Margot Bloomstein is the principal of Appropriate, Inc., a brand and content strategy consultancy. Over a twenty year career, she has consulted in a wide range of industries. Margot is the author of Content Strategy at Work and of a new book, Trustworthy: How the Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge the Trust Gap, which is the subject of our conversation today.

Show notes

• Appropriate, Inc.
• @mbloomstein on Twitter
• Timberland
• Publicis Sapient
• Trustworthy: How The Smartest Brands Beat Cynicism and Bridge The Trust Gap by Margot Bloomstein
• Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them by Ethan Zuckerman
• Gartner
• Edelman
• Crutchfield
• gov.uk
• Mailchimp
• Black Lives Matter
• Banana Republic
• Indiebound
• BookShop.org

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

Hà Phan is the Director of Discovery for Pluralsight, an e-learning platform. Before becoming a product leader, she was a principal UX designer at GoPro. In this conversation, we discuss Hà’s journey from UX design to product leadership.

Show notes

• @hpdailyrant on Twitter
• Pluralsight
• GoPro
•  The Double Diamond

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

Kourosh Dini is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and productivity expert. He is the author of an excellent book on how to take smart notes using DEVONthink, a personal information management tool. In this conversation, we discuss smart note-taking and how DEVONthink can help us work more effectively.

Show notes

• Kourosh Dini
• Being Productive
• Taking Smart Notes with DEVONthink by Kourosh Dini
• How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens
• DEVONthink
• Zettelkasten
• Niklas Luhmann
• Evernote
• Notion
• Roam Research
•  macOS Finder
• Craft
• Markdown
• BBEdit
• iA Writer
• Typora
• Scrivener
• Keynote
• Ulysses
• OmniFocus

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

Jason Ulaszek is an experience designer, activist, entrepreneur, and educator. He is the founder of Inzovu, a design collective, and UX for Good, a nonprofit that aims to provide elegant solutions to messy problems. In this conversation, we discuss Jason's work on just such a problem: helping Rwandans heal after their 1994 genocide.

Show notes

• Jason Ulaszek on LinkedIn
• @webbit on Twitter
• Inzovu
• UX for Good
• DePaul University
• Aegis Trust
• The Kigali Genocide Memorial
• The Inzovu Curve
• Tania Singer
• Ubumuntu

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

Grace Lau is an information architect and user experience designer based in the Greater Los Angeles area. She’s the co-president of World IA Day and one of the program chairs of the 2021 IA Conference. In this conversation, we discuss those professional community events, and why you should participate.

Listen to the show

Download episode 52

Show notes

• Grace Lau
• @lauggh on Twitter
• Grace G. Lau on LinkedIn
• My Disney Experience
• UCLA
• ASIS&T
• ALA
• SLA
• The Los Angeles User Experience Meetup
• World IA Day
• San Gabriel Valley UX Meetup
• The Information Architecture Conference
• Vito
• Discord

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

Cheryl Platz is an accomplished interaction designer who has designed multimodal experiences for Amazon, Microsoft, the Walt Disney Company and more. The focus of our conversation is her new book on the subject, Design Beyond Devices.

Show notes

• Cheryl Platz
• Ideaplatz
• Cheryl on Twitter
• Ideaplatz on Twitter
• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
• Kinect
• Xbox
• Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences by Cheryl Platz
• Nintendo DS
• Wacom tablets
• Siri
• Cortana
• Amazon Echo
• Echo Show
• Improvisational theater
• Unexpected Productions
• The Gum Wall
• Interaction 21 conference
• Wizard of Oz research
• HomePod
• Apple Music
• Amazon Fire TV
• Star Trek
• Walt Disney Imagineering
• Epic Systems

Disclosure: I received Cheryl's book for free as a previous Rosenfeld Media/Two Waves author.

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is Brian Breslin. Brian is a tech entrepreneur, educator, and community builder based in Miami. He’s the director of The Launch Pad, the entrepreneurship center at the University of Miami, and founder of Refresh Miami, a non-profit organization dedicated to growing South Florida’s tech and startup ecosystem. In this conversation, we focus on community-building, especially during this time when geographic boundaries are becoming blurred.

Listen to the show

 Download episode 50

Show notes

• Brian Breslin
• @BrianBreslin on Twitter
• Refresh Miami
• Google Groups
• LISTSERV
• Meetup
• Mailchimp
• Constant Contact
• Miami Herald
• Magic Leap
• REEF Technology
• Airtable
• Zapier
• Tony Hsieh
• Wealthfront
•  Venmo
• Metcalfe’s law

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commissions for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is Phillip Hunter. Phillip is a strategy and innovation consultant focused on conversational systems. He has a long trajectory working on such systems; among other roles, he was head of user experience for Amazon Alexa Skills. In this conversation, we focus on conversation itself, and how to design systems that converse.

Listen to the show

 Download episode 49

Show notes

• Phillip Hunter on LinkedIn
• Phillip Hunter on Twitter
• Conversational Collaborative AI Services (Phillip’s consultancy)
• Brenda Laurel
• Don Norman
• Google Assistant
• Amazon Alexa
• HomePod
• Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCullough
• Wizard-of-Oz testing
• Adobe XD
• Voiceflow
• Botmock
• Google Dialogflow CX
• Alexa Skills Kit
• How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation by N.J. Enfield

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commissions for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is Caroline Crampton. Caroline is a freelance writer and podcaster. Among other things, she edits The Listener, a daily newsletter that curates the best podcasts. In this conversation, we focus on Caroline’s curation workflow.

Listen to the full conversation

 Download episode 48

Show notes

• Caroline Crampton
• The Way to the Sea: The Forgotten Histories of the Thames Estuary by Caroline Crampton
• Shedunnit (Caroline’s podcast)
• Hot Pod newsletter
• Serial podcast
• The Listener newsletter
• The Browser
• Lindelani Mbatha
• Listen Notes
• RSS
• NewsBlur
• Apple Podcasts
• Pocket Casts
• Overcast
• Radio Atlas
• Google Keep
• Google Pixel
•  Google Recorder
• Google Drive
• The Joe Rogan Experience

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commissions for purchases made through these links.

My guest today is Peter Morville. Peter is a pioneer in the discipline of information architecture. Among many other distinctions, he co-authored with Lou Rosenfeld Information Architecture for the World-Wide Web, the classic O’Reilly “polar bear” book on the subject. This is Peter’s second appearance on The Informed Life podcast. I asked him back because I wanted to learn more about his recent call for practitioners to emancipate information architecture.

Listen to the full conversation

 Download episode 47

Show notes

• Peter Morville on Twitter
• Semantic Studios
• Intertwingled.org
• Information Architecture: for the Web and Beyond, by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango
•  The Informed Life episode 10: Peter Morville on Seductive Information
• Emancipating Information Architecture by Peter Morville
• Don’t Think of an Elephant! by George Lakoff
• Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star
• Pema Chödrön

Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commissions for purchases made through these links.