Whitney grew up in New York City and was initially interested in Computer Science, loves writing but missed technology and discovered HCI at Carnegie Mellon. Whitney talks about core principles for all of the work we do, underscoring the need for UX practitioners to become better negotiators and persuaders; and to focus on helping the organization become better at identifying areas of opportunity for our customers.

Quotes

“…one of the core tenets of the HCI program at Carnegie Mellon is this mantra… ‘the user is not like me’. As I got to know other practitioners in the broader community, there are some philosophical similarities between us no matter how we approach the work or what our educational backgrounds are… I became fascinated with those principles [about which we all] agree… the core principles for all of the work we do …mobile, web [regardless of] the context…”

“Think about User Experience as the way in which an organization operates and have it being core to its ethos… understanding how to be a great negotiator and great persuader… we often lack confidence in selling those ideas to the higher-ups within our organization as well as to other departments who are not in the trenches with us everyday.”

“We need to have a hand in not only designing the product but in defining what the product is, so that really does make us product strategists in a lot of ways… [we] need to be involved in the process a lot earlier than many of us currently are… understand the business needs and be able to communicate with the product folks as well as executives in the organization.”

Whitney will be talking at UX Hong Kong 17 & 18 February 2012.

Notes

* Follow Whitney Hess on Twitter.
* Learn about others who will be presenting at the second UX Hong Kong conference.
* Learn about Whitney Hess.
* Learn about Design Principles: The Philosophy of UX
* Learn about HCI at Carnegie Mellon

Today on Radio Johnny Jeff Parks talks with the President and Managing Director at Adaptive Path, Brandon Schauer. Brandon discusses the skill sets required to be a manager in the UX space today and how this translates into success with the interdisciplinary teams that make up most organizations. Brandon also articulates the necessity to differentiate that of a UX thought leader and a UX manager, as well as some of the top trends that are emerging in this young field for designers interested in making this transition.

Quotes

“You have to realize that great UX designers don’t always end up making great UX managers. Some people’s career path is going to be about being the rock star designer… getting those 10,000 hours, getting to that expert level…other people, maybe they weren’t great UX designers but for some reason their brain really connects with UX management…”

“What I saw in 2011 was really a change to organizations realizing they needed a staff of people…it wasn’t staff of production or visual designers, it wasn’t a staff of coders… it was a staff of people who could actually do UX work. The mindset of many organization has changed from a UX team of one to a UX team of plenty…as soon as you have that you have a necessity to have managers.”

“One of the things I love doing is hosting events that are just targeted at people who manage user experience…there are a lot of conferences out there that help people around UX and what are the basic skill sets but not a lot where people can exchange ideas about what’s working for them and what’s not…like I said these people don’t have a mentor or someone who was in their position before…so the best thing we can do is provide a forum where they can talk to each other.

Notes

* Follow Brandon on Twitter @brandonschauer
* Learn about others who will be presenting at the MX conference this year.
* Leah Buley on Being a UX Team of One

Today on Radio Johnny Daniel Szuc speaks with Bas Raijmakers about his topics at UX Hong Kong 17 & 18 February 2012. Bas has a social science background and studies how people use media and technology from an ethnographic point of view. Bas talks about the importance of telling stories of the people we design for while integrating those experiences into the design processes. Bas believes that by focusing on the stories of those for whom we are designing at the start, we can lead teams to intelligent design choices throughout a project’s lifecycle.

Quotes

“It’s important for our field to learn from [other] projects and [take time to] reflect … and find ways to express what we learn as knowledge.”

“I feel… reflection and making should not be separate. While you are in the field or in the workshop, these thoughts about the value of the work we do, come up. These are reflections and come up because you are engaged in the work. Doing the work brings up great ideas and how important it is to engage with designers to come up with good reflections together.”

“… techniques, methods, and processes that are related to co-creation and participatory techniques are a way of getting beyond the borders of your own discipline and allow you to collaborate with people in other disciplines… it is here [where] I include the participants because they are experts of their own everyday life …”

Bas is from STBY and talks about the importance of telling stories of the people we design for everyday. He discusses how integrating those stories into the design processes allows us to stay focused on the experiences our users want; allowing the design team to create an experience that follows the stories shared.

Notes

* Follow Bas Raijmakers on Twitter @hellobas
* Learn about others who will be presenting at the second UX Hong Kong conference
* Learn about Bas Raijmakers
* Learn about the Global Design Research Network (Reach) -
* Learn about the Service Design Network
* Learn about This is Service Design Thinking: Basics – Tools – Cases
* Learn about the Design Adcademy Eindhoven

Today on Radio Johnny Daniel Szuc speaks with Geke van Dijk about her topics at UX Hong Kong 17 & 18 February 2012. Geke specializes, at STBY, in design research for service innovation. She talks about the move from lab based testing to up front research, the service economy, consistent customer journeys as well as the importance of focusing on empathy when designing for other people.

Quotes

“… we needed to go out and visit people in their places … where they were actually making use of the web sites and mobile apps … we noticed the stories we got … were much broader than just online usage … from the stories and tests we could help our clients much more in the early stages with the concept development by moving it earlier in development the process … but how does it fit in the wider customer journey? Working with design teams, we found the consumer insights we created in the research were very interesting… they always said if we would have known this earlier in the process we could have used it in the concept development … it was quite a deliberate move to do the research earlier on in the design process and go out of the lab into the field and have a wider and strategic view with the client teams as well.”

“Co-production at the moment of truth … when the customer meets that organisation … and in service design one of the key constructs is when that moment is co-created … your customers are constructing the service delivery themselves … you can’t really predict how people are using the services … you need to have an integrated network of services … you need [to understand] the way people are using [your products / services] is [not a fixed process].”

“People are in the service economy and they are using multiple channels to get into touch with organisations … but on the inside of the companies (the service providers) that’s still a big struggle … many organisations are still organised as silos … you have the internet dept, call centre, marketing dept … sometimes they are even competitive with the KPI’s between each other… customers want to move seamlessly from one channel to another and have a consistent customer journey.”

Geke specializes in design research for service innovation. She talks about the move from lab based testing to up front research, the service economy, consistent customer journeys as well as the importance of focusing on empathy when designing for other people.

Notes

* Follow Geke on Twitter @hellogeke
* Learn about others who will be presenting at the second UX Hong Kong conference
* Learn about Geke van Dijk
* Learn about the Global Design Research Network (Reach) –
* Learn about the Service Design Network
* Learn about This is Service Design Thinking: Basics – Tools – Cases

Today on Radio Johnny Daniel Szuc speaks with Whitney Quesenbery about her topics at UX Hong Kong 17 & 18 February 2012. Whitney talks about the importance of storytelling, choosing the right UX method towards finding answers, and as we look forward, practitioner knowledge about both design and technology is critical. Whitney also talks about the trend of creating for the “social good” and how appreciating this movement can strengthen our approach to design.

Quotes

“Storytelling is a direct line from my work in theatre … understanding how we are all telling each other stories, when we try to understand someone who uses the products we make, we are trying to envision the story that they are telling themselves, what is the scenario that they are in, why are they interacting with us at all, and how can we create products that make that story a wonderful, easy, good story … as opposed to a bad, awful, difficulty, barrier filled story.

… all of a sudden we are really thinking about people situated in their lives and how the things we make fit into that life rather than how the person gets jammed into the software.

Over the years we have a pretty rich set of tools, how we move through the process … each of those techniques is really an answer … the answer needs to be modified to fit that new question … so it’s about understanding what question you are answering and then being able to think really hard about the right way to get that answer.

Summary

Whitney Quesenbery discusses the importance of storytelling in making products, how to choose the right UX method in projects, how practitioner knowledge about design and technology (a hybrid) is becoming important and how we should all continue to focus on people when designing products & services.

Notes

* Follow Whitney Quesenberry @whitneyq on Twitter
* Learn more about Whitney Quesenberry
* Learn about

Today on Radio Johnny Daniel Szuc speaks with Tomer Sharon from Google, who grew up in Tel Aviv Israel, studied at Bentley in the USA, has been in UX for about 12-13 years and focuses on research including past work at Checkpoint software technologies in Israel and now based in New York working as a Design Researcher at Google. Tomer will be speaking about one of the biggest challenges for UX practitioners which is how to persuade stakeholders to do and act on research.

Quotes

“Getting stakeholder buy in for UX research projects … people learn how to do research, but the soft skills are something that are hard, dealing with stakeholders who will not listen or won’t co-operate is hard”

Important to develop empathy towards your stakeholders as you do for your users. Learn as much as you can about the people you are dealing with, what bothers them, what is important for them, you will be surprised that UX is not the centre of the world … there are other things that are important and if they ignore you, there is probably a good reason for that … not always … empathy is one thing, humility is another thing … you are not always right, I learn that everyday.

one topic I see is called product personality and seen recent example of this with Apple’s Siri … use Siri not for completing tasks but asking it sill questions and just for fun … they like its personality, having a product personality means that a product communicates some human personality attributes that I as a user fit within the right context … its hard to do right.

Summary

Tomer will be speaking about one of the biggest challenges for UX practitioners which is how to persuade stakeholders to do and act on research. How to get them involved from the moment you start thinking about a research project, knowing your stakeholders and involving planting seeds. He is looking forward to the good food in Hong Kong and meeting the local UX community to understand the different angles and aspects of what is important for people in other parts of the world.

Notes

* Follow Tomer Sharon @tsharon on Twitter
* Follow UX Hong Kong @uxhk on Twitter
* Learn about others who will be presenting at the second UX Hong Kong conference.
* UX in Asia
* Learn about Tomer Sharon’s new book “It’s our research”

Today on Radio Johnny Daniel Szuc speaks with Lou Rosenfeld about his upcoming talk and workshop at UX Hong Kong 17 & 18 February 2012. Lou talks about how he entered UXD, his focus today around topics like the silos of user research, site search analytics and how to look at experiences holistically.

Listen to the Show

Show Time: 20 minutes 55 seconds

Quotes

so may silos of user research going on … put the data together … to achieve true insight … companies over spending and under delivering with their research budgets today … look at how they can put it together in new ways rather than spending more money on more siloed research …

site search analytics, what people search on your local site search engine … it bridges a bunch of different research methods … its data, analytics data on one hand … lots of it … its behavioural, but its also highly semantic and descriptive, its people asking you in their own words what they want from you and your site, its a great opportunity to study if you are delivering.

people are studying Apple more seriously … rising awareness of Service Design, its been happening anyway … more and more people are trying to figure out how to plug things together in a holistic integrated way across channels and lines of business.

Summary

Lou discusses getting more value from organisational research, site search analytics and what this means for business, holistic understanding and important skills he is seeing in younger practitioners and what he is looking forward to in Hong Kong including the famous 962 bus and his enjoyment and search of “wontons”.

Notes

* Follow Lou Rosenfeld @louisrosenfeld on Twitter.
* Learn about others who will be presenting at the second UX Hong Kong conference.
* Learn about Lou Rosenfeld and Rosenfeld Media
* Also … Daniel Szuc and Jo Wong write about the importance of designing for change

Today on Radio Johnny, Adaptive Path’s Teresa Brazen talks with the Mark Rothman, Executive Director at the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Mark discusses the creative process of designing this new building, including: how they chose to deliver this challenging content, their curatorial philosophy, and how visitors are engaging with the rich technology that drives their visit.

Quotes

The whole idea of what the holocaust represents, an industrialized attempt to wipe out an entire group of people, or multiple groups of people, should be hard to understand. It should be hard for us to wrap our heads around.

What does the human mind need to assimilate information, and, even more, to connect with it emotionally? We are 90% emotional thinkers. I’m totally convinced of that, there is research that shows that. We like to think we can rationally make decisions about what car we are going to drive, and frankly the partner we marry. We like to think we made a rational choice, but in a recent book David Brooks, (author of) The Social Animal, showed really powerfully, a lot of those choices were made in the first 30 seconds, totally subconsciously, before we even knew what was going on.

Just because I walk by a staged set that suggests a (Jewish) ghetto, doesn’t mean I can ever understand what it’s like to be in a ghetto.

I knew that if we were going to do anything with technology, I don’t care if we just had one single television screen, we were going to have to build it to the top of the aesthetic and technological curve, just to be able to have our voice heard in what is, in the 21t century, a video and technology intense environment.

Summary

The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust is the oldest such museum in the United States. Established in 1961 by a group of Holocaust survivors, the museum lost its home in 1994 due to an earthquake. For years, the organization moved its exhibit around, and in 2010, it established a permanent home in Pan Pacific Park.

Mark discusses the challenges of exhibiting content in a way that does not subvert emotional connection, but personalizes and makes relevant this tragic part of our past.

Touchscreens

Detail of Touch Table

Notes

* Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust
* Mark Rothman’s blog
* Recommended reading: The Social Animal by David Brooks
* See more images of the Holocaust Museum on the Tea With Teresa Blog

—-

Images courtesy of Teresa Brazen

Today on Radio Johnny, Jeff Parks talks with Kip Voytek about the ideas he shared at his recent presentation from Ignite New York. Kip suggests that we don’t unplug entirely from our digital lives, but instead discusses strategies for how we can change our own behavior and the way we consume and share information online.

Quotes

The challenge that I was setting for myself was finding balance without unplugging… the question for me was how do I find that balance within digital? It still seemed like the digital time that I was putting in I wasn’t getting that much out of – I was still getting a lot of links, a lot of cool stuff, a lot of tweet material but I wasn’t getting that kind of fulfillment. It was the balance in my digital life that I was after!

I think people who are reacting against technology or against the effects of technology… are mistaking the technology for the intention and the habits that we form.

It’s very easy on the web to keep track of the cool links, to turn something into a tweet, to build your brand…but to actually to try and harness it to get you knowledge deeper than Wikipedia gives you, to actually take on new things, that’s pretty cool to me!

Summary

Kip discusses three essential areas related to this talk at Ignite, including: the ability to build interior objects (soul objects); looking for more, not the next thing; and the desire to seek out voices rather than muddling through countless mailing lists in the digital world.

During his talk Kip quoted Emerson who stated “This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.” Unplugging is not the answer! Changing our own online behavior and understanding how to best engage with specific technologies is key when seeking both balance and deeper meaning in our digital lives.

Show Notes

* Kip’s Ignite NYC talk Shallows, Echos, and Inner Space
* Recommended reading: Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age
* Recommended reading: The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
* Recommended reading: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing To Our Brains
* FireFox plug-in Track Me Not

Today on Radio Johnny, Jeff Parks talks with Steve Krug about his experiences and insights doing usability testing for over 20 years for a variety of clients such as Apple, Lexus, NPR, Bloomberg and many others.

Steve shares how people are using websites today, the largest issues facing most organizations when trying to design great experiences, encouraging all website owners to do some form of usability testing once a month – and no, this shouldn’t break the bank!

Quotes

The people who are creating the site say… ‘Well everyone knows what we do’… because it’s obvious to them…As a result they still think like back in the beginning of the web – there’s no point in using a lot of space to explain that to people – not realizing that a lot of people who are coming [to their site] are either in the dark about what they do, or worse, form an incorrect conclusion based on assumptions about what they do.

When we’re building the sites we tend to think people are going to be much more careful and measured in using them than they actually are. That’s one of the nice things about usability testing… the whole team gets to watch people use the site and it dawns on them that people are actually kind of sloppy in the use of what we’re building so we better make sure that it is robust so they don’t fall through the cracks.

I try to keep people very far away from the word ‘opinions’ because it’s the difference between focus groups, where you’re showing people and asking their opinions about it, and usability testing where you’re actually having them use it and seeing where they are having problems.

Summary

Steve discusses how usability testing on a regular basis can illustrate where users have to “muddle” through in areas that should flow, and the necessity to omit needless words from every page of your site. In addition Steve believes that even to this day one of the largest issues preventing clarity and a great experience is an organization’s inability to clearly explain what it is they do, to first time visitors.

Steve also discusses the need to remain neutral when running usability tests. He believes that moderators should communicate more like a counselor not providing cues or hints but asking them to talk out loud and provide feedback in their own words, and not that of the moderator.

Show Notes

Steve’s Blog
Forum for discussing do-it-yourself testing
Book page for Rocket Surgery Made Easy
Free downloadable scripts, forms, and checklists from Rocket Surgery Made Easy
Video of a demo usability test
Steve’s upcoming usability testing workshops in Seattle and London