***Special discount with Calagator: Get $75 off the registration price when you use the promotion code CALPORT

UIE is excited to announce our new UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences, a full-day workshop, based on 10 years of UIE's extensive research, that will deliver new insights and inspire your team to create the best user experiences.

This winter, we're taking this workshop on the road to:

Portland, OR on Tuesday, February 17, 2009 Minneapolis, MN on Thursday, February 19, 2009 Atlanta, GA on Monday, March 2, 2009

Recognized industry leader, Jared Spool, will share information that previously we've only made available to our biggest clients.

During the day, Jared will lead you through these sessions:

9:00 am: Designing for the Age of Experience? Jared will start with an overview of UIE's research into great experience design.

10:45 am: UX Level-Up: Taking Your Team to the Next Level?? You'll assess the critical dimensions that will pinpoint what your team needs to succeed.

1:00 pm: The Making of a UX Vision? You'll discover the secrets behind creating a unified user experience vision that you can share with your entire organization.

3:15 pm: Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusions to Simplify Design? In a perfect session to end the day, Jared will use professional magic effects to demonstrate the parallels between the world of magical illusions and the world of digital design.

View a full description of the program at: http://cli.gs/RqzyBR

IxDA Portland is delighted to welcome Jared Spool to the Pacific Northwest, to present his UX Tipping Point talk. Doors open at 6pm for drinks, snacks, catching-up with friends, and checking-out Wacom's swanky new "Experience Center" in the Pearl District. Jared's talk will then span ~45min, with time after for Q&A. We'll also be raffling-off books, and offering a discount code for UIE's upcoming Portland workshop series!

———

The UX Tipping Point

For the longest time, making a great experience for the user was a business-strategy luxury item. A great product only had to work and ship. A great experience was a nice-to-have, not a requirement. Times have changed. The cost of delivering a product is no longer a barrier to entry. Quality is no longer a differentiator. What’s left? The user’s experience.

Every part of the organization must be infused with an understanding of great design. Your organization has to cross the UX Tipping Point. You must increase everyone’s exposure to users, communicate a solid experience vision, and install a culture of continual learning. With that, design will become your organization’s competitive advantage.

Jared will show you and your team:

• Which path organizations take to become design-infused • How a centralized UX team is a stepping stone to a more UX capable organization • Why the market needs to demand a better experience before it will matter • What your organization will need to do 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.