I remember meeting Jared Spool for the first time at UPA’s conference “Designing the new Millenium” in August 2000 in Asheville, North Carolina. Then again, in April 2006 at CHI’s conference “Interact. Inform. Inspire.” in Montreal. Each time, I met a humble person delighted to talk about his true passion: user interface engineering (could not resist it…;).
Hence, it was a great pleasure to meet Jared Spool again today at Webcom Montreal (QC) for the 3rd time. The founder of User Interface Engineering gave an inspiring talk on “The Future of Usability & Design in a Mobile World“.
Thanks to Christian Aubry, the Michel Chioni / Claude Malaison tandem behind the Webcom world conference and Agentsolo as one of the Webcom live producers, I was privileged enough to interview Jared right after his talk on the Webcom Live set. Exclusive precisions on the key elements of his presentation’s are presented here in a 9ish minutes video:
To sum it up for you, Jared actually presented what he called the “Eye of the Perfect Storm” for the future of usability and design in the mobile world, which basically aligned his presentation along 2 axes with the following 4 quadrants:
- Market maturity (real opportunity)
- Surgeons’ law (99% of developments equals crap)
- Activity vs Experience (phoning vs smartphoning)
- Balancing excitement and basic expectations along economic classical lines (i.e. investment/satisfaction)
The conclusion? If you think UX is important now, don’t wait until the mobile world hits in for good: it’s going to get worse…i.e. UX will be even more so important! 
Jared promised to send his presentation and I will update this post including the Powerpoint as soon as I get it in my inbox, so please check back if you’re interested 