtips article: Two More Usability Challenges for Designing Web Apps
--In last week’s UIEtips email newsletter, I shared three challenges we’ve seen users encounter in our usability tests. These are challen...
UIEtips article: Two More Usability Challenges for Designing Web Apps
--In last week’s UIEtips email newsletter, I shared three challenges we’ve seen users encounter in our usability tests. These are challen...
UIEtips article: Two More Usability Challenges for Designing Web Apps
--In last week’s UIEtips email newsletter, I shared three challenges we’ve seen users encounter in our usability tests. These are challen...
Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Designs
--Want to know what relationship behind magical illusions, practiced by professional magicians, and experience design, practiced by UX designers, rea...
UIEtips article: 3 Important Usability Challenges for Designing Web Apps
--Web-based applications are different from content-based web sites because the users are involved in a transaction. In our work researching the usab...
Usability Tools Podcast: Applying Fitts’ Law
--A button is a button right? Move the mouse over it. Click. Not much to it, eh? Well, when it’s a well-designed button, all the work your brain is ...
Usability Tools Podcast: Successful Web App Usability Techniques, Part 2
--In this week’s podcast, Brian Christiansen and I continue exploring usability techniques for web-based applications. This week, we explore the usa...
Usability Tools Podcast: Mouseovers in Navigation
--It's tempting to spend a ton of time creating slick flyout, dropdown, or pop-up navigation on our site, but is it worth the effort? This week, Bria...
UIEtips Article: Taking the Netflix Experience to a New Level — An Interview with Sean Kane
--If you had a chance to build your user experience design team from scratch, what would you do? Where would you focus your resources? What would you...
The missing skill: Creating UI Mockups
--I bet you can tell I’m cleaning out my inbox. Jen wrote: I enjoyed your December 10th article, on assessing UX skills, so I sent it around to...
Getting Started in Interface Design - Your Thoughts?
--Lucy wrote us: How can I learn to do what you do? Specifically, I am in awe of the courses and conferences your offer, and your site confirms that...
SpoolCast: Accessibility with Derek Featherstone
--Derek Featherstone travels the globe as a premier expert speaker on web accessibility, and I had a chance to sit down and interview him for the Spo...
UIEtips Article: Assessing Your Team’s UX Skills
--Over the last 7 years, we’ve been looking carefully at how to put a user experience team together. We’ve studied dozens of teams, some ...
UIEtips Article: Five Usability Challenges of Web-Based Applications
--Over the past few years, we’ve been studying the emergence of web-based applications and the usability and design challenges that accompany b...
Usability Tools Podcast: Avoiding Redesigns
--This week, we discuss avoiding redesigns. When we talk about avoiding redesigns, we don’t think your should stay anchored in the past, far from it....
One Year Later on Major Re-launches: “We were warned, you have been warned.”
--A little more than a year ago, we republished my article, The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch. The article generated an interesting discussion a...
Slides with Audio for The Dawning of the Age Of Experience
--Slideshare.net’s Slidecast technology is pretty slick. With very little effort, I easily added the soundtrack to the slides I’d uploade...
UIEtips Article: Seven Critical Decisions for Designing Effective Applications, Part II
--As we continue our research into what separates the best design teams from the rest, we see one factor consistently bubbling to the top: an attenti...
Usability Tools Podcast: On-Site Search
--In this week's episode, Brian Christiansen and I discuss the experience of on-site search engines, how to tell if yours is working well, and how to...
Great writeup of our Building Robust Personas Virtual Seminar
--Bruce McCarthy offers this great writeup of our recent Virtual Seminar on Building Robust Personas. A while back I wrote a piece about personas whe...
Usability Tools Podcast: Robust Personas
--This week, we follow up our Virtual Seminar presentation on Building Robust Personas In 30 Days or Less, with answers to more questions that were g...
Announcing Web App Summit 2008
--I'm pleased to announce the return of our Web App Summit sell-out program. We're holding the Summit in Coronado, CA on March 26 - 28, 2008. We've ...
A Few Followup Questions from the Building Robust Personas Seminar
--Yesterday, I gave my Virtual Seminar on Building Robust Personas in 30 Days or Less. If you missed it, you can watch it on demand. The session went...
Personas vs. User Descriptions; Apples vs. Tomatoes
--The always intriguing Christopher Fahey commented on yesterday’s post about Crappy Personas vs. Robust Personas: Personas provide a fabulous ...
Anyone Want To Give Me A Reference?
--Are you an ACM or SIGCHI member? Have you seen me give a presentation? Did you like it? If so, I may need your help. I’ve been nominated to t...
Crappy Personas vs. Robust Personas
--There’s been a lot of discussion lately on the Interwebs about how personas are a useless tool. 37Signals’ Jason Fried recently wrote: ...
Delight by Functionality — An excerpt from UI12
--Unbeknown to me, David Armano recorded and posted a small portion of my UI12 Keynote: Magic and Mental Models. In this segment, I’m talking a...
KJ Analysis is Sweeping The Company!
--A while back, I wrote about a question our friend Cheryl had about the KJ technique. Recently, Cheryl got back to me about her company’s reac...
Slides for The Dawning of the Age Of Experience
--With much prompting from Rashmi and others, I've learned to post things on SlideShare. My first experiment is the slides from my presentation, The...
Podcasting Update
--Are you looking for our weekly podcast? Thanks to next week’s User Interface 12 Conference, we’re extra busy around the office, so we&#...
Download Time and E-Learning
--If users are waiting for content and not doing anything else, they'll see that as painful. It would be the equivalent of an engaging live instructo...
Usability Tools Podcast: Statistical Significance
--Statistical significance revolves around having enough participants to make your findings valid. However, the number of participants necessary can ...
UIEtips Article: Seven Critical Decisions for Designing Effective Applications, Part I
--The landscape for building applications is always changing. In the ’80s, we built them out of “dumb terminals” and DOS screens. I...
SpoolCast: An Interview with Cameron Moll
--Like many of us, Cameron Moll works in a large, complex organization. This means managing design decisions and wrestling (often inflexible) enterpr...
Avoiding Useful Content with Slick Javascript
--The user, a frequent traveler, wanted to find ways to impress his new girlfriend. WhiteTie, a luxury concierge and VIP service, seems to be just th...
Cameron Moll’s Highly Extensible Interface
--Our friend Cameron Moll has an outline and video preview of his upcoming UI12 Full-day tutorial up on his blog. Cameron works for the LDS Church an...
Amazon.com Soon To Launch New Navigation
--We’re getting reports from folks that Amazon is about to roll out a new navigation scheme. Some people already are part of their test audienc...
UIEtips Article: Web Form Design in the Wild, Part II
--In last week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, we published a fantastic article written by Luke Wroblewski, a Principal Designer at Y...
Usability Tools Podcast: Are There Users Who Always Search?
--In the design world, there’s always been an assumption that some users demonstrate “search-dominant” tendencies by going right to the search engine...
UIEtips Article: Web Form Design in the Wild
--In this week’s issue of our email newsletter, UIEtips, we published a fantastic article written by Luke Wroblewski, a Principal Designer at Y...
Usability Tools Podcast: Interview-Based Tasks for Usability Testing
--In usability tests where we incorporate interview-based tasks, the participants interests are discovered, not assigned. Unlike traditional task des...
UIEtips Article: The Power of Comics for Understanding User Needs
--UIEtips 9/27/07: The Power of Comics for Understanding User Needs As designs and product visions become more complex, there is an increasing need t...
Spoolcast: Communicating Concepts with Comics: An Interview with Kevin Cheng
--In this interview, Kevin Cheng and Jared Spool discuss the use of comics to express user experience ideas early in the brainstorming stage of a pro...
A Perfectly Cromulent Fairy Door at Flickr
--Embiggen, a made-up word for a Simpson's episode, found its way into an options screen at Flickr. We think that's a perfectly cromulent fairy door.
Usability Tools Podcast: The Truth About Page Download Time
--This week, Christine Perfetti asks Jared Spool about User Interface Engineering’s groundbreaking study on download time. In this study, we found th...
States of Login
--Multiple levels of security are great. However, designers need to learn ways to explain these more complex models, so users don't panic when they e...
Losing Control of the Experience
--It's hard enough to create a successful user experience when you can control every aspect of the customer interaction . Can Apple (or anyone else f...
UIEtips Article: Time for Content to Become More Scientific
--UIEtips 9/18/07: Time for Content to Become More Scientific Time and time again in usability testing, I watch users struggle with web sites. I̵...
More on Usability Tests with 30 Observers
--We've had some great comments on my post, Usability Tests with 30 Observers. Here are my responses.
Being Cheap with Error Messages
--This error message is wrong on so many levels. For one, we did enter a city & state that matched the zip -- on the previous page. Second, it's...
Usability Tools Podcast: Inherent Value Tests
--This week, Christine Perfetti asks Jared Spool about one of UIE's most valuable usability testing techniques, Inherent Value Tests. Inherent Value ...
The Sign-In Travesty
--One of the most common design elements that stops users in their tracks is the sign-in page. A poorly-designed sign-in page can prevent users from ...
9/27 Virtual Seminar: Design and Usability Under Impossible Pressure presented by Larry Constantine
--I’m very excited about our upcoming Virtual Seminar presented by my good friend, Larry Constantine. If your team is facing an aggressive dead...
Usability Tests with 30 Observers
--Because there's a large number of design agents and stake holders involved and often a small number of available tests to observe, we can find ours...
UIEtips Article: 5-Second Tests — Measuring Your Site’s Content Pages
--UIEtips 9/11/07: 5-Second Tests: Measuring Your Site’s Content Pages It’s hard enough creating usable designs when there is ample time ...
Usability Tools Podcast: 5-Second Usability Tests
--This week, Christine and Jared discuss the genesis and value of five-second usability tests.
UIEtips Article: Making Personas Work for Your Web Site — An Interview with Steve Mulder
--Jared M. Spool recently had the chance to talk with Steve Mulder about how to create effective personas based on user research as well as valuable ...
UIEtips Article: Thinking in the Right Terms: 7 Components for a Successful Web Site Redesign
--Jared M. Spool details the seven essential long-term components to reach a successful redesign project, and avoid costly changes that don't enhance...
Want to be a User Interface 12 Volunteer?
--This year’s User Interface Conference is only two months away. The most forward-thinking minds in usability and design will be presenting on ...
Usability Tools Podcast: Department and Store Pages
--In last week's podcast, we talked about Gallery Pages, which are pages with links to the site’s content pages. This week, Christine asked me about ...
Resolving Group Name Differences in a KJ Analysis
--We’re big fans of the KJ Technique, a method that helps teams rank the important issues for a focus question, such as “What are the mos...
UIE Needs A Freelance PHP Wizard
--At User Interface Engineering, we’re looking for a PHP wizard who can help us enhance UIE.com to add better customer service functionality. W...
Holes in the Experience
--What could UPS do? Well, they could change the message to be more honest. They could say, for example, "You've tracked a valid package number, but ...
UIEtips Article: Five Survival Techniques for Creating Usable Products
--UIEtips 8/21/07: Five Survival Techniques for Creating Usable Products At User Interface Engineering, we’ve spent two decades researching the...
What Happened to Apple TV?
--I'm betting, on June 29, 2007, there was a team of developers inside Apple corporation who were not very cheery about the successful launch of the ...
SpoolCast Crew Episode 6 - Shenzhen Typhoon
--This week the crew discusses a controversial blog posting, the role of usability research in product development, and experience design vision work...
Getting Exactly What We Asked For
--Someone in eBay's user experience group must've rubbed the belly of a magic lamp last quarter, because a wish was definitely granted.
Study Participant Playing Cards
--Using player cards as visual reminders of your personas and the people you met during field studies is a great way to help keep your users at the f...
UIEtips Article: Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim Goodwin
--UIEtips 8/15/07: Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim Goodwin The most valuable asset of a successful design team is the information they ha...
Apple’s Input Device Alternatives
--Luke Wroblewski has written a fun post on his blog, Apple’s Input Device Alternatives, documenting a number of Human-Computer Interface patents App...
SpoolCast: An Interview with Cooper’s Kim Goodwin
--In today's SpoolCast, Christine Perfetti, UIE's Managing Director, sits down with Kim Goodwin, the General Manager and Vice President of Design at ...
Usability Tools Podcast: Gallery Pages
--In this week’s episode, Christine Perfetti asks Jared Spool about UIE’s research on Gallery Pages. Gallery Pages, the list of links to content, are...
UIEtips Article: Web 2.0 — The Power Behind the Hype
--UIEtips 8/07/07: Web 2.0 — The Power Behind the Hype Over the past few years, the world of web application development has seen the emergence...
Usability Tools Podcast: Home Page Design
--In this Usability Tools podcast, Christine Perfetti asks Jared Spool about UIE's latest thinking on home page design.
Social Hour - San Francisco 8/6 5:30-7
--Join us for a social hour in San Francisco on Monday, August 6 from 5:30pm - 7pm.
Floating Headers for Tabular Data
--Handling and presenting large amounts of data is often a challenge many organizations are faced with. There are issues such as the number of fields...
Ginny Redish’s “Letting Go of the Words”
--Editing your site's content can be an exhaustive and time-consuming job. However, it's absolutely critical to your site's success. In her great new...
UIEtips Article: Common Pitfalls of Social Web Applications, Part II
--UIEtips 7/31/07: Common Pitfalls of Social Web Applications, Part II This week, UIE turns 19 years old. Over the years, we’ve seen technology...
SpoolCast: Gerry McGovern Interviewed by Jared Spool
--In today's SpoolCast, I had the opportunity to speak with Gerry McGovern. Gerry is a widely-acclaimed speaker author and consultant on the topic of...
UIEtips Article: Debunking the Myths of Innovation: An Interview with Scott Berkun
--In this week's article, UIE's Christine Perfetti sat down with Scott to talk about his new book and his research in the area of innovation.
Qualitative Research
--Ashley McKee points out a series of articles by Leisa Reichelt that discuss accepting the unscientific qualities of qualitative research, and using...
SpoolCast: Eric Mattson interviewed by Jared Spool
--This week Jared interviews Eric Mattson, innovative marketer, social media researcher and serial podcaster.
Internet Wasteland
--I believe this is the first song that has ever included “The Scent of Information” and “Ruby on Rails” in the lyrics: Eddy ...
Customer Carewords: Words Drive Action on Your Site
--Jonathan Murphy details the exciting aspects of carewords from Gerry McGovern's latest book "Killer Web Content."
Podcasting Survey: We Have a Winner - But It’s Not Too Late for You
--Last week, we posted a survey to ask our podcast listeners what they thought about our work. To sweeten the deal, we offered to raffle a $25 iTunes...
Kevin Cheng’s IA Summit 2007 Presentation
--At this year’s IA Summit, Kevin Cheng and Tom Wailes gave an interesting presentation called, Finding Innovation in the Five-Hundred Pound Go...
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I'm a HUGE fan. Super awesome presentation. I think I should work for UIE.
;-)
I loved your Keynote at the UPA event in DC last year. You are great!!!