Jared Spool

Jared Spool (born December 8, 1960) is an American writer, researcher, speaker, educator, and an expert on the subjects of usability, software, design, and research. He is the founding principal of User Interface Engineering (UIE), a research, training, and consulting firm that specializes in website and product usability. He is also an amateur magician. Spool attended Niskayuna High School in Niskayuna, NY.

Spool has been working in the field of usability and design since 1978, before the term usability was ever associated with computers.

Achievements and awards
Under Spool's leadership, in 1996 UIE launched the User Interface Conference, an annual user experience research and design conference, which he chairs and delivers the keynotes for.

From 1998 until 2008, as an adjunct faculty member at Tufts University, Spool created and taught a unique curriculum for the Experience Design Management course at the Tufts Gordon Institute.

Spool has delivered the keynote presentations for The National Association of Government Webmasters, The National Association of Online Librarians, Higher Ed Webmasters, Agile 2009, South by Southwest Interactive, Web Advertising, Web Visions, the Usability Professionals Association, CHI (conference), the Information Architecture Summit, UX Australia, UX Lisbon, UX London, Drupal Con 2011, An Event Apart, Designing for People Amsterdam, UPA China, the Norwegian Computer Society, the British Computer Society, the Society for Technical Communication, and the Federal Webmasters Society.

In 2011, the Stevens Award was given to Spool, "whose quiet evangelism of usability and the practical outcomes of methods and tools had a wide-ranging influence on how we think about making systems effective."

Current activities
Spool spends time working with research teams, consults with organizations so they can better understand how to solve their design problems, and works with reporters and industry analysts on the state of design. In addition to being a speaker at more than 20 conferences every year, Spool presents almost weekly for various groups.

Jared also runs a 24-week UX strategy program via the organization The Center Centre and offers a UX community called The Leaders of Awesomeness. He also shares resources and collaborates with other organizations frequently to evangelize principles of user research.

Jared continues to advocate for UX as a practice and is quoted as saying, “The number one responsibility of UX leaders is to make their organization the world's foremost experts on their users and what their users need.”

Spool also sits on the editorial board for Rosenfeld Media, a user experience publishing house.

The Center Centre
With the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign, in 2014, Jared co-founded the Center Centre, "a new, bricks-and-mortar user experience design school for adults," with Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman.