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Episodes
Cyd Harrell - The Challenges of Usability Testing Mobile Apps
December 05, 2013 08:23 - 31 minutes - 15.9 MBAs much as we may like to pretend, there is nothing natural about usability testing. There’s always a level of concentration involved that likely wouldn’t be present in a natural setting. This “unnaturalness” is magnified when testing mobile applications. Users have to focus on things like posture and how they’re holding the device while trying to interact with it realistically.
Jason Ulaszek & Brian Winters - From Research to Experience Roadmaps
November 15, 2013 07:04 - 29 minutes - 14.9 MBNowadays, design is an increasingly important business tool. As Jared Spool reminds us, Apple is one of the largest companies in the world, largely based upon continually engaging in good design. A great user experience can be a differentiator in the business landscape. For Jason Ulaszek, a good design starts with good research to guide and direct the organization’s decisions.
IA Summit 2013: Karen McGrane’s Closing Plenary
October 18, 2013 05:37 - 58 minutes - 29.1 MBTechnology changes quickly. A lot of organizations struggle to keep up with this change. It’s not just mobile design that’s throwing a wrench in the spokes. Content strategy and information architecture are more important than ever in this changing, multi device landscape. Karen McGrane believes in the not too distant future IAs and UXers will be leading organizations in the face of these changes.
Dan Klyn - Determining What Good Means with Performance Continuums Live!
October 04, 2013 06:33 - 29 minutes - 14.4 MBIn considering your user's experience with your design, keep in mind that there's a difference between something looking good and being good. But how do you determine good? How can you measure it? If, for example, you’re a print company building a digital presence, do you focus on retention or acquisition based on the shifting experience? It’s easy to ask for something that already exists, but much harder to describe something that one might want or need.
Kate Kiefer Lee - Voice and Tone Live!
September 17, 2013 15:03 - 52 minutes - 26.2 MBGiven the amount of communications a user takes in on a daily basis, how you speak to them is incredibly important. The “voice” a company uses contributes to the establishment of the brand as well a creates a distinguishing identifier that sets it apart within the daily deluge of content users encounter. A consistent voice can help a user feel comfortable and familiar with your organization.
Brian Suda - Data Visualizations that Pack a Punch
September 06, 2013 15:24 - 20 minutes - 10.6 MBCreating visualizations from data can be a powerful and intriguing way to present findings. But way too many design teams sit on vast amounts of data. They also spend entirely too much time making static images rather than interactive tools.
Adam Connor - Design Studio: Building Consensus Early in Your Design Process
August 29, 2013 13:36 - 25 minutes - 13.5 MBGetting two people to agree on something is a difficult task in any aspect of life. Getting a whole team to agree on a design, where underlying feelings, ownership, and organizational hierarchy are involved, can be an even greater challenge. That’s not even counting the dreaded “swoop and poop” scenario. The trick is to get everyone involved early in the design process and a design studio is a perfect tool for just that.
Dan Brown’s “Designing Together”
August 27, 2013 06:40 - 15 minutes - 8.18 MBDan believes that collaboration and conflict—that’s right, conflict—are the basis for good design. The book itself evolved from his Surviving Design Projects card game. Dan joins us for this podcast to discuss his book, and his thinking around collaboration and managing conflict.
Steve Portigal’s “Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights”
August 23, 2013 14:51 - 17 minutes - 9.21 MBSteve’s book is a distillation of his years of experience conducting research with users. Somehow existing as both a handbook of sorts and as a casual conversation with one of the sharpest minds in the field, it’s a must-have for anyone thinking about the research side of things. Steve breaks down interactions with users to illustrate when, and how, to ask the right questions to uncover valuable insights.
Margot Bloomstein - Controlling the Pace of UX with Content Strategy
August 21, 2013 06:07 - 21 minutes - 10.9 MBIn some scenarios, getting a user to convert or react to a call to action is the desired outcome. It means your design and experience work. But if users are coming to and then quickly leaving your site, what are they really experiencing? If they don’t take the time to explore and discover they may not have any loyalty to you or the experience. And if you’re dealing in complex decisions, you want your users to take the time they need to fully understand and commit to their choice.
Christine Perfetti - Jumpstart Your UX Research Program
August 08, 2013 16:23 - 29 minutes - 15 MBUX folks often have to sell the importance of the field to stakeholders. That’s also the case with user research. The costs and time associated with starting a research program, and actually interacting with users, are sources of a lot of friction. Organizations are now seeing the value in user research but it’s daunting to know where to begin. It’s also difficult to fit research into an already established process.
Adam Connor & Aaron Irizarry - Building Consensus in Critiques and Design Studios
August 06, 2013 15:52 - 34 minutes - 17.9 MBCritique is often confused with being negative and critical. However, the basis of critique is communication. Having strongly grounded communication is necessary for any relationship in life, work related or not.
Stephen Anderson - Displaying Data in Digestible Ways
August 01, 2013 15:04 - 33 minutes - 17.1 MBCulling through massive amounts of data is a headache. A dense table of aggregated data points can be useful in theory, but the manner in which it’s displayed is often a hindrance. Even more than that, showing that data in a chart or graph is confusing if it’s not effectively labeled. Data is useless when you can’t make good decisions from it.
Scott Berkun - Innovating on a Deadline
July 31, 2013 15:04 - 34 minutes - 17.4 MBEveryone wants to be innovative, to be the next iPhone, or Google. Innovation in itself is a tricky proposition. There’s really no way to aim for it as a goal and it’s not something you can declare you’re going to achieve. Many companies and products have been innovative though, so there must be some way to do it.
Kevin Hoffman - Leading Super Productive Meetings
July 12, 2013 06:58 - 32 minutes - 16.6 MBIt’s common in the current technological landscape for teams to have remote members. Firing up a Skype session to join the whole team in a meeting is easy. However, having a remote element to your team is not without complications. There can be hurdles in terms of collaboration, not to mention the possibility of technical issues. In the end, co-located or remote won’t matter if the meeting itself is poorly designed.
Kim Goodwin - Using Scenarios to Design Intuitive Experiences
June 28, 2013 06:07 - 24 minutes - 12.9 MBScenarios can represent the ideal picture of a user’s experience with a product or service because you can see how and when they’ll interact. However, a scenario is often missing the details of what's going on at this moment in time and that can be a sticking point. This is where the value of the journey map emerges.
Dan Saffer - Designing Microinteractions
June 14, 2013 06:23 - 28 minutes - 15.1 MBDo you think about the ringer on your phone and the ability to turn it off? Dan Saffer uses this example to kick off his book Microinteractions. Silencing the ringer on your phone is a common feature. If that feature is clunky or hard to find it interferes with needing to silence it quickly, in a crowded movie theatre for example. These tiny interactions that surround the main functionality are integral to rounding out the entire experience.
Jeff Gothelf - Lean UX: Escaping Product Requirement Hell
June 07, 2013 06:39 - 32 minutes - 16.9 MBAssumptions tend to be the downfall of many research projects. Making design decisions based on generalizations of what people are likely to do leads to surprises once you finally get your product in front of actual users. The result? Rework and frustration due to an overall lack of communication within the team.
Richard Rutter - Typography in Responsive Web Design
May 29, 2013 05:31 - 17 minutes - 8.96 MBTypography wears many hats in the user experience world. It’s part of the overall look of the visual design. It can convey tone and meaning of the content. Well set type can improve the user experience through readability and be an important piece of the accessibility puzzle for users with low vision. As with most things involving the web these days, typography isn’t immune to the disruption caused by mobile and multi-device design.
Russ Unger’s “Designing the Conversation”
May 24, 2013 16:07 - 19 minutes - 10.1 MBFacilitation is an important skill, whether with collocated or remote teams. It drives conversation and collaboration. The ability to facilitate well is integral when conducting participatory design activities, giving a presentation, or even giving a virtual seminar. Russ joins Adam Churchill to discuss the book and the various types of facilitation in this podcast.
Margot Bloomstein’s “Content Strategy at Work”
May 10, 2013 07:31 - 15 minutes - 7.97 MBHere at UIE we’ve amassed quite a library, and we’re adding to it all the time. One of the more recent additions is Margot Bloomstein’s book Content Strategy at Work. The subtitle of Margot’s book is “Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project” and in keeping with that idea, it is chock full of case studies and practical examples. Adam Churchill catches up with Margot to discuss her book in this podcast.
Jared Spool - Mobile & UX: Inside the Eye of the Perfect Storm Live!
May 02, 2013 06:53 - 51 minutes - 25.5 MBThe world of web application design is expanding at a rapid rate. We’re now expected to design great experiences across a huge variety of platforms, from small screens to large displays. The flood of iPad applications and successful online businesses are showing our executives that design matters.
Steph Hay - Building Trust with Your Users through Messaging and Copy
April 17, 2013 15:04 - 23 minutes - 12.4 MBEver wonder how many “World’s Best Coffee” signs exist in the world? The world is a big place, so that claim may or may not be entirely accurate. These days, with social media being so prevalent, it’s important that your messaging is truthful and that your product or service delivers on those promises. Otherwise you run the risk of losing the trust of your customer base, and scaring away potential users.
Nathan Curtis - Sketching for Understanding
April 09, 2013 15:37 - 22 minutes - 11.6 MBShared understanding is important to any team working towards a common goal. Ensuring every member of the team is on the same page can be difficult. Sketching is a quick, lightweight method for communicating design ideas or interactions. Starting with sketching early in the design process lets everyone share the same vision.
Kristina Halvorson - A Content Strategy Roadmap
March 20, 2013 14:09 - 15 minutes - 8.21 MBA beautiful design means little if it’s not useful. Content is the key to making it useful. From the outset of the design process, you must consider the content for the site. Members of the design and development teams should work along side the content strategist to ensure the right content is delivered with the right message.
Luke Wroblewski - Organizing Mobile Web Experiences
March 11, 2013 05:46 - 23 minutes - 12.3 MBThe proliferation of mobile devices has made it necessary to rethink your web experiences. The mobile phone and tablet, along with retina displays, have substantially changed how a user experiences your design. Responsive web design has emerged as a solution in some cases, but even though connection speeds on mobile networks are increasing, performance remains an issue.
Jason Cranford Teague - Prototyping a Responsive Design
March 01, 2013 14:47 - 40 minutes - 20.9 MBWith the emergence of techniques like responsive web design, many of the traditional prototyping methods become difficult to employ. Sketches and wireframes have in some cases given way to HTML and CSS prototyping so that users and clients can experience a richer, more complete interaction.
Derek Featherstone - Accessibility as a Design Tool
February 27, 2013 16:12 - 26 minutes - 13.6 MBAccessibility is important, but somewhere along the way it got an undeserved reputation for being ugly, costly, and driven only by technical-compliance requirements. Making it an integral part of your design early creates something that is beautiful, inexpensive, and user-experience-driven. When someone with a disability comes across usability issues in your design, they're likely to be amplified. Something of minor inconvenience for a user could be a significant roadblock to another using a...
Karen McGrane - Adapting Your Content for Mobile
February 20, 2013 08:57 - 31 minutes - 16.3 MBAs more web capable devices hit the market, designers need to consider where and how their designs will be seen. Unfortunately, the same consideration isn't always made when it comes to content. With design changing so much in a multichannel environment, content must be structured independent of how it will eventually look.
Des Traynor - Strengthening Your Design through Microcopy
February 13, 2013 16:43 - 26 minutes - 13.7 MBDes Traynor is an expert on crafting microcopy. In his virtual seminar, Microcopy That Strengthens your Design’s Experience, Des identifies the key questions to ask when creating microcopy so that it doesn’t get lost or created by accident. The audience asked a bunch of great questions during the live seminar and Des joins Adam Churchill to answer some questions in this podcast.
Kelly Goto - Prototyping for Mobile Designs
February 08, 2013 15:59 - 30 minutes - 15.8 MBBuilding a prototype is a great way to test your design early on with users. Whether you choose to go for a high-fidelity representation, or go lo-fi with paper, you can learn a lot about the usability of your site. Often, teams are concerned with which technique or tool to use because of the litany that are available.
Luke Wroblewski - Designing Intuitive Mobile Inputs
February 01, 2013 06:58 - 29 minutes - 15.6 MBWhat makes a user want to download an app in the first place? Ideally, it’s the promise of fulfilling a goal or need for the user. With the hundreds of thousands of options available, and the immediacy of the mobile context, you have a small window of opportunity to engage your user. If users can’t easily use your app, they simply won’t.
Cyd Harrell - Conducting Usability Research for Mobile
January 25, 2013 15:43 - 25 minutes - 13.4 MBMobile changes everything about how we conduct usability research. Not only has the way we design and build websites and apps had to adapt, how we study them has to as well. Traditional research methods won’t translate to a mobile environment.
Jared Spool - Build a Winning UX Strategy from the Kano Model
January 16, 2013 16:30 - 29 minutes - 15.3 MBThe ultimate goal for user experience is that users enjoy using your product or service. Many companies use satisfaction as a metric for measuring their success. But satisfaction is really just the lack of frustration. You should be focused on what you can do to delight your users.
Jason Grigsby - When Responsive Design Meets the Real World
January 04, 2013 06:27 - 30 minutes - 16.1 MBResponsive web design allows the notion of “one web” to be a reality. Designers are increasingly able to sell to their organization the idea of delivering content to multiple platforms. Putting it into practice is another story.
Chris Risdon - Mapping Your Customer’s Journey
December 21, 2012 07:56 - 29 minutes - 15.5 MBWith so many teams and divisions within organizations, falling into a pattern of designing within your own silo is incredibly easy. Mobile teams are focused on the mobile products. Desktop teams are concerned with the desktop experience. But customers interact with your product or service from an increasing variety of touchpoints. They expect a seamless experience across channels and devices, but this is often not the case.
Kevin Hoffman - Designing Stellar Meetings
December 14, 2012 06:27 - 10 minutes - 5.4 MBWe’ve all sat through terrible meetings before. Part of what makes those meetings so bad is poor communication. Being present in a meeting doesn’t guarantee that your attendees will retain the important information from the meeting, or feel like they played any role in it. Improving the way that things are heard, seen, and discussed will go a long way to improving your meetings overall.
Jared Spool - The Secret Lives of Links
December 12, 2012 07:22 - 9 minutes - 4.92 MBWebsites are full of links. How useful these links are in helping users complete tasks is another story. Links have to guide users as they follow the scent of information. A vague or confusing link often leads users down a wrong path and in turn increases their rate of failure.
Rhythm and Flow - A 2012 IA Summit Podcast with Peter Stahl
November 21, 2012 09:36 - 41 minutes - 20 MBMost interactions have an underlying rhythm. For example, an application may ask you to scan a list of items, then click one, leading to another list to scan and click. Scan, click, scan, click. You can get into a groove. Systems increasingly have rhythm too: animated transitions, hover responses, and digital physics. Static is so last year.
Driving a Multichannel Experience from a Single Message - A 2012 IA Summit Podcast with Margot Bloomstein
November 20, 2012 09:36 - 42 minutes - 21.1 MBE pluribus unum? Better yet, out of one, create many—many channels within a multifaceted but unified experience. That’s the challenge of experience design among constrained budgets, tight timelines, and unlimited interaction expectations. Content strategy’s communication foundation, the message architecture, can help you answer that challenge.
Beyond Channels: Context Is King - A 2012 IA Summit Podcast with Emily Wengert
November 15, 2012 10:01 - 40 minutes - 19.1 MBWhen smartphones and tablets first emerged, designers focused on channel differences like screen size in order to understand the basics in this new area. It’s time to set aside channel-centric planning and think of a user’s context first.
What’s Your Perception Strategy? (Why It’s NOT All About Content) - A 2012 IA Summit Podcast with Stephen P. Anderson
November 14, 2012 10:01 - 44 minutes - 22 MBIf we focus too much on content, we ignore what we know about how our associative brain comes to makes sense new information. Think about how many people respond before reading past the first sentence of an email, or how a magazine article doesn’t get the same reaction when displayed in HTML. Or consider how knowing the author of a publication influences your judgement of that content.
Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction with Nathan Shedroff & Chris Noessel
October 24, 2012 06:26 - 29 minutes - 15.4 MBScience fiction films often take liberties with the technology that they display. After all, it is fiction. Though they can make up essentially whatever they want, technologies still need to be somewhat realistic to the audience. This influences the way that sci-fi technology is presented in film, but in turn, it's how sci-fi influences technological advances in the real world.
Chris Risdon - Mapping the User Experience
October 19, 2012 05:02 - 33 minutes - 17.1 MBIn the current multi-device, interconnected landscape, a user can interact with your product or service from a variety of touchpoints. At each, you must address the user’s needs at a particular place and time. Those needs will be determined by where they are in the experience.
Jason Grigsby - Mobile-First Responsive Design
October 12, 2012 06:41 - 18 minutes - 9.66 MBSpeed and performance are a critical aspect of mobile design. Using media queries to design your site responsively is a great way to ensure proper display on mobile devices. But just shrinking a desktop site to work on a mobile device can affect performance.
Kevin Hoffman - Leading Productive Meetings
September 21, 2012 08:09 - 34 minutes - 17.4 MB“Meetings are a waste of time.” “Meetings, ugh—I have real work to do.” Heard these? The perception of meetings worsens when you have an unproductive one. The entire team feels like their time could have been better spent.
Karen McGrane - Integrating Content Strategy into Your Design Process
September 14, 2012 06:56 - 35 minutes - 18.5 MBIn any website, there’s a lot of thought that goes into the visual design. But a great visual design is worthless if the site isn't useful. If the content is confusing, poorly constructed, or even just missing, your users are going to have a horrible experience. Karen McGrane suggests the solution was once much simpler. You'd determine your content, stick it into your design, and never worry about it again. With the web changing as drastically as it has over the past few years, content can n...
Seth Earley - SharePoint and the User Experience
September 08, 2012 07:59 - 23 minutes - 12.1 MBSharePoint is a powerful tool, but the complexity associated with it can leave users overwhelmed. Users trying to manage content and share information through SharePoint often experience frustration. Seeing where UX fits within SharePoint isn’t always clear.
Kim Goodwin - Designing Intuitive Experiences with Scenarios
September 07, 2012 16:55 - 36 minutes - 18.7 MBScenarios are a powerful tool in the design process. They focus on the user experience in its entirety, giving the reason a user is engaging with your product or service. Scenarios allow you to think about the gaps between the experiences. They are great for crossing organizational silos.
Nathan Curtis - Prototyping with HTML and CSS
August 30, 2012 08:06 - 32 minutes - 16.9 MBPrototyping is an effective way to communicate design ideas. Static PDFs, PSDs, and wireframes can help get your point across but aren’t dynamic. Usually, any necessary changes are logged away as to-dos. They’re then taken back, fixed, and presented again. Nathan Curtis and the team at EightShapes are prototyping with HTML and CSS more in their design process. They find that employing these techniques leads to greater efficiency.