To follow on from Woody’s post - Journey to the Center of Design this was such a strong talk that I have to add some points myself.

The down to earth approach to looking at design (UE) Jared was very against the dogma of design that the industry has currently got it’s self into and explains that the formulas being touted by be names and companies are not a recipe for sucess. Looking across the spectrum of successful sites some use these processes and some don’t for example Apple has pretty much got rid of there UCD approach to design compared to Microsoft who last year carried out in excess of 10,000 usability studies, are Microsofts products 10,000 times more usable?

The approach that Jared proposed was to look at methodologies not processes to create designs. He suggests that the best work is mastered through practice and knowing the right and wrong ways to implement these methodologies. You can then base you decisions on which approach to use, allowing you to understand why you have used that methodology not just blindly following.

the closing section to this talk ran through 3 keys to success, these are:

• Good Vision - Can every member of your team tell you where they or the company wants to be in 5 years
• Good feedback loop - Does every member of you team watch users of your site/competitior sites for at least 2 hours every 6 weeks
• Good culture - Reward failure as it shows a willingness to learn