UIE Brain Sparks
By Jared M. Spool and User Interface Engineering (UIE)
To listen to an audio podcast, mouse over the title and click Play. Open iTunes to download and subscribe to podcasts.
Podcast Description
The latest insights from User Interface Engineering on the world of design. Shows include the SpoolCast, Userability and Usability Tools Podcast.
| Name | Description | Released | Price | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
1 |
Brian Suda – Designing with Data | A data visualization, when done well, can be an incredibly powerful way to communicate information. It ultimately boils down to the choices you make in how to design and present the data. If you make the wrong choice you can run the risk of not accurately displaying the data or struggling to effectively tell its story. | 5/14/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
2 |
Steph Hay – Writing Content for Usability | Content is everywhere. With the amount of content users are confronted with everyday it can be challenging to garner their attention. Compounding this problem is the fact that designers and developers are often tasked with writing content that end users see. This can be an intimidating prospect if you’re unaccustomed to crafting copy. | 4/20/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
3 |
Caroline Jarrett – Designing Effective Surveys | Getting data from your users is a fundamental part of creating great user experiences. Surveys are a great way to get feedback and learn about your users. The problem is everyone has sat through a painful, monotonous survey that asked a series of frustrating and seemingly pointless questions. As with anything in UX, if your users sense they’re in for a painful experience they simply won’t engage with your survey. | 4/6/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
4 |
Hagan Rivers – Designing Dashboards | A dashboard is often the first screen that a user sees in your UI. The importance of visual design and data visualizations is high. But good looks aside, the dashboard has to meet the users’ needs. Beautiful dashboards are futile if the presented information isn't useful to the user to accomplish their tasks. | 3/30/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
5 |
Hugh Beyer – Getting Started with UX Inside Agile Development | Change is always an interruption. For those switching to an Agile process, the transition doesn’t always go so smoothly. Suddenly, with things moving so quickly, the role of UX gets lost in the shuffle. User experience is often disregarded in Agile development. | 3/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
6 |
Noah Iliinsky – Telling the Right Story with Data Visualizations A Virtual Seminar Follow-up | The right data can be more effective than words when it comes to telling a story. Even if you have the data, you have to present it in the correct manner. Choosing the right axes, colors and placement are all a big part of putting together a great visualization. Noah Iliinsky demonstrates what goes into creating an effective visualization. | 3/16/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
7 |
Luke Wroblewski – Examining Mobile User Input | Touch screen devices are commonplace. It's now expected that your mobile experience work as well as, if not better than, your desktop experience. With faster connection speeds, cameras, GPS, gyroscopes, and accelerometers, we can deliver information to users in new ways. But we can also receive information from them as well. | 3/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
8 |
James Robertson – Innovative Mobile Intranet Design | With mobile, you simply can't have as much content on your pages as you do on the desktop. Intranet access within enterprises is crucial and accessing it with mobile devices is beneficial. However, the vast amount of pages and content is cumbersome and impractical for a mobile setting. James Robertson asks, what are the few essential things users need while they are away from their desks? | 3/2/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
9 |
Jeff Gothelf – Lean UX: Integrating Design into Agile | Lean UX can eliminate the contractual obligations inherent with specification documents and other deliverables. Designers and developers find it frustrating to put so much effort into a project then not see it ship at the end. Using the Lean UX process, you’re constantly validating your designs, especially early in the process. This motivates the team to work towards the same end goal. | 2/24/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
10 |
Anders Ramsay – Designing with Agile A Virtual Seminar Follow-up | There's a belief that user experience insight is lacking in Agile development. Trying to shoehorn UX practices into an Agile process results in a lot of frustration. Often, developers build stuff faster than the designers can design it. The whole process often focuses on the delivery more than the quality of the experience. Anders Ramsay believes that UX and Agile can coexist. | 2/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
11 |
Dave McFarland – JQuery for Agile Prototyping | Technologies are often misunderstood at their outset. This misunderstanding leads to a lack of adoption. This lack of adoption leads to the technology not reaching it’s full potential or not being utilized in useful ways. This is essentially what happened to JavaScript. Its detractors said it wasn’t a real programming language, and it’s capabilities were ignored. Dave McFarland notes that Google’s use of JavaScript in Google Maps makes a lot of people take notice. | 2/17/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
12 |
Rachel Hinman – Creating Great Mobile User Experiences | Mobile is greatly influencing the user experience community. It’s challenging traditional approaches to design, but also bringing with it a host of new opportunities. Being a user experience practitioner in this changing environment is a bit scary. Yet coupling existing skill sets with the constraints of designing in the mobile space makes for an exciting world full of possibility. | 2/10/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
13 |
Josh Clark – Buttons Are a Hack A Virtual Seminar Follow-up | Touchscreen devices give you the ability to directly manipulate content. This allows designers to create interfaces where the content itself is the control. This lessens the need for buttons and can reduce the level of complexity within your design. The problem is making the user aware of the availability of gestures in your design. Gestures, especially multi-touch gestures, are powerful control mechanisms but useless if the users aren't aware of them. | 2/9/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
14 |
Lou Rosenfeld – 8 Better Practices for Great Information Architecture A Virtual Seminar Follow-up | The goal of any site is for the right audience to find the right information. But beyond your actual content there are many things that can cause findability issues. These tend to be unanswered questions about your primary audience and whether or not you’re satisfying the need of that audience. Good information architecture can help guide your design decisions so that your users can effectively engage with your content. | 2/3/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
15 |
Noah Iliinsky – The Power of Data Visualizations | A common trap in designing data visualizations is focusing on all the different ways to represent the data, rather than the questions that the data should answer. The presentation of a data set is pointless if it’s not useful, usable, or if people can’t understand it. With so much data to choose from how do you keep the goal of the visualization in mind? How are you sure you’re telling the right story? | 1/27/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
16 |
Jeff Gothelf – Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business A Virtual Seminar Follow-up | The goal of Lean UX is to take the focus of user-centered design off of documentation and put it squarely on the experience. The way to do this is to view any design idea as a hypothesis. With a focus on the experience, you can validate or invalidate this hypothesis much quicker. The sooner you reach this validation, the sooner you can focus on designing and building the correct solution. | 1/20/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
17 |
Anders Ramsay – Applying Agile Values to UX | The Agile development process is accused often of being too focused on delivery over the user experience. But that’s not to say that Agile is the bane of UX. Anders Ramsay believes it’s important to distinguish between Agile methods and Agile values. Many, such as fast prototyping and shared understanding are also valuable in the user experience world. | 1/11/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
18 |
Josh Clark – Discoverability in Designing for Touch | While the traditional “mouse and cursor” interfaces are still in use, many of us are becoming familiar with touch-based interactions. The power and capabilities of mobile and tablet devices is growing. Often, these devices are the more convenient alternative for users to access your content. But beyond accessing your information, how are they interacting with your design? | 1/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
19 |
Richard Rutter – JQuery for UX Designers | A designer can never have too many tools and methods for creating their designs. Many times conveying interactions in a static wireframe is difficult. So designers have turned to HTML and CSS to create wireframes and prototypes to provide a richer interaction. JQuery can also be thrown into the mix to further this process along. | 1/5/12 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
20 |
Jeff Gothelf – Understanding Lean UX | The term Lean UX is bandied about quite a bit these days. Along with it, there seems to be some confusion as to whether this is just a buzzword, a new way of working, or simply a new description for what people in the UX realm already do. Jeff Gothelf of The Ladders is a champion of Lean UX, so Jared Spool sat down with him to find out what Lean UX was all about. | 12/1/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
21 |
Lou Rosenfeld – Beyond User Research Live! | UX professionals have made a lot of progress in large organizations. Companies realize the importance of connecting with their users more and more. User research is becoming firmly rooted in many organizations as companies try to produce better products and services for their users. But user research itself can be narrow in focus and full of biases. Lou Rosenfeld of Rosenfeld Media, suggests that by breaking down the silos that exist between other research practices, we can create a complementary research experience. This will produce even better analysis and therefore, better products as a whole. | 10/28/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
22 |
Dave Gray – Gamestorming Live! | Gamestorming can allow collaboration to happen. It quickly gets a lot of people working together, sharing ideas, and getting creative. Words may be tricky because you're not certain if someone has interpreted what you’ve said the way you meant it. The beauty of Gamestorming is it gets people to think visually and physically express their thoughts and ideas on paper. | 10/14/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
23 |
Jeff Patton – Story Mapping for UX Practitioners: Tying Agile and UX Together | Story mapping is a way to build a model of user experiences. More than that, in the Agile context, it allows you to tactically plan for what should go into each release. It is a way to get everyone on the team thinking and talking about user experience. Getting people into a discussion mode starts to create a very collaborative environment. Jeff discusses how to create a story map and how it fits into the Agile process. | 10/7/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
24 |
Luke Wroblewski – Navigating the Mobile Landscape | Mobile is the “hot topic” these days. It’s increasingly at the front of designers’ minds. In a world where the power and capabilities of the device in your pocket are so great, the possibilities become somewhat astounding. The mobile landscape is changing so rapidly that it makes developing a formal strategy to “figure mobile out” all but impossible. Luke discusses how taking advantage of the market as it is today and the capabilities of these devices can lead to the refinement and evolution of your product. | 10/5/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
25 |
Hagan Rivers – Simplifying Complex Applications | It’s easy for applications to get overcomplicated and bogged down with data - especially in an enterprise setting. It’s hard to keep track of so many different things. When dashboards and widgets are employed, the goal is to make your life easier, but often that’s not the result. The solution - simplifying these applications for specific use cases and giving the right people the right information they need for their given task. Hagan Rivers spends her time meeting with teams to show them exactly what they need to do to streamline these complex applications. | 9/29/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
26 |
Bill Scott – Design Patterns for Multiple Platforms | As we use a multitude of devices to access the same content, we expect a similar experience across platforms. If you have a great user experience on the desktop, it would be easy to rationalize that your mobile experience, for example, shouldn’t be painful. User experience professionals now need to consider how and where their applications and content are being accessed more than ever before. Developing rich interactions across all of these platforms can be a daunting task. Bill Scott discusses how employing design patterns can help ensure that your users have a great experience wherever they use your product. | 9/16/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
27 |
Margot Bloomstein – Combining Curation with Your Content Strategy | With the amount of content coming at you from all sides, it can be difficult to make sense of it all and present it in a logical fashion. Curation allows you to create order out of all the chaos. Borrowed from the world of museums, curating your content allows you to form a narrative, showing your users what they can and should do with your content. Margot showcases lessons she has adopted from museum curators. She shows what content strategists take from these lessons and apply to their practice. | 9/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
28 |
Brandon Schauer – Getting to Good Design, Faster | Everybody strives to arrive at the end of a project with a great design. But often times the “brilliant idea” isn’t easy to communicate and takes a long time to develop. Brandon Schauer believes that you can develop techniques to help this communication, arriving at good design in shorter amounts of time. By putting your ideas on paper and post-its, and getting everyone participating, you create a collaborative environment that allows these ideas to grow and develop. | 9/9/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
29 |
Cennydd Bowles – UX Design when Time, Money, and Support is Limited | Developing a good set of fundamentals is key to successful user experience design. But if you work for an organization that doesn’t recognize the importance of design, just possessing the skills isn’t enough. It will prove difficult for you to change the company’s culture if they view UX as this huge, disruptive endeavor. Cennydd believes that you can take a lightweight approach to introducing user experience without people realizing that you’re actually doing it. | 8/31/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
30 |
Steve Portigal – Immersive Field Research Techniques | You can’t ask people what they want. They can’t tell you. The answer is almost always narrow in focus, concerned with the here and now rather than the future. How do you get them to give you the observations you need to design what they will want? Conducting field research to actually learn about your users can lead to innovative new ideas. Steve knows that going out into the field provides real opportunities to see what the world surrounding your product is like. | 8/25/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
31 |
Kevin Hoffman – Facilitating Project Kickoffs | A good starting point is crucial. It sets the tone for everything that comes after. All too often, projects are unsuccessful or labor through growing pains because the importance of this starting point was overlooked. When done right, the kickoff to a project will leave the team energized, inspired, and engaged. Kevin discusses that kickoff meetings are an important time to identify business strategy as well as company culture and the risks associated with the project. | 8/19/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
32 |
Stephanie Sullivan Rewis and Greg Rewis – What Designers Need to Know About HTML5 and CSS3 | The introduction of CSS3 and HTML5 brought with it a host of new capabilities. With most modern browsers supporting CSS3 and HTML5, implementing them into your designs is becoming easier. Understanding the things that are now possible with these new standards can help you create better designs more efficiently and effectively than ever before. Stephanie and Greg discuss what the introduction of HTML5 and CSS3 means for designers and developers, and what can be accomplished today by putting it into practice. | 8/12/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
33 |
Kim Goodwin – Developing Effective Scenarios | Combining compelling storytelling with research data can help you craft realistic scenarios to guide your design process. Getting to know the specific needs of your users will allow you to address any potential problems they may have. As a consultant, Kim Goodwin uses her experience and expertise in working with teams to develop effective scenarios. In this podcast, Kim discusses the role that scenarios play in the design process with Jared Spool. | 8/5/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
34 |
Dan Rubin – CSS3 for Everyone | Incorporating CSS3 into your designs allows you to create innovative designs with less code and reliance on images. The level of compatibility with many of the browser options out there is already impressive and it continues to grow. Taking advantage of the new CSS3 features helps to shift heavier visual elements to the browser itself. Dan discusses examples and tips in this podcast. | 7/28/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
35 |
Kim Goodwin – Designing with Scenarios: Putting Personas to Work | Storytelling is a natural form of expression. We’ve all been telling stories from a very young age. Scenarios are the stories that drive design decisions. They put the design into the context of how and why the user will interact with it. Kim Goodwin uses her immense experience to outline the relationship between personas and scenarios and how to bring them into your design process. | 6/24/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
36 |
Nathan Curtis – From PDFs to HTML Prototypes | Prototypes help, be they paper, wireframes or PDFs, to exhibit a design idea. They allow you to communicate your idea visually and test aspects of the design. As effective as they are, they have their limitations. Nathan Curtis of EightShapes uses HTML prototypes in his team’s design process. Using HTML, they test functionality and interactions in ways that are impossible while using static PDFs. | 6/3/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
37 |
Luke Wroblewski – Designing Mobile Web Experiences Live! | Mobile design is becoming more important everyday. As the technology and capabilities get better so does the users’ experience. Taking advantage of this technology affords you to opportunity to create experiences that your users have only dreamed of. Luke discusses the capabilities of mobile devices, new usage, and the future possibilities. | 5/12/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
38 |
Jared Spool – The Essential Principles Behind Great Design Principles Live! | Great design principles guide your team to creating designs that delight your users. Having a set of great principles will allow your team to turn ordinary design into extraordinary design. But not everyone has great design principles. What even constitutes a great design principle? Jared dives into our latest research on what teams are doing it right and which are missing the mark. | 5/5/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
39 |
Steve Portigal – You’ve Done All This Research… Now What? | Conducting research and gathering data are crucial parts in the process of creating great design. But once you have all of the data, what do you do with it? How do you know you’re extracting the right conclusions and not leaving anything important on the table? Steve Portigal discusses the methods of synthesis and ideation to approach this crucial next step. | 4/29/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
40 |
Julie Zhuo – Facebook: Data-Informed vs. Data-Driven Design Decisions Live! | Analyzing data is a great way to make design decisions. But when your analytics log contains billions of clicks, how do you distinguish which ones you should use in forming those decisions? Users’ behavior and activity can provide you with great information and insights. But when do you look to that and when do you trust your own instincts? Julie Zhuo discusses Facebook’s design process. | 4/27/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
41 |
Josh Clark – Designing Tapworthy Mobile Apps | “Thinking mobile” goes beyond scaling down an existing app to fit a smaller screen or making decisions about what content to include. Because the app can be used anywhere by nature and the interface is manipulated with thumbs and fingers, there are much more than just aesthetics to consider. Josh discusses mobile design with Adam Churchill. | 4/21/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
42 |
Luke Wroblewski – Designing Mobile Web Experiences | The surge in mobile technology is incredible. Manufacturers ship over a million touchscreen phones every day. These devices allow people to interact with the web in new ways. Streamlining your design for mobile helps you focus on what is absolutely necessary. In this podcast, Luke joins Jared Spool in a discussion about designing mobile experiences. | 4/8/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
43 |
Mike Lee – Designing a Strategy for Organizational Transformations | Mike Lee is the Senior Digital Strategy Advisor at AARP. With much of the organization’s 53-year heritage being within “traditional” media realms, shifting it’s publishing and broadcast businesses into the online world is no small task. In this podcast, Mike joins Jared Spool to discuss some of the design challenges, the ways AARP has transitioned to the web, and how they have been exploring and taking advantage of mobile and tablet technologies. | 3/29/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
44 |
Noah Iliinsky – Beautiful Visualization: Letting Data Tell the Story | Information Visualization uses the brain’s innate ability to recognize patterns to create visual representations of data. When you see a great visualization, it’s as if you are looking through the eyes of an expert. Noah Iliinsky gives examples of the types of visualizations in common use, why and when they are useful, and how to think about different types. | 3/24/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
45 |
Jonathan Snook and Steve Smith – Learning Experiences with Sidebar Creative | Whether it's on the design side or development side there are tricks and techniques you can benefit from. Often, these tips can save you time and frustration. You may not even be aware of them unless someone actually shows them to you. Being able to see someone else's approach reveals knowledge that you can't find anywhere else. In this podcast, Jonathan Snook and Steve Smith join Jared Spool to discuss some of their best tips and techniques they learned from each other. | 3/18/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
46 |
Ethan Marcotte – The How and Why of Responsive Web Design | More types of devices are accessing your web content everyday. Have you figured out how to accommodate them? Ethan Marcotte is leading the charge in this area, with his work on Responsive Design, which can help your content scale and adapt to new devices. | 3/11/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
47 |
Noah Iliinsky – The Steps to Beautiful Visualizations | Translating information and data into a useful visualization is challenging. When creating information visualizations, as with any design process, it’s imperative to keep your audience in mind. With quality visualizations, they can understand and analyze complex information. In this podcast, Noah joins Jared Spool for a discussion about how to interpret information visually in a way that is most effective for users to process the information and be successful in their tasks. | 3/9/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
48 |
Stephen Anderson – The Quest for Emotional Engagement | Stephen Anderson, designer and creator of the Mental Notes card deck, believes your users must be emotionally engaged if you want them to exhibit a certain behavior. Stephen uses simple visual representations to help people make choices and understand complex information. In this podcast, Stephen and Jared Spool discuss creating designs that engage your users’ emotions. | 3/4/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
49 |
Bryan Veloso and Dan Rubin – Peeking Over the Shoulder of Design Experts | Certain tips and tricks you can only learn from watching the best in the field do what they do. Peeking over the shoulder of an expert can teach you valuable techniques and insights that you won’t find in any book. That is exactly how the designers at Sidebar Creative learn from each other. | 3/1/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
50 |
SpoolCast: 5 Simple Principles for Improving Your Information Architecture – Q&A with Dan Brown | Information architecture exists in all levels of design, from the most abstract to the most concrete. Everything from thinking about the content of the site right down to embedding a navigation strategy determines the structure of a website. Through his experience, Dan Brown has developed a set of principles for information architecture. | 2/25/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
51 |
SpoolCast: Mobile Apps – Web-based or Native? – Q&A with Josh Clark | With mobile quickly emerging as a viable and practical source of web based content, designers need to know how to adapt and keep up. With the sheer number of different devices out there it can be a daunting prospect. Josh joins Jared Spool in this podcast for a discussion about making the decision between mobile web and native apps. | 2/23/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
52 |
SpoolCast: Designing for Mice and Men: UI Across Platforms – Q&A with Bill Scott | The number of places that you can access the web grows every day. But are you designing for it? How do your users see your content? And more importantly, how are they interacting with it? Bill Scott joins Jared Spool and discusses the challenges and a few of the surprises that come with designing for multiple platforms. | 2/18/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
53 |
SpoolCast: Sharing Stories as Data: Building PatientsLikeMe’s Community – Q&A with Kate Brigham | Kate Brigham is the Patient Experience Manager at PatientsLikeMe. Rather than focusing solely on forums and discussion, she has helped create an environment that encourages sharing amongst the patients. In this podcast, Kate talks to Jared Spool about how PatientsLikeMe uses data visualizations to help create the level of understanding within the community. | 2/15/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
54 |
SpoolCast: When Search Meets Web Usability Q&A with Shari Thurow | How do you bridge the gap between the search engine and your site? You want that transition to be as smooth and natural for your users as possible. Ideally, they would start with their search, arrive at your site and accomplish what they set out to. Often times, it doesn’t work out that easily. Shari Thurow offers techniques and tricks to satisfy the goals of your users. | 2/9/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
55 |
SpoolCast: Visual Design Essentials for Non-Designers with Dan Rubin | Visual design is often considered an artistic realm. Many times people shy away from design or limit their involvement despite being completely capable of creating a great design. Learning the basics of design can help dispel the notion that it is only for the artistic. According to Dan Rubin, “there’s a big separation between being artistic and being creative.” | 2/3/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
56 |
SpoolCast: Visual Design for Web Applications with David Rivers | Web applications live in a strange world―half application, half website. Making a command look like a command can be tricky. Do you make it a button? Should it be a link? David discusses a number of considerations for creating or updating your application's visual design | 1/27/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
57 |
SpoolCast: The Power of Ad Hoc Personas: Truly Practical Methods to Get Your Organization on the Same Page with Tamara Adlin | Effective communication is the basis for keeping your team organized. But how can you be certain that everyone in your organization is on the same page when it comes to business goals, objectives and the user experience perspective? Using personas can set in you that direction and Tamara Adlin specializes in just that. | 1/26/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
58 |
SpoolCast: Leveraging Seductive Interaction Design with Stephen Anderson | Seductive interactions leverage the latest advancements in social science, psychology, and behavioral economics. Stephen Anderson shows us specific examples of sites who’ve designed serendipity, arousal, rewards, and other seductive elements into their applications. | 1/20/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
59 |
SpoolCast: Answered! Your Top Questions on Web Form Design with Luke Wroblewski | Knowing exactly how to design web forms is a struggle. Forms are often a critical step in a user’s journey. It’s easy to frustrate them if your forms aren’t well thought out or well crafted. Luckily, Luke Wroblewski is one of the world’s foremost experts on web form design. | 1/18/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
60 |
SpoolCast: Organization Schemes for Web Content with Donna Spencer | When approaching your information architecture, you’ll realize most sets of content can be organized in more than one way. You need to figure out which works best for your audience, your content, and your project’s goal. Donna Spencer shows you the most popular approaches, and offers tips on when and how to use each. | 1/14/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
61 |
SpoolCast: Kim Goodwin’s “Getting Design Into the Corporate DNA” UI15 Session Sample | Design has made a lot of progress in the corporate landscape over the past decade, but many designers still find themselves justifying their existence on a fairly regular basis. In Kim Goodwin’s talk, “Getting Design Into the Corporate DNA” from the 2010 User Interface Conference, she explains that it’s a matter of changing the culture of your organization. | 1/11/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
62 |
SpoolCast: A Practitioner’s Guide to Prototyping with Todd Zaki Warfel | Prototyping is an iterative process. You generate design concepts. You test them. You discover what works, what needs improving, and opportunities for new ideas. Tune in to this podcast to hear Todd Zaki Warfel talk about prototyping. | 1/7/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
63 |
SpoolCast: Luke Wroblewski’s “Why You Should Design for Mobile First” UI15 Session Sample | For years, the mobile web experience was little more than an afterthought as most design teams focused on catering their designs to the desktop. As Luke Wroblewski explains in his session “Why You Should Design for Mobile First” from the User Interface 15 Conference, this is becoming an increasingly backwards way of thinking. | 1/3/11 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
64 |
SpoolCast: Kristina Halvorson’s “Message and Medium: Better Content by Design” UI15 Session Sample | At this year’s User Interface Conference, Kristina Halvorson presented “Message and Medium: Better Content by Design.” Here's a sample of her talk from the conference. | 12/22/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
65 |
SpoolCast: SEO and User Experience in Harmony with Tamara Adlin and Vanessa Fox | SEO and User Experience shouldn't be at odds with one another. That's what Vanessa Fox and Tamara Adlin tell us in this week's SpoolCast with Jared Spool. | 11/2/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
66 |
SpoolCast: Leah Buley’s UX Team of One, Revisited | Leah Buley discusses her latest findings in her work with small teams and solo UXers with our Jared Spool. | 10/22/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
67 |
SpoolCast: Designing with Scenarios featuring Kim Goodwin | Scenarios are comprehensive stories that describe the way a persona would interacts with your product or service. If there is a grand dutchess of personas, scenarios, and design processes, it's Kim Goodwin. That's why we asked Kim to do a workshop on turning user research into action at UI15. Jared Spool spoke with her to preview that workshop, and clear up confusion surrounding scenarios in this podcast. | 10/15/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
68 |
SpoolCast: Luke Wroblewski and Innovations in Web Input | To give you a taste of Luke Wroblewski's upcoming UI15 talk, Jared Spool had a chance to speak with him about some of the latest trends, good and bad, in web input. | 10/7/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
69 |
SpoolCast: Mark Burrell’s Search Patterns Revisted | Today we're revisiting search patterns by sharing the followup podcast Jared Spool recorded with Mark Burrell of Endeca. Jared and Mark discuss a few bonus questions from the previous Virtual Seminar. Included in the full post are a few highlights from the podcast. | 9/24/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
70 |
SpoolCast: Reusable Components & Libraries with Nathan Curtis | Jared Spool chats with Nathan Curtis about the reuse and standardization of components that make up your web site. | 9/16/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
71 |
Userability Podcast #19 – Be a Linchpin | This week, calling in from beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah, is Grady Kelly. Grady is inspired by Seth Godin's new book, Linchpin. He wants to know how UX professionals can work to become indispensable team members and not just another cog in the machine. | 7/14/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
72 |
Userability Podcast #18 – Is Virginia, Is Not Virginia | Joe Sokohl calls in with a question about using distributed teams on UX projects. Robert Hoekman and Jared Spool have plenty to say on the topic! | 6/25/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
73 |
Userability Podcast #17 – My Stylish Idaho | Hugh Griffith from Boise asks Jared and Robert, what happens when you swap radio buttons and checkboxes with more stylish graphic replacements? | 6/18/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
74 |
SpoolCast: Hagan Rivers’ Escaping Navigation Hell, Live! | Web applications can get wild. You know the kind; something that's on your corporate intranet with an obscure purpose, hundreds of screens and some kind of navigation kudzu growing in every direction. Hagan Rivers is one of our favorite wranglers of such apps. Listen to a sample of Hagan's Escaping Navigation Hell from the Web App Masters Tour in this episode of the SpoolCast. | 6/11/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
75 |
Userability Podcast #16 – Testing Without Solutions | Our guest Jon Wold from Oslo brings up a really great point about test results: It’s hard to report on problems without providing suggestions for correcting the problems you observe in testing. Tune in to get Jared and Robert's suggestions on the topic. | 6/4/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
76 |
SpoolCast: Stephen Anderson’s Designing Seductive Business Apps: Live! | It's becoming common to see behavioral cues in everyday web applications. Stephen Anderson is the first person we think of when it comes to these kinds of interactions. Stephen is an independent consultant and creator of the Mental Notes, a set of reference cards with design insights from the world of psychology. Stephen is one of the most popular speakers at the Web App Masters Tour and we want to share a sample of his talk, Designing Seductive Business Apps. | 5/19/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
77 |
SpoolCast: Steve Portigal’s Deep Dive Interviewing Tips Revisited | We tell our clients this constantly: the organizations who are most successful are the ones who are on intimate terms with how and why their customers use their product. But how? To answer that question, we invited our friend Steve Portigal to host a UIE Virtual Seminar recently on the topic of interviewing. In this podcast we revisit the topic and answer several remaining questions from his seminar. | 5/11/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
78 |
Userability Podcast # 15 – Going Social | It seems we've failed to offend our international audience sufficiently, so this week we'll try again by chatting with Jay Vidyarthi, a designer hailing form Montréal, Québec, Canada. Jay is working on a project with social design aspects. He's helping design a site where the goal is to build "an involved and contributing community of users." He wants to know if there are any user experience techniques to encourage participation. | 4/30/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
79 |
SpoolCast: Bill Scott’s Desiging for Interesting Moments: Live! | Bill Scott's Designing for Interesting Moments was one of the highlights of the first stop on UIE's Web App Masters tour, in San Diego. We wanted everyone to benefit from his research into web interactions, so we're bringing you this audio and visual sample. | 4/23/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
80 |
SpoolCast: Crumlish and Malone Design the Social In | As soon as we saw Erin Malone and Christian Crumlish’s new book, Designing Social Interfaces, we knew you’d want to hear about their rich collection of social patterns and principles. | 4/9/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
81 |
Userability # 14 – Growing in UX | This week, Mohammed Alaa calls in from Egypt with questions about convincing stakeholders of the value of UX and about improving his own UX skills. Robert Hoekman and Jared Spool are back with another episode of Userability! | 4/2/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
82 |
SpoolCast: Care and Feeding the Corporate Cash Cow with Ken Kellogg | Ken Kellogg, the Director of User Research at Marriott International, sits down with Jared Spool to discuss the process of design and research that lay beneath a web site that generated $6.5 billion in revenues in 2009. | 3/29/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
83 |
SpoolCast: Backstage at 37signals with Jason Fried | Jason Fried brings a unique viewpoint to any design discussion, one informed by years of success with his company, 37signals. Recently, Jared Spool was able to chat with Jason about 37signals' current work. If you're joining us at the UIE Web App Masters Tour in Minneapolis or Philadelphia, Jason will go into even more detail | 3/22/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
84 |
SpoolCast: Design Lessons from Facebook’s 350 Million with Julie Zhuo | Julie Zhuo is the principal designer behind the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect experiences, and has contributed to the last two major site redesigns. She sat down to chat with our Jared Spool. | 3/2/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
85 |
SpoolCast: Interesting Moments with Bill Scott | Bill Scott chats with Jared Spool about rich interactions, his new book about them, and his deep history with them at Sabre, Yahoo! and now Netflix. Bill is one of the stellar presenters scheduled for all four cities on the UIE Web App Masters Tour. | 2/23/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
86 |
SpoolCast: Moving Beyond Static Forms with Luke Wroblewski | The world's foremost authority on web forms is Luke Wroblewski, author of the heralded book, Web Form Design. It's no coincidence that we lean on Luke often to join us at events like our upcoming Web App Masters Tour. Jared Spool sat down with Luke to discuss what's been happening with web forms since his book came out. It winds up there have been some interesting developments recently. | 2/11/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
87 |
SpoolCast: Leveraging Search Patterns & Discovery with Peter Morville | In this podcast, Jared Spool sits down with Peter Morville to answer many excellent questions from the recent Leveraging Search and Discovery Patterns virtual seminar. Even if you did not attend, there's a lot of great information in this podcast. | 2/5/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
88 |
SpoolCast: Escaping Navigation Hell with Hagan Rivers | We turn to Hagan Rivers for insight on designing challenging web applications year-after-year because she just keeps coming up with better and better ideas. Recently, Jared sat down to talk with Hagan to discuss her somewhat radical notion, designing web app navigation as its own, separate application. | 2/1/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
89 |
SpoolCast: Stephen Anderson on Seductive Interactions | How can we design systems that encourage the behaviors we want? In this episode, Jared speaks with Stephen Anderson about using human psychology in web apps to encourage users' behavior. | 1/28/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
90 |
SpoolCast: Prototyping Seminar Follow-up | A followup conversation with Fred Beecher answering more questions about prototyping tools and techniques, after his popular, recent Virtual Seminar on the topic. | 1/22/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
91 |
SpoolCast: Effective Moderating for Usability Testing Followup | Back in October, we asked usability testing expert Beth Loring to present a UIE Virtual Seminar on how to Effectively Moderate Usability Tests. As is often the case, we got lots of great questions from the live audience, but just couldn’t get to them all. Adam and Beth got together to record this podcast and cover some of the remaining issues. | 1/14/10 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
92 |
SpoolCast: Recruiting for Usability Testing Followup | User experience research lives or dies by the appropriateness of the participants in the study. If the participants match the real users, you're set. We held a Virtual Seminar with Dana Chisnell to discuss recruiting for usability testing, and this is the followup podcast to that seminar. In the podcast, Dana answers remaining questions from the seminar. | 12/9/09 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
93 |
UI14 Session Sampler: Leah Buley’s A UX Team of One. | An audio selection from Leah Buley's A UX Team of One 7.5MB - 14min 15sec If you didn't attend the User Interface Conference this year, you may have missed the buzz over Leah Buley's session entitled "How to be a User Experience Team of One". Attendees loved it. Leah gave them tips and techniques used by top user experience teams that any UXer can use in a small team or an unsupportive environment. Below are some notes I took during Leah's session and slides from this portion of the talk. The slides here are shrunk to fit our blog, but the materials on the disc are full-sized PDFs suitable for printing. Leah began with telling the story of her transition to a new job at Adaptive Path. Up until then, she had been a UX team of one at a financial firm. Her time was mostly spent walled up in a cubicle, headphones on, sketching and otherwise prepping wireframes on the computer, based on up-front meetings determining business requirements. After a few weeks she would emerge from her design cocoon with designs ready to be shown in a dog-and-pony show-style. Her first day at Adaptive Path was radically different. She was handed paper and a Sharpie and, along with a couple of other designers, was asked to tackle a problem by generating several solutions, collaboratively, on the spot. She was initially flush with panic. They didn't teach this at library school! After a short while she warmed up to the process. To get to the quality ideas, you first must generate a lot of ideas, and be OK with many of them being subpar and others simply being tossed aside. Now instead of jumping to the finish, as she had at her previous job, she was exploring more ideas more efficiently with techniques you can use with or without collaborating designers. Leah used the idea of redesigning the eVite.com digital invitation and RSVP service to demonstrate some of the techniques she learned after joining Adaptive Path. (For the purposes of this blog post, we'll be covering just the first part of the brainstorming process) She avoided the computer. Computers can lock you into only one idea and you often get sucked down by minutia you shouldn't be addressing at this stage. She started with a "6-up" - a single sheet of paper with six, smallish, blank browser viewports and a pen. This allowed for 6 different ideas of how to solve one problem, say the eVite landing page. One or two ideas came easily. How do you push through to the next ideas? [Download a PDF file of Leah's 6-up template] Leah uses a couple of so-called "lightweight conceptual frameworks" to help push more ideas out of her head. A "Spectrum" is one such framework. A spectrum is a range from two opposing points. For example, what would the landing page at eVite.com look like if it was intended solely for a first-timer? What would it look like if it was solely for a long-time user of the service? What would pages on the spectrum in between those to points look like? What characteristic would they exhibit? None of the sketches you make on the spectrum may be the right solution. But that's OK, because we're not drawing solutions. We're drawing ideas. This framework gets you to try ideas you might have avoided before. Now you have a pile of ideas to pick from. Perhaps the best design features aspects from several of these thumbnail sketches. You can hear the rest of Leah's talk plus the other seven speakers and Jared Spool's keynote presentation on the UI14 proceedings disc. The disc is loaded with over 12 hours of audio recordings, all the handouts from the Featured Talks and the presentation slides from the 8 full-day workshops. Order the proceedings disc by November 20, 2009 to guarantee your set and get the lowest price. | 11/11/09 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
94 |
SpoolCast: Innovation Beyond the Buzzword | How can you bring real innovation into your projects? That's what I asked Scott Berkun when we spoke earlier this month. Scott has a lot of great ideas for your team from his years of research into the habits of highly innovative teams. In addition to this interview, Scott will be presenting at our User Interface Conference in November. | 10/23/09 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
95 |
SpoolCast: Visual Design for the Non-Designer | What can a non-designer do to harness the power of visual design without calling professional help? Quite a lot, says internationally-regarded visual designer Dan Rubin. We called Dan to talk about what design techniques are accessible to mere mortals. He also gave us a preview of his day-long workshop for non-designers at our User Interface 14 Conference, this November. | 10/9/09 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
96 |
SpoolCast: Information Architecture Essentials | Donna Spencer is our long-time, go-to expert on the topic of Information Architecture. We're happy to bring her stateside again for the upcoming User Interface 14 conference. Recently, I spoke with her, all the way from Australia, in advance of her trip to Boston. | 10/6/09 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
97 |
SpoolCast: Prototyping Experiences | Todd Zaki Warfel has just finished two years of research into the tools and processes used in prototyping web sites. His findings will be published in a book due out this fall and we've asked him to give a full-day workshop on the topic at UI14. Todd sat down with us to talk all about prototyping tools and processes, and previews his upcoming workshop at UI14. | 9/23/09 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
98 |
SpoolCast: Designing for Facets Followup | A few weeks back we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Pete Bell and Daniel Tunkelang of Endeca. These guys are the experts we go to when talking about designing for facets. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so I got together with Pete and Daniel to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions. | 9/21/09 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
99 |
SpoolCast: Managing Sites for Top Tasks | One of the most popular speakers in the history of our User Interface Conference is Gerry McGovern. Certainly most of that popularity is thanks to Gerry's no-nonsense, customer-centric approach to content management strategy. Gerry joins us in this podcast to discuss customer care words and managing top tasks. | 9/4/09 | Free | View In iTunes |
|
100 |
Userability #13 – Renaissance Man | This week we have our longest, and certainly one of our most interesting episodes to date. Jared and Robert met Joshua Muskovitz on the IxDA discussion list when Josh posted an innocent-enough question to the list: what do you call someone who sits squarely on the fence between interaction design and implementation? How do I market myself while job hunting when I have been in the industry so long that I have a really broad range of skills? | 8/28/09 | Free | View In iTunes |
| Total: 100 Episodes |
Customer Reviews
Clarified what I already believed and more.
Listened to my first podcast from April and it was wonderful. This is my main area of interest. Luke Woblewski's talk was illuminating (not an exageration).
Concise, unique, informative
This podcast stands out among its peers for its uniqueness, content quality, and attention to detail. After sifting through lots of podcasts and webinars pertaining to web design, internet marketing, and page optimization, I have found it refreshing to listen to these talks. Standing apart from derivative, me-too podcasts, the SpoolCast offers well edited content that informs, entertains, and doesn't waste your time.
And its theme music is cool.
If you are a designer, you had better be listening
Jared Spool and his merry band of User Experience practitioners offer practical advice that every designer should apply to their craft. If you are not taking advantage of these podcasts along with any of the other great offerings that you can find at uie.com then you are behind the rest!!
