Love your Mac? Find your vacuum cleaner cumbersome? Despair at the booking system of your local leisure center? User experience design (or lack of) plays a significant part in whether you love or loathe the products and services you interact with.    This week on the Good Practice podcast, Gemma and Ross D talk to Rhys Pendred, Emerald Work's Lead UX designer. We focussed on the what, why and how of user experience, discussing: 

• What UX is 
• UX fundamental principles 
• How we might think about and improve the UX of our products / learning. 

  Show notes  For more from us, including access to our back catalogue of podcasts, visit emeraldworks.com. There, you'll also find details of our award winning performance support toolkit, our off-the-shelf e-learning, and our custom work. 

Rhys mentioned Jacob Neilson's "10 Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design". This article can be found online at https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/ 

If you'd like to find out more about UX in learning design, we would recommend listening to our previous podcast "Design thinking for instructional design" with Connie Malamed. You can find it here https://podcast.goodpractice.com/78-design-thinking-for-ld 

Rhys talked about Eddie Van Halen's quirky, brown M&Ms stipulation. This is mentioned in The Independent's Eddie Van Halen obituary. You can read the obituary at https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/music/obituary-eddie-van-halen-39608991.html 

Gemma referred to a piece of research on muscle loading. It was mentioned in Tom Goom's video "What muscles should runners strengthen". The video is found online at https://www.running-physio.com/muscles/ 

   Connect with our speakers  If you'd like to share your thoughts on this episode, connect with our speakers on Twitter / LinkedIn: 

• Gemma Towersey @gemmatowersey 
• Ross Dickie @RossDickieEW 
• Rhys Pendred linkedin.com/in/rhys-pendred