In this episode, I am joined by special guest, Jared Spool! We are talking about transformational UX research and design strategies. We cover a lot of actionable insights and share a few laughs too. You will learn about how to evaluate the readiness and urgency required to make a maximum strategic UX impact within organizations, what actual leadership means, and how to improve future experiences with research-led, human-centric practices and more.

If you and your design/product teams need weekly motivation and resources, join the Leaders of Awesomeness community or sign the team up for a deeper intensive. Lift up your career and your organization with an amazing knowledge base and uniquely thoughtful teacher, Jared Spool.

Hey, everybody, it’s Cathi Bosco from rethink.fm the forward-thinking podcast about experience design. Join me and special guests to discuss effective design, technology, and the intersection of helping people and entrepreneurship. From user experience research to product roadmaps. We’ve got you covered. The big news today is that I will officially be taking over the rethink.fm podcast, founded by Jackie D’Elia and then co-hosted by Jackie, Monique Dubbelman, and myself. Moving forward, I will be conducting one-on-one interviews with experienced professionals to gain insights into their practices, their projects, and their teams. Let’s face it, design is a team sport, technology and user needs are continuously evolving and we can learn a lot from each other’s experiences along the way. Since this episode is a transition episode each of us will answer a few questions and at the end of the podcast, I’ll give some definitive insights into where we’re headed moving forward. I hope you’ll enjoy this episode. Thank you for joining. What does UX mean to you today, compared to early in your career?

It’s been a while, but in this episode, we have a guest! And what a guest: Rian Rietveld, accessibility specialist at Level Level is joining us to talk about accessibility. We talk about the problem with accessibility overlays, educating people, and how we can help more people develop, design, and create content in a way it’s accessible for everyone. Big take away: make it about themselves.

Sometimes, product teams or clients can be too focused on output or features. This is a problem, because you can end up becoming a feature factory, without knowing if the user really benefits from these new features.

If you want to avoid endless iterations of a design with clients or developers, it’s time to start focusing on outcome instead of output. In this episode, we discuss our experience with clients or teams focusing too much on output.

In this episode, we discuss our learnings and experience from working as a team, after decades of working solo. What are the pro’s & cons? What tools do we use to collaborate online and remote?

In episode 31, Cathi, Jackie & Monique talk about user-centered design practices. This podcast is based on the talk Cathi did for the GoDaddy online event Expand 2021. Listen in and learn from our mistakes.

YouTube recording of Cathi’s talk for GoDaddy’s online event Expand 2021

In episode 30, Cathi, Jackie & Monique discuss designer-isms. As designers, we tend to use too much jargon. This episode is based on the article we wrote for UXATT (link below), where we wrote about 15 design terms. We talk about why you should avoid jargon. And give suggestions on how you could speak about the same thing in plain language. And yes, we need to get better at it too.

In episode 29, Cathi, Jackie & Monique discuss the value of UX research. Many designers, including larger agencies, have difficulties ‘squeezing’ user research into a project, because clients prefer to immediately jump to the visual part of design. But what is the value of UX research?

In episode 28, Cathi, Jackie & Monique talk about how you can approach usability on digital products in a systematic way. We also introduce and explain our usability model, a pyramid that is based on the foundation of performance, accessibility and security. Listen now or read the transcript in the show notes to learn more.

In episode 27, Cathi, Jackie & Monique talk about Web Stories for WordPress. Google recently released this plugin in Beta. With Web Stories, you can create visually immersive and engaging content. In this podcast, we look at the plugin from a design perspective. Who can benefit from this way of publishing content? What does it mean for accessibility? How is the overall editing experience? And why should you use this open source alternative, rather than use what’s already out there, like Instagram Stories? We answer all these questions and more in this episode of the Rethink.fm podcast.

Other ways to publish stories in the include: Web Stories, Tapable HQ, Make Stories, Ampstor, Visual Stories