What Makes Content Great?"
Jared M. Spool, Tufts University Gordon
Institute and Founding Principal of User Interface Engineering (UIE), Bradford
Massachusetts, USA
ABSTRACT:
Users are
coming to your design so they can accomplish their goals. Is the content on your site helping or
hurting them?
In this
presentation, Jared will discuss the basic elements of quality content. You'll learn how content needs to bridge the
user's knowledge gap and 3 different techniques for making the connection. He'll discuss recent research into medical
education applications, and show examples of how the design of the content
dramatically improved user satisfaction and their understanding of the
information.
Jared M. Spool, Founding Principal
If you've
ever seen Jared speak about usability, you know that he's probably the most
effective and knowledgeable communicator on the subject today and has a great
sense of humor. What you probably don't
know is that he has guided the research agenda and built User Interface Engineering
into the largest research organization of its kind in the world. He's been working in the field of usability
and design since 1978, before the term "usability" was ever
associated with computers. A software
developer and programmer, Jared founded User Interface Engineering in
1988. He has more than 15 years of
experience conducting usability evaluations on a variety of products, and is an
expert in low-fidelity prototyping techniques.
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. He is a regular tutorial speaker at the
annual CHI conference and Society for Technical Communications conferences
around the country.
Jared
spends his time working with the research teams at the company, helps clients
understand how to solve their design problems, explains to reporters and
industry analysts what the current state of design is all about, and is a
top-rated speaker at more than 20 conferences every year. He is also the conference chair and keynote
speaker at the twice-annual User Interface Conference, is on the faculty of the
Tufts University Gordon Institute, and manages to squeeze in a fair amount of
writing time. We are truly fortunate to
have him spend time with us.
His
latest work is as co-author of Getting Them to What They Want, a report about the best practices for
designing successful navigation to content.
The company Website lists many of their reports and activities http://www.uie.com
UIE
242 Neck Road
Bradford,
MA 01835
Tel 978
374 8300
Fax 978
374-9175