Ian Spalter is Head of Instagram Japan where he leads the team responsible for all things design ranging from cross-platform app experiences to brand & identity. Ian was previously a Sr. UX Manager at YouTube, and prior to that, Director of UX & Design at Foursquare. Ian also spent four years at R/GA where he oversaw design development projects such as the Nike+ Fuelband and Nike Running, Basketball, and Training products.
Ian was born (1976) and raised in New Rochelle, New York and graduated from Hampshire College. Surprisingly like a lot of people within the industry, he grew up playing with Legos, drawing, and doing old-school programming on a Commodore 64. As a kid, Ian was into Sci-Fi and watched a lot of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, This later became a main source of his creative spark.
“Whenever I think about my journey to design, I think it just comes much more from a creative and inventive place. Being interested in sci-fi, Star Wars, and more importantly, how those films were made and the creativity that went into inventing something that didn’t exist before, like what ILM was doing.” “But there was something about the mechanics of dreaming that stuff up and creating this alternate reality” … “this idea of art and science coming together to create something magical.”
The work that Ian did on the FuelBand was a hugely important milestone. The FuelBand was Nike’s take on a fitness tracker, and it was arguably the most compelling take when it launched in the beginning of 2012. Nike was interested in helping everyone become more active. And it was a project that was based around a new piece of hardware that was being developed, which was essentially like a pedometer; at the time, it wasn’t something people wanted to wear. Ian and the team set out to make it fun, having the Nike stamp on it, making it something people would want to wear all the time. They worked across how to configure the device and setting it up to the visual brand; what it looked like from the app standpoint or on the web.
The FuelBand was one of the first activity trackers to implement goal setting, induvial feedback that would show how you were progressing towards that goal. And getting the immediate reward. One of the things that Ian and his team were able to do that nobody else did at the time was they created a system that allowed people to improve their habits. The idea of tracking your progress was only within the domain of elite athletes up until this point; Nike Plus was the first time that the quantified self really became a mainstream idea.