Jared Spool: Beyond the UX Tipping Point

For the longest time, making a great experience for the user was a luxury item in a business’s strategy. It was a nice-to-have, after identifying a customer need and fulfilling it with a working product. The product had to work and it had to ship. If it was a great experience, well all the better. Times have changed. The cost of creating and delivering a product is no longer a barrier to entry. Quality is no longer a differentiator. What’s left? The experience of using the product. If you’re going to be truly competitive in today’s markets, your products and services better have a great experience. To do that, a fundamental shift has to occur inside your organization. It’s no longer acceptable to ship a product with a poor experience or to deliver poor customer service. Every part of the organization has to be infused with an understanding of great user experience. Your organization has to cross the UX Tipping Point.

Jared M. Spool is a co-founder of Center Centre and the founder of UIE. In 2016, with Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman, he opened Center Centre, a new design school in Chattanooga, TN to create the next generation of industry-ready UX Designers. They created a revolutionary approach to vocational training, infusing Jared’s decades of UX experience with Leslie’s mastery of experience-based learning methodologies.

You’ll also find him as the conference chair and keynote speaker at the annual UI Conference and UX Immersion Conference, and he manages to squeeze in a fair amount of writing time. He is author of the book, Web Usability: A Designer’s Guide and co-author of Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks that Work.

You’ll find his writing at uie.com. You can also follow his adventures on the Twitters at @jmspool, where he tweets daily about UX design, design strategy, design education, and the wondrous customer service habits of the airline industry.