For the longest time, making a great experience for the user was a business-strategy luxury item. A great product only had to work and ship. A great experience was a nice-to-have, not a requirement. Times have changed. The cost of delivering a product is no longer a barrier to entry. Quality is no longer a differentiator. What’s left? The user’s experience.

Jared Spool – Beyond the UX Tipping Point Live!

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Traditional marketing and communications often take the form of a one-way conversation. Things are put out into the market and it generally ends there. With the emergence of social media, a two-way conversation has also emerged. It leads to the opportunity for companies to sense what is happening in the market and respond to it.
Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden previously co-authored the book Lean UX  and in their latest, Sense & Respond, they investigate how companies can foster that two-way conversation. In particular, convincing companies that, no matter what industry they're in, they're software companies.
In this podcast, Jeff and Josh share some of the highlights from the book and their research. Our hosts, Adam Churchill and Jared Spool dig into those highlights.

Jeff Gothelf & Josh Seiden’s “Sense & Respond”

Art versus Science is the quintessential Left Brain/Right Brain cage match. But in reality, math factors into great works of art as much as developing a treatment plan for a patient could be considered the doctor's design.
Andrew Shipe is a developer at MEDITECH, a company that makes Health Records software. Through his research he found that medicine can sometimes be as much art as science, a fact that was getting lost in the cold, analytical research data. He discovered that telling stories helped to span that divide in understanding.
Kim Goodwin, Author of Designing for the Digital Age, joins us on this podcast to share her thoughts on Andrew's approach of using stories and how that is the first step down the road of scenario based research. Kim will also be teaching one of the full day workshops at UI22 this November 13-15 in Boston. For more information visit uiconf.com.

The Tension of Art and Science When Communicating Complex User Research

You can draw a direct line in the UX family tree from User Experience Design back to Human Computer Interaction. What if we could make the “computer” aspect of that interaction, feel less like a machine, and more like a human?
Robert Sens, the Lead Product Designer of the restaurant reservation app, Reserve, sought to create a conversational user interface to help users get seated at restaurants. They settled on implementing a chatbot to simulate the interaction of speaking to a reservationist.
Steph Hay, VP of Design for AI Experiences at Capital One joins us on this podcast to share her experiences in crafting conversational UIs and her insights into Reserve’s approach. Steph will also be teaching a full day workshop at UI22, November 13-15 in Boston on designing conversational UIs.

More Human than Human?: Designing a Conversational UI

According to Heraclitus, the only thing that remains constant is change. The internet itself has evolved exponentially over a relatively short amount of time. Few relics from the early days of the web remain, and those that have, have been forced to change.
Adam McClean is the SVP of Product at Dotdash. Dotdash was once About.com. The very same About.com that has been around for 21 years. Adam and his team were increasingly aware that the landscape around them was changing, and that they needed to evolve. They made the switch to a new brand, Dotdash, and a new process, to keep up with technological and market changes.
Dan Mall, who runs SuperFriendly out of Philadelphia, joins the podcast to share his views on the evolution of dotDash’s process in support of their new brand. Dan will also be teaching one of the daylong workshops at UI22 this November 13-15 in Boston, MA. He’ll show how to develop workflows for the multi-device world we live in.

About Face: How About.com Changed its Design Process and became Dotdash

Project management encompasses an important set of skills, such as communication, planning, and forecasting. But does someone need the title of project manager to actually do the work? 
In Brett Harned’s book Project Management for Humans, he makes the argument that project management is always needed on projects but the role itself is less important. You should focus on the skills in order to manage projects well.
In this podcast, Brett shares some of the highlights from his book. Our hosts, Adam Churchill and Jared Spool dig into those highlights, in particular, whether designers already possess the skills that project managers have.

Jared Spool – Beyond the UX Tipping Point Live!

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