UX Cake

Rosenfeld Media is offering a 15% discount to UX Cake listeners. Just use the promo code: cababa-cake at when purchasing directly from Rosenfeld Media’s website (expires July 1st, 2023).

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Systems Thinking for Designers, featuring Sheryl Cababa & Leigh Allen-Arredondo May 17, 2023

In this episode, we chat with Sheryl Cababa, Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial and author of "Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers." She introduces the concept of systems thinking, which is a way to consider the broader implications of design decisions.

By examining the entire problem and understanding the interconnections between various components, designers can anticipate and address potential issues and create more holistic and impactful solutions.

🎤About Our Guest:

Sheryl Cababa is the Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial, and the Author of “Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers”, which was just published by Rosenfeld Media. Sheryl is a seasoned design & strategy leader who’s worked with consultancies including Frog and Adaptive Path.

📚Interested in purchasing Sheryl’s new book?

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Connect with Sheryl

Twitter | LinkedIn

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The Quiet Leader: Strategies for Introverts with Tim Yeo May 01, 2023

This episode is about quiet leadership - how you can be an authentic leader even if you don’t have the loudest voice in the room. We’re joined by Tim Yeo, a design leader and speaker who helps introverts have an impact and influence without having to pretend to be extroverts. Tim is the brain behind The Quiet Achiever, where he coaches introverts to use their strengths to their advantage.

Tim shares his experience working in environments where strong opinions and loud voices are the norm, and how he was pressured to speak up more. Tim identifies as an introvert and shares his journey in discovering more about being one.

We also discuss the challenges that introverts face in the design industry, where we have to make our work visible, as well as in leadership, where there can be a perception that the ideal leader is an extrovert, and how to overcome those challenges.

Connect with Tim

Twitter | LinkedIn

Learn more about Tim’s coaching and courses at www.thequietachievr.com

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Adding Strategic Value to Tactical Work with Laura Barboza Apr 06, 2023

Are you a UX practitioner who's frustrated with feeling like you lack agency in your work? Or maybe you're someone who wants to take their UX game to the next level by incorporating strategic outcomes into your tactical deliverables? You’re not alone! Listen (or watch) on…

This week I’m joined by my long-time friend, colleague, and UX Strategy expert Laura Barboza for the beginning of our 4th season of UX Cake!

Laura and I explore the differences between strategic and tactical work in UX research and design. We start by discussing why it's so important to incorporate strategic objectives into your tactical deliverables. After all, without a bigger picture in mind, your work may lack direction and purpose.

We give you practical tips for adding strategic outcomes to your tactical UX deliverables in both research and design. We discuss the challenges that designers and researchers may face and possible pushback from stakeholders who are more focused on short-term goals, and how to speak to the value of your efforts and tie it back to user and business objectives. By being clear on these objectives from the start, you can ensure that everything ties back to the larger strategic goals.

At the heart of this episode is the message that everyone, regardless of level, can and should think more strategically in their work. By understanding the bigger picture and incorporating strategic outcomes into your tactical deliverables, you can become a more effective UX practitioner and build products that truly meet the needs of your users.

Connect with UX Cake

uxcake.co | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube

Connect with Leigh

How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us

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(Best of) On Recovering and Reinvention: Navigating Career Changes with John Maeda Feb 22, 2023

With so many people facing changes in their work and careers right now, navigating the complex and turbulent waters of layoffs, org changes, and economic adjustments can be incredibly challenging.

My guest today is renowned design leader and author John Maeda - who is no stranger to career shifts and changes. In this inspiring episode, John shares his message of focusing on recovery instead of failure, the importance of intentional reinvention, and the benefits of renewal and rebuilding.

This episode is a replay from 2019, and it's just as relevant today as it was then. Since our conversation in 2019, John has gone on to take on different roles and is now the VP of Design and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft. We mentioned his keynote at Interaction 19, which has since been recorded and is available online - we've included the link to that and other inspiring references we mention in the show description and on our website at uxcake.co.

This episode covers a lot of ground - John talked about why we should focus on recover fast vs. fail fast, why inclusive design is so important, and why we should be using Anpanman to train our AI platforms.

Links from this episode

John’s Keynote on Recovering & Reinvention at Interaction19

John Gardner’s Essay “Self Renewal”

Get the Collected Works of classic poet Kahlil Gibran

Joy and Sorrow - poem excerpt from “The Prophet” by Kahlil Gibran

Books by John Maeda

The Laws of Simplicity

Redesigning Leadership

Links for John Maeda

YouTube LinkedIn Twitter

More resources from John available on his site https://maedastudio.com

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uxcake.co | Twitter | Instagram | Linked In | YouTube

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Unleashing Your Best Work Through Healthy Conflict and Feedback with Billie Mandel Feb 09, 2023

Do you want to unlock your creative potential and foster innovation? We know that collaboration and communication are vital to producing outstanding work, but what you might not know is that the foundation of that is healthy conflict. Without it, we can't achieve our creative best.

On this episode, we welcome Billie Mandel, a seasoned expert in design, coaching, and education with a focus on critique, conflict, and creativity. We'll delve into the importance of expressing divergent ideas, how to ask difficult questions, and creating a safe space for diverse thoughts, mistakes, and asking "what am I missing." Additionally, we'll highlight the critical role of feedback in this journey and offer tips on how to solicit, offer, and receive feedback with care and effectiveness. So tune in as we uncover the impact of productive conflict in the quest for creativity and innovation.

Books mentioned in this episode

Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live by Brené Brown

Radical Candor: How to Get What You Want by Saying What You Mean by Kim Scott

Connect with Billie Mandel

CEO and Chief Instigator, Mandel Creative

Speaking engagements

Connect with UX Cake

uxcake.co | Twitter | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube

Connect with Leigh

https://www.tuttitaygerly.com/

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Do More With Less: The Power of a Strategic Mindset Feb 01, 2023

If you're in UX, you've likely heard the question, "How can we do more with less?" especially during any economic squeeze. Many companies are cutting back on resources and downsizing teams, while still expecting the same results. Some common approaches are to argue the value of UX, or simply say "no" to requests due to lack of resources. But there’s another way, one that can increase the value of your work and foster cross-team relationships. You can look for ways to be more strategic in the work that you do.

In UX, being more strategic means producing bigger outcomes instead of bigger output. It requires understanding the big picture, aligning with stakeholders, and prioritizing work based on impact.

Join me as I describe a framework to help you approach your work more strategically, in a way that achieves more for the business and users’ goals without working longer hours.

Links from this episode

User data research portal

Baymard Institute

Develop strategic UX leadership skills

StrategicUXLeader.com

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uxcake.co | Twitter | Instagram | Linked In | YouTube

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Making Space For Meaning and Success with Tutti Taygerly Jan 19, 2023

As human beings, it is embedded in us to seek purpose in everything we do. We want to do meaningful work that affects other people or pursue the passion within us.

But many people wonder, is it too much to ask for an opportunity to work on something valuable?

In today's episode, we are joined by Tutti Taygerly, a Leadership Coach, speaker, and author of the book “Make Space To Lead: Break patterns to find flow and focus on what matters”

Tutti's primary focus is to help high-achievers make space for sustainable success, so we dive deep into conversations about making space for the things you want to do and achieve. We delve into how we can create more fulfilling work and build a career that is sustainable, by making space for what matters most to us, and how you can navigate through your current environment to maximize your creativity.

Join us in this jam-packed episode filled with actionable tips on how to deal with the "Achievement Monster" and what steps you can take to create your space and utilize it the best way possible.

Tutti coaches cofounders and tech leaders to embrace their unique leadership style to achieve professional impact and a sustainable company culture. She focuses on working with women, people of color, and immigrants. Previously she was a design leader at design firms, startups, and large companies including Disney and Facebook. Tutti writes for Harvard Business Review, Business Insider, and Fast Company and her book Make Space to Lead shows high achievers how to reframe our relationship to work.

Connect with Tutti

https://www.linkedin.com/in/tuttitaygerly

https://www.instagram.com/tutti/

Connect with UX Cake

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/uxcake.

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Beyond Titles: The Real Meaning of Leadership Jan 12, 2023

Join host Leigh Allen-Arredondo for this UX Cake Pop - short and sweet when you just want a bite of UX Cake!

In this UX Cake Pop, I’m sharing my experience with the true meaning of leadership, which is not about having a specific job title or position of authority, but about inspiring and guiding others towards a shared goal. Anyone can be a leader at any point in their life, regardless of their title or level of experience. There are different ways of being a leader without a traditional leadership title or authority, starting with being a leader in your own life. UX pros in particular have an opportunity to create positive change through collaboration and effective communication. Listen in and consider what kind of leader you are, and what kind of leader you want to be!

For more leadership resources, workshops, programs, and coaching, visit StrategicUXLeader.com

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uxcake.co | Twitter | Instagram | Linked In | YouTube

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Outsiders In Design - with Ryan Rumsey Jan 04, 2023

In this episode I’m talking with Ryan Rumsey about feeling like an outsider in design,

the very human need to belong, and some of the affects that feeling like an outsider can create in our lives and in our careers. Find out how we’ve overcome feeling like outsiders, and what we’ve done to find community.

My guest Ryan Rumsey is author of Business Thinking for Designers and CEO of Second Wave Dive and the Chief Design Officers school. Before founding Second Wave Dive, Ryan worked for over 20 years as a designer and executive at Apple, Electronic Arts, USAA, Nestlé, and Comcast. Ryan has a plethora of experience and titles in design, and yet, as we discuss, those things aren’t what we need to combat the feeling of being an outsider, or to create a feeling of belonging.

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Grab your FREE PDF download of Ryan’s book:

Business Thinking for Designers by Ryan Rumsey

https://www.secondwavedive.com/book

Learn more about Ryan Rumsey's Chief Design Officer School:

https://thecdo.school/

Other resources:

Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World

https://amzn.to/3iwyU5q

Originals: How Nonconformists Rule The World

https://amzn.to/3VwwyT2

Follow along Leigh’s upcoming workshops & programs:

www.strategicuxleader.com

Follow Chimmy on LinkedIn

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Building Design Teams That Scale with Anjali Deswandikar Oct 03, 2022

A business can only grow as much as its people. That is why it is important to build teams with the knowledge that each of them is a key member who will eventually become a senior as you grow. In this episode, Leigh Allen-Arredondo interviews Anjali Deswandikar, the Design Director at Terralogic, Inc. and Design Team Lead at Lollypop Design, about building design teams that scale. Anjali talks about the process it took to build her teams across the globe, seeing as they grew from a handful to over 250. She takes us through the structures in place as well as how she ensures that teams are both values-driven and function with high performance. As design leaders, you don't have to bear all the weight alone. You have your team with you who can help, so build them well through this conversation.

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Designing For Accessibility With Chimmy Kalu Aug 19, 2022

Accessibility needs to be the gold standard for everything. If you have the power to make things more accessible and inclusive, strive for that. You are actually leaving money on the table if you don't design with accessibility in mind. There are billions of persons with disabilities, and companies need to consult them. If you're a small company, then it's okay to start small. Start with what you can control and change first.

Join Leigh Allen-Arredondo as she talks to product designer Chimmy Kalu about the importance of designing with accessibility. Chimmy is the Chief Design Officer of Lovable Studio. She also does workshops and talks about product design. Learn Chimmy's process when designing something that's accessible. Discover how you can spread accessibility. If everyone does a little bit, then everyone collectively becomes more accessible.

Related: Listen to UX Cake Episode #25 with Liz Jackson, "Changing the Design Narrative"

LINKS

Chimmy's Website

Follow Chimmy on Twitter

Chimmy's Design Courses & Workshops:

Sketch Essentials

How to design anything

Advanced Figma

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Designing With Developers - Abhishek Nayak Aug 10, 2022

Great digital products don't just happen. They're the result of a strong designer-developer relationship. That is because the two groups bring different but complementary skill sets. By understanding and respecting each other's strengths, the designer and developer can work together to create user-friendly and technically sound products. In this episode, Abhishek Nayak talks about how their company, Appsmith, addresses some of the common issues in the designer-developer relationship and how they have set up both sides for success. Abhishek is the CEO and Co-founder of Appsmith, an open-source low-code tool that helps developers build dashboards and admin panels very quickly.

Abhishek also shared with us Appsmith's design system in a bonus video, and showed us how the designers and developers collaborate on files, and get feedback on work-in-progress from customer in real time: View video on our Youtube channel

Links

Appsmith
UX Cake – YouTube
Abhishek Nayak – Twitter
https://www.Linkedin.com/in/AbhishekNayak/
https://GitHub.com/AppsmithOrg/Appsmith

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(Best of) Leveling up with UX Strategy Jul 19, 2022

Level up with UX Strategy

In this episode of UX Cake Podcast, we discuss how you can create a UX strategy for better outcomes for your users, and the products or services you help create.

There are many different perceptions about what UX Strategy actually is. My guest Jaime Levy - who wrote the book "UX Strategy" - defines as the intersection between business strategy and UX design, with a key component being early and continuous validation of the value proposition with customers. It’s a high-level plan of how your product or feature is going to achieve the business goals.

Jaime Levy is a UX/product strategist, author, and public speaker based in Los Angeles and Berlin. Her passion is to help business leaders and internal teams transform their product visions into innovative digital solutions that customers want. Jaime also offers public/private workshops, and online masterclasses, and speaks at design and innovation conferences worldwide. Her best-selling O’Reilly Media book is called UX Strategy: Product Strategy Techniques for Devising Innovative Digital Solutions. The book presents a solid framework for the practice, which lies at the intersection of UX design and business strategy.

Resources

Jamie Levy

UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want

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Scaling UX Research : Democratization 2.0 Jul 05, 2022

Scaling user research, means doing more, doing more research, and doing more with user research, through democratization, or enablement.

Democratization in UX, is a topic of controversy, yet this episode is a conversation and not My an argument debate. I think partially because the term democratization and the concept of democratization really has some baggage.

Instead of having to spend your time evangelizing the importance of research, which takes up a lot of a lot of time, you are able to spend your time enabling research through systems, infrastructure and tooling. After a long and winding career journey (from eLearning designer, to product manager, to UXer), Roberta now leads the User Research team at User Interviews, where she conducts strategic research projects and creates scalable systems and resources for democratization.

She’s researched and designed experiences for communities of learners, educators, and enterprise clients at companies like Year Up, edX, Pluralsight, The Predictive Index, and more.

At her core, she’s an infectiously curious and adaptive leader who loves bringing teammates closer to customer insights. She values learning and community and derives the most joy from mentoring, coaching, and enabling others.

In her free time, she’s a Career & Wellness Coach at Learn Mindfully and enjoys gardening, storytelling, and cooking. She’s based in Boston, MA with her partner and two cats.

Links

Article - Scaling Research / Democratization 2.0

User Interviews intro promo - get 3 free participants

Roberta Dombrowski

Website

Linked In

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UX Writing - with Laura Costantino Jun 22, 2022

In this episode of the UX Cake podcast, we’re bringing you lots of great information about UX writing as a specialty within UX. In this special Ask Me Anything format we cover some of the most useful soft skills for a career in UX writing, hard skills that are transferable from other industries, ideas on how to upskill your UX writing, finding a mentor, and career trajectories for UX writers.

My guest is Laura Costantino (they/them), a senior UX writer at Google. For the past 10 years, Laura has worked at the intersection of editorial marketing and strategy. They fully transitioned into UX content about three years ago and now, as someone who went through a career change, Laura is dedicated to helping other people of all backgrounds transition into UX while also being committed to developing content design and strategy as pivotal parts of the UX discipline.

Resources

Strategic Writing for UX, Torrey Podmajersky

Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson

Content Strategy Toolkit, Meghan Casey

Working in Content

Content + UX slack

Mentoring platforms

ADP List

UX Coffee Hours

Design Buddies

Hexagon Mentorship program

Connect with Laura Costantino

Linkedin

Website

Twitter

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If you enjoy this podcast, there are some really simple ways you can help us:

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Show Me What It Means - with Thomas Watkins Jun 07, 2022

This episode is all about creating meaning from data, and making it easy for your audience to understand by making it visual. We can apply the same principles we use to design dashboards to presentations - whether you’re communicating design concepts (and the data-driven decisions behind your design) or user research findings. I had such a great time talking with my guest Thomas Watkins about how to show meaning using data, I know the term ‘data visualization’ sounds a little overwhelming to some people in UX, if you aren’t designing dashboards. But it doesn’t need to be. I think we did a pretty good job of making data visualization accessible for any level of data interest in the episode.

Everyone in UX should be using data - whether you’re in design or research or PM or developer or marketing - and using data in a visual way to communicate important information to the person reading it. If you create presentations, for your design or for your research, if you have any opportunity to use data to explain your design or research recommendations… this episode has great information for you. Whether you are data-curious or data-shy or you lean in the data geek direction like me. I learned some great guidelines about making data visual in more effective ways, and I’ll bet you will too, even if your eyes glaze over at terms like “magnitude comparison” or “scatter plot.” I love how Thomas talks about explaining the context of the numbers, and not just ‘decorating’ numbers with meaningless donut graphs, one of my pet peeves!

Thomas Watkins is the founder of 3 Leaf consulting, a design collective that combines psychology and design principles to create usable products and services. Thomas is a thought leader, speaker and industry practitioner in Houston TX. The scope of his work has included interface design for mobile, SaaS system architecture, usability research, and data visualization.

LINKS

https://www.3leaf.consulting/

https://www.instagram.com/3leafmethod

https://www.linkedin.com/in/watkinsthomas/

Show Link - Graph Selection Matrix

https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/misc/Graph_Selection_Matrix.pdf

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Influencing without Authority May 03, 2022

Increasing our influence also increases the impact our work can have. This is especially important in user experience design and research… when not everyone we work with may have the same user obsession as we do, so it sometimes takes extra effort to see the impact we want. Often the UX folks are not the ultimate authority in the room, or on a project. And then add to that the fact that others’ bias can also undermine your authority - biasis about gender, race, age, disability…

I had a chance to talk about all of this with 3 other UX experts, Hana Nagel, Real Canty, and Ashby Hayes. We covered a lot of ground. And, because we recorded in front of a live audience, you’ll also get a chance to hear the very powerful Q & A session which is the last half of this longer-than usual episode. This episode was originally published in 2019, and it remains one of UX Cake’s top-downloaded episodes, episode 31. There is also an unedited video of the panel on our UX Cake YouTube channel.

Hana Nagel is UX Manager @ Deloitte Digital, Real Canty is Sr User researcher @ Google, Ashby Hayes is SVP of product & design at Potato, a digital product agency.

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Challenging Assumptions to Transform Results Apr 12, 2022

No doubt you're practicing challenging assumptions in your user-centered work already -- identifying what you think you know (or assume) about users' beliefs and actions, and finding out if those assumptions are true, or what else is true. What if you take that same approach towards the people you work with, and in your own career?

The result can be surprising, and even transformational.

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Transitioning Into User Research with Eniola Abioye Mar 29, 2022

Have you found interest in User Research, but are unsure if a career change is possible?

Today I'm talking to Eniola Abioye, a Sr. User Researcher at Meta, specifically about transitioning into user-focused or design research from research-related backgrounds in other disciplines. Eniola herself came from biotechnology before moving into the design research space.

Eniola has a passion for helping others figure out how to utilize their existing experience, and to learn through doing, getting relevant experience in the real world to create a fulfilling career in UX without necessarily going back to school.

Eniola Abioye currently conducts impactful user research with cross-functional teams at Meta. She began her people research career at Branding Science, an agency in the biotechnology space, and later moved on to advance Design Thinking at Kaiser Permanente. She then designed a research strategy and led research across a digital platform at Silicon Valley Bank. Outside of her full-time position, Eniola provides career coaching to other UX Researchers and leads UX projects with social justice organizations in her community. She’s excited to share how UX Researchers are uniquely positioned to drive inclusive and accessible innovation in tech.

Connect with Eniola Abioye

Website

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UX Strategy Sprints with Craig Nishizaki Mar 15, 2022

This week we're talking about UX Strategy, and UX Strategy Sprints. The term UX Strategy gets defined in different ways by experts across our discipline. I like to define UX Strategy at it’s simplest, highest level as identifying business objectives and user needs to create a vision that aligns those two things. And while that might sound simple, getting to that vision for a product or a service is anything but simple.

My guest today is Craig Nishizaki, Head of Business for UpTop, a User Experience Design and Development agency based in Seattle. Craig's perspective coming from the business side of UX can really help us understand how to sell and drive the creation of UX Strategies at organizations that might not be familiar with the true value of UX.

Connect with Craig

UpTop

Craig Nishizaki is Head of Business for UpTop, a User Experience Design and Development agency based in Seattle.

Over the past 12 years Craig has worked on the business-side of UX: in business development, account direction, strategy, and leadership. In that time, Craig has honed his understanding of the value of UX and how to convey that value to business leaders, to help them create change, innovation, and impact for their organizations.

Seeing UX through the lens of a business leader, identifying how to reduce friction and create value are what Craig loves about what he does on a daily basis. "Gaining a solid understanding of the problems that a new solution, technology or approach can solve, effectively communicating that value proposition, and seeing our clients realize the positive results really stirs my cocoa!"

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Deep Listening with Indi Young Mar 09, 2022

If we want to make products and services that people want and use, we have to talk to those people. Whether you’re involved in product strategy, UX, development, marketing, any part of building products or a business or a service – you’ve got to understand what your audience or user’s goals, what will really serve their needs, what motivates them. And how do we do that? We talk to them. More importantly, we listen to them talk. So, how do we get them to talk about what’s really most important to them? Today we’re going to explore a different approach than what you might be used to in user research. It's focused on getting into someone's most inner unconscious purpose and motivations, and this will help you identify the most important opportunities to act on.

Indi Young, is a researcher who coaches, writes, speaks, and teaches about inclusive product strategy. Her books on mental models and empathy are widely known & respected, and personally I've been a fan of hers for years and I have learned so much from her. She's developed this approach of deep listening over many years, she offers training and coaching in it, and now she's written a book about Deep Listening called Time to Listen.

Order Indi’s book here: https://indiyoung.com/books-time-to-listen/

Get training by Indi on Deep Listening: https://indiyoung.com/training-sectionpage/

Connect with Indi Young

Website

https://www.linkedin.com/in/carynwille/

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UX Cake is back with Season 3! Mar 07, 2022

UX cake podcast is coming back for Season 3 !!

I have missed you all so much these last couple of years while the podcast has been on a break ,and I'm really excited to share with you some of the changes that are coming in season three and give you just a little glimpse into some of the great content and learning that you have to look forward to.

UX cake has always been a podcast that helps you become more effective in your work and to really grow in your career, tune in to hear more of what you can expect from season 3.

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Learn UX: Career Growth Through Community Involvement Feb 17, 2020

Ep. 43: In the third of 3 episodes in our special mini-series called Learning UX, guest host Leo Zhang talks with Sara Hubbard and Caryn Wylie, the organizers of the meetup group Seattle Women of Design and UX, about growing your network and experience by getting involved in the UX community around you.

From Leo:

In our third and final Learn UX episode of the mini-series I wanted to bring on the founders of Seattle Women of Design and UX meetup (seaDUXX). Caryn Wille and Sara Hubbard are some of the most-respected advocates of women in UX in the our Seattle tech scene through their meetup, and on the show they will be talking about their experiences in founding and growing their meetup, and how it has helped them in both their personal and professional lives.

Caryn Wille

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ux-of-you/id1476322309

http://www.meetup.com/seaDUXX

Caryn is currently a Senior Interaction Designer at Google. Since 2011, Caryn has been helping companies from startups to medical associations to operas to telecom providers architect and design experiences that nest into the cross section of user needs and business goals. Her diverse client work has run the gamut of responsive websites, B2C e-commerce sites, internal business applications, live ticketing sales, and content management system (CMS) implementations, but she has yet to meet a project that doesn't benefit from a keen understanding of the people the experience is being built for. With a focus on storytelling and clear communication, she helps teams hone in on designing the right thing before bringing experiences to life. Caryn believes strongly in user-centered design and creating products and experiences that make users' lives easier and delight them in the process.

Sara Hubbard

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-m-hubbard/

Sara is a Senior User Experience Designer at Smartsheet. Sara has over six years experience working with globally-recognized brands, taking their complex tasks and transforming them into easy-to-use experiences. She takes a human-centered design approach to my work, and ruthlessly advocates for users. She prides herself in finding ways to both delight users, work within technical limitations, while meeting business needs. Sara also finds ways to give back to the community by teaching UX courses at the School of Visual Concepts, and being a mentor to folks entering the UX industry. Outside of work she enjoys playing board games, listening to true crime podcasts, and spending time with my polydactyl cat, Maisie.

Both Sara and Caryn are passionate about creating an inclusive UX community in Seattle, which they do through organizing monthly events through the meetup they founded togther: Seattle Women of Design & UX (seaDUXX).

This is the last episode of the three-run mini-series. This was such an impactful and eye-opening experience for me to host these, and I am forever grateful for this opportunity. Thank you all for taking the time to listen to this collaboration between Learn UX Seattle and UX Cake!

Leo Zhang, Founder of Learn UX Seattle

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leozhang

Learn UX Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/LearnUX/

Leo Zhang is a veteran UX Strategist and Researcher who has developed insights-based strategies for clients including Dell, USAA, Philips, Johnson Controls, Impinj, and the Federal Government. He brings a unique approach and toolkit to his work and meetup, borrowing from his past experience as a Naval Nuclear Engineer combined with a Master’s Degree in Design from Arizona State University. Outside of professional work, Leo’s passions lie within his Learn UX Seattle Meetup, which now has over 3,300 members and is one of the largest, most active UX meetups in Seattle. Leo is equally as passionate about people as he is UX, and he is proud to be a member of the Greater Seattle UX community.

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Permission to Speak - LaDonna Willems Jan 22, 2020

Ep. 42: Maybe there are times you’ve found yourself hesitating to speak up, to put your voice out there… this happens a lot, it’s not just a UX issue but is a common complaint in UX, and in tech in general. And it happens at every level, I’ve been in leadership roles for 20 years and I still experience this at times. My guest is LaDonna Willems, who is the associate editorial director at Dropbox.

LaDonna is a writer, and she’s an expert on voice. So when she realized that she wasn’t always speaking up, because on some level she was waiting for permission, that was incredibly eye-opening. She went through a process that really changed her perception, and it was so transformative, she wanted to share it with others. So She created a workshop to go through the process, to help others who want to find the power in their voice and to speak it, in whatever way comes naturally to them. There are many ways to speak, but it starts with finding the source of your power, and the power of your voice.

LaDonna Witmer Willems

@wordsbyladonna

Writer, Speaker, Associate Editorial Director at the Dropbox Brand Studio

Along her personal journey to find her own voice, LaDonna has been a newspaper journalist, advertising copywriter, copy director, and poet. She’s currently one of the editorial gurus on the Dropbox Brand Studio team in San Francisco, creating and facilitating the most powerful expressions of the Dropbox voice. In minutes between meetings and her daughter’s ballet class, she’s also writing a book.

LaDonna Willems

https://www.ladonnawillems.com/out-loud

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Learn UX: Aligning UX Value Jan 17, 2020

Ep. 41: This episode is the second in our special mini-series called Learning UX, hosted by Leo Zhang. In this mini-series, Leo talks in-person with local UX leaders about their careers and topics they’re passionate about. This episode Leo is talking with Kimberly Wiessner, about her career spanning design, creative direction and product strategy, and about bringing teams together to align on UX value.

From Leo Zhang: In our second Learn UX episode of the mini-series I wanted to bring on a friend with a knack for aligning, teaching, and driving UX work across different teams. Kimberly Wiessner is a Principal Product Strategist at REI and is going to be talking about a topic she is very passionate about: the relationship between UX and other teams in an organization.

Kimberly Wiessner, currently in a Leadership role within the Digital Product Strategy team at REI, has done everything from founding her own agency, being a Global Creative Director for HSBC, guiding design direction as Director of Innovation at USAA, to now working as a Principal at REI. Throughout her career, Kim has been passionate about bringing teams together in creative ways. In this episode we tap into her knowledge bringing teams together in various UX settings and take lessons away on how you do this at your workplace.

Kim Wiessner is a high-performing leader with a passion for orchestrating customer experiences. A natural ability to see the big picture, absorb strategy, and provide clear direction toward action. A passion for influencing organizational change and aligning cross-functional teams. Positive energy that inspires others to work through ambiguous problem spaces. A customer-centered mindset and approach to design thinking and product discovery. Delivery-oriented team leader and ego-less task smasher.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimberlywiessner/

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Bias Is The Context We're In Dec 05, 2019

Ep 40: Since I started asking users questions as part of my design process over 20 years ago, I’ve often asked myself, how could I ask better questions. Am I asking the right questions? What bias am I bringing into the interaction?

As we progress in our research practice and go beyond the 101 lessons like avoiding leading questions, asking questions that are open-ended, leaving silence in the spaces to allow participants to talk more, learning to interpret actions and expressions not just words… those are all important, that’s where we start, but how can we go beyond that. at some point we might begin to look inward as researchers, and the part we as individuals are playing in the outcome, our biases, assumptions, our own values and life experiences.

Who better to have this conversation with, I asked myself, than Steve Portigal, an author and expert on the subject of asking questions. Steve wrote the book Interviewing Users which is a great place to start for those who are newer to asking users questions, and he also wrote Doorbells, danger and dead batteries, with stories from practiced user researchers that deals with some of these questions of bias. We had a great conversation with lots of great advice for researchers at any level.

Linked in https://www.linkedin.com/in/steveportigal/

Medium https://medium.com/@steveportigal

Steve’s Dollars to Donuts podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dollars-to-donuts/id956673263

Twitter https://twitter.com/steveportigal

About Steve Portigal

Steve Portigal helps companies to think and act strategically when innovating with user insights. His work has informed the development of professional audio gear, wine packaging, medical information systems, design systems, videoconferencing technology, and music streaming services. He’s also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations. Steve is an accomplished presenter who speaks about culture, innovation, and design at companies and conferences across the globe.

STEVE'S BOOKS

Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories

FROM THE SHOW

Purchase the Cognitive Bias Codex Infographic

Slack channels:

Go to this GREAT list of slack channels for UX including UXR

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Learn UX: Mentoring and Hiring Nov 20, 2019

We're introducing a new series, called Learn UX, hosted by Leo Zhang. Leo started a meetup here in Seattle called Learn UX, aimed at UXers in earlier to mid-career, that hosts great speakers like Torry Podmajersky, who we had on our show talking about strategic UX writing back in episode 33. Leo is adapting his content to a podcast format for UX Cake, and we're trying out a three part series of to see how that resonates with our listeners. So we totally want to hear what you think about this! Chat us up on twitter or IG or FB or at uxcake.co (links below)

From Learn UX: To kick off our collaboration with UX Cake, we are starting with a topic that would resonate with both Senior UX professionals as well as those just starting out: mentorship and hiring.

Drory Ben-Menachem, currently Director of Product Design at Zonar Systems, has over 25 years experience working in a wide array of UX environments, as well as speaking at UX conference and guest lecturing at prominent schools such as The University of Washington. Throughout his entire career, he has always been passionate about all things revolving around mentorship. He’s written very well-received articles around mentorship such as Mentoring is a Mitzva and Mentoring ‘No-Hire’ Design Candidates. In this episode we talk about some of the lessons he’s learned along the way about both being a receptive mentee as well as being an effective mentor, and how his adventures in mentorship can help people of all levels of experience in our field.

Drory has also been in multiple positions where he has served as a hiring manager, and he talks about how his experiences in mentoring has helped him make more informed UX hiring decisions. In this episode we will cover how fundamentally important mentorship is to grow as a UX professional as well as how it can help both hiring managers as well as job-seekers in the hiring process.

From Leo: I am honored to be a part of UX Cake. It means a lot to me to be able to share my Learn UX community with a wide range of UX professionals from all around the world and I’d like to thank everyone for taking time out of your day to listen to our first collaboration episode!

Leo Zhang, Founder of Learn UX Seattle

About Drory:

Designer, puzzle solver, idea shepherd, creative coach, storyteller, writer, researcher, mentor, data-viz geek, foodie, film buff, gamer, aspiring chef & rally driver.

Born at a very young age, he made Seattle his home in 1991 and has enjoyed time at agencies, high-tech companies, and startups. Sometimes when it rains, he goes outside holding a cocktail umbrella and pretends he's a giant who makes bad decisions.

Hopes one day someone will call him "sir" without adding "you're making a scene".

Around the web:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/droryb/

Medium: https://medium.com/@droryb

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/uxcake.

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Uplevel Your Career With UX Strategy Oct 23, 2019

Ep. 38: This week I got to talk with Jaime Levy, a UX pioneer, and Author of the book ‘UX Strategy’, about 'moving beyond’ being a designer or researcher in UX, and ‘leveling up’ in your career by moving into UX strategy or digital transformation. We talk about the difference between UX Strategy as a process or workflow vs. UX strategy as a role, and what that takes. Then we talk about Digital Transformation as the next step up in leveling up, from UX Strategy.

There are many different definitions of ux strategy out there, if you google ‘ux strategy’ you’ll get many vague and even conflicting definitions. To set some context in case you haven’t read Jaime book, she defines as the intersection between business strategy and UX design, with a key component being early and continuous validation of the value proposition with customers. It’s a high-level plan of how your product or feature is going to achieve the business goals.

About Jaime

Jaime Levy is an author, university professor and a user experience strategist. Her best-selling O’Reilly Media book is called UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want. The book presents a solid framework on the practice, which lies at the intersection of UX design and business strategy. For 30 years, Jaime has been an internationally recognized pioneer in the creation of innovative digital products and services.

Website https://jaimelevy.com/

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaimerlevy/

Medium https://medium.com/@JaimeRLevy

Twitter https://twitter.com/JaimeRLevy

UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want

By Jaime Levy

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Collaborative Research Oct 09, 2019

This episode was a live recording for the podcast at the 5th annual Radical Research Summit in Vancouver BC. Our panel topic was collaborative research - Working with people in other disciplines, in other teams, or even in other organizations to produce really impactful research that will get integrated into the experiences we’re creating. The panelists were Ariba Jahan, Innovation Director at Ad Council, Judd Antin, Director of Research at Airbnb, and Komal Faiz, a UX researcher at Zensurince. You’ll get a fuller introduction of them at the beginning of the panel.

This episode is special not only because it was recorded live in front of an audience, it was also different because halfway through the panel the fire alarm went off! And yes, we had to evacuate the building. Although we are laughing about it now, it was not, in the moment, terribly funny. I was just thinking, how are we going to make this into an episode? I wasn’t worried about a fire. We edited it out for the podcast but you can see it unedited on our youtube channel. Fortunately, we were allowed back into the building about 10 minutes later to finish up with one last discussion point and then some really great questions and answers with the audience. About everything from who has the power to make decisions to working in agile ways to discovering and incorporating everyone’s knowledge into the process.

If your organization or conference would like to host a live recording of the ux cake podcast, you can find out more about that by emailing us at team@uxcake.co. This was the 4th live recording ux cake has had and I mentioned I love doing this because there is such a physical sense of the community, and the community is why I and the rest of the volunteer team do this podcast. Also They’re really well- attended and they get great download numbers so it's a great way to spread the news about your organization to a global audience. OUR PANELISTS

Ariba Jahan As an immigrant Bengali woman that discovered her profound hearing loss at age eight, Ariba focuses on advocating for diverse, marginalized voices that are often overlooked and ensuring we bring humanity into tech. After a varied background including Biomechancial Engineering, engineering research publications, and a stint at medical school, Ariba lead operations and product management for industry-shifting startups. This work and her passion for social impact brought her to the Ad Council as the Director of Innovation, where she’s charged with scaling design thinking and agile practices, creating digital products to create measurable social impact, and exploring future-forward technology for the organization.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/aribajahan/

https://twitter.com/aribajahan

Judd Antin is Director of Research at Airbnb, where he leads a global organization of over 100 amazing humans across 6 research functions. Prior to joining Airbnb in 2015, Judd was Research Manager at Facebook. Judd is a leader and grower of high-performing, fulfilled teams, and a strategic product and design thinker and doer. Always a researcher above all, Judd is deeply multi-method, fascinated by people and evidence.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/juddantin/

https://twitter.com/juddantin

Komal Faiz is a UX researcher. She is a global shaper at the World Economic Forum (WEF); founder of Design Pakistan; runs a podcast called ‘South Asian Female Travellers’; and is a member of the 'Design Research Society.' She has a master’s in strategic foresight & innovation from OCADU, Canada. Prior to her current role at Zensurance, she worked as a design researcher for a project on 'women's mobility' funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, UK, in collaboration with Coventry University, University of Malaya, and Design Pakistan.

https://twitter.com/komalfaiz

https://www.linkedin.com/in/komal-faiz

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Research Beyond Words Sep 25, 2019

Ep 36: Sometimes words just can't get you the research insights you need. This week we’re talking about alternative ways of gathering insights in user research, beyond just verbal and written communication. There are many circumstances when words just aren’t the best way for people to tell us what they’re thinking, feeling, or doing, so being able to use physical or tactile methods can really affect the insights you’re able to gather. My guest today is Anna Macaranas who is a Senior Design Strategist at Digitalist Group & Network, in Vancouver BC. Anna has some great insights and examples for how to get participants to express themselves if words aren’t working.

Anna is an award-winning researcher and strategist at Digitalist, a customer experience innovation company. Forever curious, she loves diving into a complex problem and understanding the context and factors that bring the team closer to the ideal solution. She’s passionate about helping companies build stronger relationships with their customers through organizational change, internal capability building and inclusive processes.

Twitter https://twitter.com/annajlm

Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-macaranas/

If you want to help UX Cake, follow us on twitter, and subscribe to the newsletter for updates and bonus content.

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Design For The Future Sep 11, 2019

For any experience you’re designing, you want to know what the current trends are, but if you’re looking for innovative solutions, you want to predict what future trends will affect your audiences' needs & motivations & obstacles so you can design for the future. Our topic this episode has a fairly unsexy name but is thoroughly intriguing — innovation-based trend forecasting. This isn’t currently a common methodology in UX today, but it’s something that could definitely be a game-changer for your organization.

My guests are experts in trend forecasting: Lillian Pontius-Goldblatt is a senior strategist and brand storyteller at Carbone Smolan Agency, and Jennifer Passas is a brand strategist at Gensler. In this episode we’re talking about applying trend forecasting to your design practice. And this is not just focused on the design of a digital product though it can include that - but design as it applies to the larger human experience -- built environments, or workplace design, physical or organizational design, systems, services. And it includes all the roles that contribute to the creation of an experience, designers, researchers, PMs, developers and business leaders of all kinds.

Lillian and Jennifer conducted a workshop at this year’s South by southwest about how individual’s and teams can incorporate the practice of innovation-based trend forecasting into their own process. They talk through the process in practice, as well as how they condensed the process into a workshop time-frame. Lillian will be presenting this process at this year's Radical Research Summit in Vancouver, BC, on Sept. 27th. This one-day conference focuses on UX research with a great line-up of speakers and diverse topics, and you can get a 20% discount if you use the promo code UXCAKE!

FREE DOWNLOAD - Download Jennifer & Lillians 2-page guide & resources for creating a practice like this in your own team. Plus they have a list of resources to go to when you're looking for emerging trends!

Lillian Pontius-Goldblatt is an adaptive, creative, and curious storyteller with proven skills in brand strategy, organizational culture, and research-based insights. She works as a senior strategist and brand storyteller at Carbone Smolan Agency where she leads brand projects for corporate and cultural clients, as well as the agency’s trend reporting practice.

Website - lillianpontiusgoldblatt.com/

Twitter - @Carbone_Smolan

Medium - @lillianpontiusgoldblatt

Agency website - carbonesmolan.com

Jennifer Passas is a brand and experience strategist from Vancouver, BC who currently lives in New York City. She has a BA in Art History from the University of Victoria and a Masters in Branding from the School of Visual Arts. Currently a Brand Strategy Lead at Gensler, Jennifer spends her days thinking of ways brands can come to life through analog and digital experiences in the built environment. She has expertise in naming, trend reporting and is a writer for PSFK.

About the Radical Research Summit

The Radical Research Summit is an annual one-day event that brings together over 250 researchers, UX practitioners, ethnographers, product managers and businesses. Attendees will connect and learn from thought leaders in user experience research, emerging technology practitioners and world-class academic researchers. The day will provoke and inspire your team with new ideas while gaining practical and actionable insights to be more effective influencers and deliver research that has impact.

Twitter - @radresearchvan

Facebook - radresearchvan

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If you enjoy this podcast and if you think what we’re doing is useful and important, there are some really simple ways you can help us. You can follow us on twitter. You can like and reshare our posts. You can subscribe to the newsletter for updates and bonus content. And you can share this episode, or any of our episodes, with a friend. And we would love it if you would rate & review us on Apple Podcast!

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Uncovering Truffles: The Scarcity and Value of Women in STEM

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The Cognitive Diversity Issue in UX Aug 27, 2019

Ep #34: Today’s episode is a conversation with Melanie Polkosky who is a UX Psychologist with a PhD in cognitive psychology and a long history in tech. After Melanie left a 13-year career at IBM, she wrote a book called Uncovering Truffles, a book about the scarcity and value of Women in Stem. And something she wrote about in her book stood out to me as really relevant to many people UX, across genders. In researching her book, Melanie found that certain cognitive styles can make it more difficult to get ahead in tech and leadership, and that contributes to holding many women back in STEM fields.

And here’s the interesting connection to UX. Thinking styles that are more thoughtful, observational, perhaps more empathetic... the people with these cognitive styles can have a hard time fitting into tech teams, and in leadership roles especially. And, ironically, these cognitive styles — largely intuitive, an interest in people and behavior, and highly empathetic, are a common denominator in the discipline of UX, as I mentioned, across genders. So that’s what we’re digging into today - what can someone do if they find themselves in this place - a place where they feel like to they don’t fit in, or they feel undervalued or misunderstood? Fortunately for us, Melanie has great experience and some great advice.

Melanie is a social-cognitive psychologist, a UX executive, and an author. She has deep expertise in speech technology, artificial intelligence and mixed method user research. She also holds the Associate Certified Coach (ACC) credential from the International Coach Federation. Her coaching practice focuses on career and life coaching. Currently, Melanie leads design and UX as the SVP Customer Experience at Sweepr.

Follow Melanie on Quora: Early Career UX

Buy Melanie's book

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Getting The Work You Want Aug 20, 2019

Ep. #14 (re-run) Much of the work in UX and in our careers requires convincing others, about our ideas, our work, or our ability to do the work we want to do. My guest is Fiz Yazdi, a managing director at cxpartners in London and Bristol, UK. Fiz developed an approach to selling based on what’s called a ‘consultative’ model which Fiz adapted into a simple framework she uses in her own UX practice and has begun sharing it with others.

More about Fiz Yazdi

Fiz is an enthusiastic design leader. She’s been consulting since the year 2000, tooling-up people, teams and organisations for success. She’s been on a journey from UX consultant to MD at cxpartners, helping it grow to one of the world’s leading independent innovation design consultancies. She's just started mentoring high growth, high tech start-ups too. Fiz always starts with people, and combines that with a deep respect for culture, business and technology to drive damn good work.

Download Fiz Yazdi's Guide to Getting The Work You Want to Do

www.cxpartners.co.uk

Twitter: @cxpartners

Connect with UX Cake!

Website: uxcake.co

Strategic Writing for UX: Drive Engagement, Conversion, and Retention with Every Word

Podcast music by hip-hop band Eaters (song Cruziero, album Simian Samba) Visit their page on Facebook to find more music

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Words Make Experiences Work Aug 05, 2019

Ep #33: This week I’m talking with Torrey Podmajersky about her new book, Strategic Writing for UX - how to drive engagement, conversion, and retention with every word. Torrey is not only an expert at UX Writing, she’s an expert at getting the right words into the experience — which is half the challenge sometimes, even if you’ve determined what the right thing to say where is, getting the rest of the team to see the value can be harder than it should be. So of course, we talk about that. Her book has so many great tips and techniques and tools to help you determine the right words for your experience. We talked about how to incorporate that into your or your team’s process, how to measure the effectiveness of that, and how to prove out the value of effective UX writing to your stakeholders.

This topic is so important for anyone who is involved with creating user experiences, because so many people in a team contribute to the words that a user sees.

About Torrey Podmajersky:

Torrey Podmajersky uses UX content to help teams meet business and customer goals. She speaks and teaches about UX writing, and she wrote Strategic Writing for UX (O’Reilly Media, 2019).

Torrey has written UX content for Google, OfferUp, Xbox, and Microsoft. She teaches at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts (SVC). She teaches teams and conference attendees how to write UX that solves problems for their organization and for the people who will use those organizations’ products and experiences.

Connect and follow Torrey

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/torreybird/

Website - torreypodmajersky.com

Social media

Twitter - @torreybird
Medium - @torreyp

THE BOOK YOU NEED TO BUY

by Torrey Podmajersky

THE EVENTS YOU NEED TO GO TO

Content Strategy Meetup: Strategic Writing for UX

August 8, 2019 - Seattle

Seattle Interactive Conference

Oct 17 & 18 - Seattle

UX New Zealand

October 30, 2019 - Wellington, NZ

THE BAKERY YOU NEED TO VISIT

Borracchini's Bakery

Seattle's historic Italian bakery, tracing our roots back to our founding in 1922.

Open 7 days a week

2307 Rainier Ave S

Seattle, WA 98144

Listen on Apple | Spotify | Google | Website

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Negotiate the Salary & Title You Deserve Jul 22, 2019

Ep #32: Welcome back to UX Cake! We took a short break and now we're back on our regular publishing schedule. In this episode I talked with Tamara Adlin, a UX strategy expert, speaker, and author, who was a guest in season 1, episode 10, talking about creating alignment personas. This time we're talking about a really important topic that plagues many of us and that she is really passionate about, she’s been sharing her wisdom in meetups and conferences in Seattle, and I wanted to make this available to the larger UX community. Negotiating a salary or title in UX in in general is not easy, a lot of people struggle with translating their value in UX into business metrics. So it can be challenging for anyone, but many women especially have other internal hurdles to jump. Research has shown that women are much more likely to discount their own experience and value when it comes to salaries and titles. Tamara has some really great, specific and actionable advice for you, and although we’re talking about women in UX primarily, a lot of this is applicable to anyone who feels they aren’t great at negotiating.

In this episode we talk about how to find your superpower and assign a value to it, how to prepare for a successful negotiation, and a few key steps to remember when you’re going through the negotiation process. Also some really great advice if you're asking for a raise or promotion.

About Tamara Adlin

Tamara Adlin is the President of Adlin, Inc, a one-woman Customer Experience Strategy consulting company in Seattle, WA. She works with early-stage startups, and big companies trying to act like startups, to bring customer focus to the business teams and business savvy to the design teams. She has written several books on Personas, including her latest website on Alignment Personas. She has also developed a reputation as an un-boring speaker and teacher on everything from personas to the art of negotiating as a UX professional (especially if you are a woman.)

Linked In

Twitter @tamaraadlin

Read Tamara’s article: Elation/Deflation: The Responsibility of Being an Experienced Woman in Tech (or any business)

Check out Tamara’s Office Hours

Check out the Ladies Get Paid Website

You’ll find articles, webinars, events, lots of great resources for you there.

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Website: uxcake.co

Podcast music by hip-hop band Eaters (song Cruziero, album Simian Samba)

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Influencing Without Authority Apr 01, 2019

This week's episode was a live recording at the ConveyUX conference in early March with a panel of UX pros talking about Influencing without authority, which is such an important topic and clearly very relevant based on the turn-out - it was standing room only. This episode is almost twice as long as our normal episodes — but you won’t want to miss the second half, where we turned it over to audience members to ask advice about their own situations, kind of mini-mentoring sessions, on a variety of things, from getting stakeholders to respect your quantitative research, to dealing with others’ biases that undermine your authority. We had a real diversity of experience in the panel which made for such an amazing conversation, and the audience was great — really engaged. This is really what UX Cake is about, that synergy that can happen when we come together as a community so I love doing live recordings.

If you enjoy this podcast, join the UX Cake community by following us on social media - twitter, FB, Instagram… and if you like this episode, share it with a colleague or two, send them a link to this episode. Those are the ways we’re growing UX Cake, where our mission is to strengthen the UX community by helping ux pros become more effective in their work and careers. It only takes a moment, and it helps us so much!

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When UX and Agile Meet... Mar 12, 2019

This week we’re talking about incorporating UX into an Agile product development process. It’s been a common complaint for the past couple of decades most agile processes don’t allow time for ux research and design. Teams that want the best human-centered design outcomes have to be intentional about that and it means adjusting their agile processes in some way, so they can use ux resources more effectively. But many teams don’t even know they need to do this, or if they do know they have issues with their UX, they don’t know how or what to change. Today we’re talking with Shayna Atkins who is an agile expert and a big proponent of incorporating UX into Agile.

Shayna is an agile coach and founder of Atkco Inc in Chicago. she's worked with organizations large and small, from corporations and startups to universities and non-profits, and she has success stories that prove that the most successful agile framework is one that incorporates UX research and design in the process from the start, where it brings high value. She’s got great examples of what this approach looks like and techniques to accomplish it. and She also has some great ideas about how anyone in an organization can advocate for these kind of changes, to see more effective outcomes.

Oh, and if you enjoy this content, please, take just a moment to rate and review us in iTunes or apple podcast, it would mean so much to us. And thank you SVC, the school of visual concepts here in Seattle, for leaving a nice review and also for recommending us to your students! The feeling is mutual - and That’s how our community grows. OK let’s talk about getting more effective and agile.

Shayna is a founder, product manager, and Agile coach. A product development expert, Shayna Atkins has managed and coached multi-million dollar IT transformations for 8 years. The brains of Agile operations, she most recently stood up an Agile Release Train for a fortune 500 Financial Services company.

@shaynaatkins

atkcoinc.com/join

Spotify Framework

Scaled Agile Framework

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Recipe for Effective User Research Feb 25, 2019

Are you committed to doing user research in order to design and build products and services that work well, solve real needs, and create engaging experiences? Chances are pretty good that if you produce user research in your work, at some point you will feel like your research is just not making the impact it should be. Or you may have trouble making a case for doing more research — and the number one way to get your organization on board with doing more research is to make sure the research that IS done is super effective. So, how can you get more effective?

We spoke with expert researcher Danyell Jones, and she’s got a recipe for making research more effective for in-house teams. Danyell is a User Experience Research Lead at ZS Associates, a management consulting firm in Chicago, and she’s giving a talk at the upcoming Convey UX conference called A Recipe for In-house Research. We caught up with her recently where she was working from home while Chicago was in the middle of the Polar Vortex.

Danyell Jones oversees and conducts research across 5 different verticals in the Software Development group at ZS Associates. Danyell works with teams to develop reusable and efficient processes for conducting and analyzing research while increasing the visibility of the research practice and user experience team. In addition to working in user research, Danyell teaches graduate-level classes in the HCI program at DePaul University as well as at the Illinois Institute of Art in the Web Design and Interactive Media department. She is also a runner, an avid reader, a Whovian, and a video game lover.

Follow Danyell on Twitter @danyelljones

Wondering how to ask better questions to avoid the mistakes we talked about? We recommend this book for every level of experience:

Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights by Steve Portigal

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UX Cake Pop: Getting Buy-in Feb 18, 2019

A UX Cake Pop is like a bite-sized piece of UX Cake. In this Cake Pop, we're talking about being more effective through getting buy-in early. We interviewed a few UX pros who were attending the Interaction19 conference while we were there, and got lots of great responses to our question: What's the biggest challenge you've been dealing with in your work lately? We got a great response from Marie Williams, who’s the founder and CEO of Dream Networks CIC in London, about both the difficulty and the importance of getting buy in. This is something that’s often at the root of why something might be either a success or a failure, and it’s also something that can be easy to forget about when we’re in the throws of a project and trying to move quickly and maybe not thinking about who we need to bring along.

So if you’ve struggled with how to get buy-in, know that you are not alone.We’ve at least touched on it in many UX Cake episodes, because it’s so core to getting anything important done. And there’s not a one-size-fits-all answer for how to get buy in, but, there has been a lot of great advice from the pros I’ve talked with on UX Cake. Way back in episode 2 I talked with long-time executive Eva Manolis about getting buy-in for UX, and she shared how her teams got buy-in for design & research at Amazon. Then in episode 10 Tamara Adlin shared her technique of creating personas with executives, which creates alignment up-front but also brings those executives into the process of defining who you’re solving problems for, and what their needs and motivations are. And most recently in episode 28, Marty Neumeier talked about a framework which puts everyone together in framing the problem and identifying solutions, which is crucial for getting buy in from the team and from each decision maker. If you’re having trouble getting buy-in, you might also check out episode #14 with Fiz Yazdi - she created an approach to selling your ideas that’s based on a consulting selling strategy — and has a lot to do with understanding what those you want to “sell” to are motivated by, and what their objective is.

TQWQvZv54Ev5vW2a7L7u

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Website: uxcake.co

Scramble: How agile strategy can build epic brands in record time

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Fast and effective - Agile Strategy with Marty Neumeier Feb 04, 2019

In this episode we talk with the renown brand strategist Marty Neuemeier about a strategy framework he calls Agile Strategy. Marty’s written many strategy books - design strategy, brand strategy, business strategy - and his most recent book Scramble has a very unique approach to the business book genre. It’s set as a novel - Marty calls it a ‘business thriller’ I haven’t read any other business book like it. Marty tells us about why agile strategy is more likely to create innovation and bold change, what are some things to keep in mind if you want your brilliant strategy to see the light of day, and what anyone - from business executives to design leaders to individual contributors - how we all can use this framework for more effective outcomes.

Marty is a keynote speaker at Interaction19 - learn more at interaction19.ixda.org

Follow Marty on Twitter @martyneumeier

BOOKS & LINKS

ZAG: The #1 Strategy of High-Performance Brands

The Designful Company: How to build a culture of nonstop innovation

BRAND A-Z

An interactive dictionary of 1,000 essential brand terms

Connect with UX Cake!

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Recovering and Reinvention with John Maeda Jan 28, 2019

Ep #27: I’m really excited to share with you my conversation with John Maeda — about Reinvention. This episode covers a lot of ground John talked about why we should focus on recover fast vs. fail fast, why inclusive design is so important, and why we should be using Anpanman to train our AI platforms. John is well known for so many things, across design, tech, and business worlds. He wrote one of my favorite books, titled “The Laws of Simplicity.” He’s also written extensively on design, leadership, and technology, has been a professor at MIT Media Lab, the president of Rhode Island School of Design, he has been and is an advisor and board member of many startups and companies, and for the last 3 or so years he has been the global head of computational design and inclusion at Automattic. Whether you know who John is or not, you’re in for a real treat because he’s just so insightful, and truly enjoyable to listen to. John will be speaking at the Interaction19 conference in Seattle in February.

John Maeda is an American executive spearheading a new convergence across the design and technology industries. He joined Automattic in 2016 as Global Head of Computational Design + Inclusion and previously served as Design Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), a world-leading venture capital firm. Maeda can be found on Twitter discussing technology, business and design at @johnmaeda, one of TIME Magazine’s 140 Best Twitter Feeds.

View a transcript of this episode on our website

John's Youtube channel

Rebrand Cities, Hajj Fleming, CEO (build-a-thons in different cities) Helping small businesses build websites

John Gardner’s Essay “Self Renewal”

Kahlil Gibran: Joy and Sorrow

from his book The Prophet

The Laws of Simplicity

by John Maeda

In The Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda offers ten laws for balancing simplicity and complexity in business, technology, and design―guidelines for needing less and actually getting more.

Redesigning Leadership

by John Maeda

Lessons for a new generation of leaders on teamwork, meetings, conversations, free food, social media, apologizing, and other topics.

More resources from John available on his site https://maedastudio.com

Portrait of John Maeda by Helena Price for Techies Project.

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Designing The Impossible with Nelly Ben Hayoun Jan 21, 2019

Ep #26: This week we are talking about designing the impossible, with Dr. Nelly Ben Hyoun, founder and experience designer of Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios in London. They create large scale, extreme experiences like being an astronaut, or erupting volcanos, or recreating natural disasters, for organizations as diverse as Nasa, the European Space Agency, Google, Mattel, Nike, Lego, the list goes on and on. So designing impossible things is just part of every day for Nelly and her teams — and even though it sounds kind of wonderful and magical, maybe the end result is magical but the process is what she calls Brutal. And for her, that is a critical aspect of anything that is good design - there has to be contention or friction in creating something meaningful, what you get from a plurality of thinking, through a multi-disciplinary team.

Besides creating magnificent experiences at Nelly Ben Hayoun Studios, she’s also founded the University of the Underground in London, created an international Space Orchestra, recently completed a feature film about political theorist Hannah Arendt, she’s currently a Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art, and that’s just a few of the things she’s up to. And next up, she’ll be working on becoming a mermaid…

FROM THE SHOW

The beautiful song “Mermaids" by Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) taught political science and philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York and the University of Chicago, widely acclaimed as a brilliant and original thinker, and author.

The Human Condition, by Hannah Arendt

Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding

by Hannah Arendt

Nelly Ben Hayoun - Films (from ImDB)

I am (not) a monster (Documentary) 2019

Disaster Playground (Documentary) 2015

The International Space Orchestra (Documentary) 2013

The sport of being a mermaid

Yes it’s true - swimming like a mermaid is an 'extreme sport.’ You’re welcome.

Follow Nelly

https://twitter.com/weareNBHstudios

https://twitter.com/NellyBenHayoun

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Changing the Disability Design Narrative Jan 14, 2019

Ep. #25: This week we’re talking about designing withdisability, rather than fordisability, with my guest Liz Jackson. Liz is a disability advocate who is trying to shift the disability narrative. We talked about how the way we currently approach disability in design can actually cause more problems that solutions for people with disabilities, and how language - phrases we commonly use in design, like accessibility and inclusion, and even design thinking methodology - makes disabled people the recipients, rather than the drivers, of design. And what a product or design team can do to get the perspectives they need and make sure that disabled people are treated as the experts in disability.

(Transcript available online)

Follow The Disabled List on Instagram and Twitter

Follow Liz Jackson on Twitter

www.disabledlist.org

FROM THE SHOW

Rie Norregaard- SY Partners

Medium article: Designing for Humanity: Do we need a new design frame?

Workshop Proceedings: Aging and Disability - Beyond Stereotypes to Inclusion: Proceedings of a Workshop(2018)

Why Vanilla is anything but boring!

Real Vanilla Isn't Plain. It Depends On (Dare We Say It) Terroir (NPR)

In Defense Of All Things Vanilla

BOOKS

Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability

by Aimi Hamraie

Brief Answers to the Big Questions (Oct 16, 2018)

by Stephen Hawking

Connect with UX Cake!

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Design a Better World, with Don Norman Jan 08, 2019

Ep. #24: Welcome to season 2! We are kicking the season off with a fascinating conversation about changing the world with design, with Don Norman. Don Norman has been a well-known name in the design field for over 30 years, and is currently Director of Design Lab at UC San Diego, where he spoke to us from, in between trips around the world spreading the practice of design to change the world. You might know Don from his book The Design of Everyday Things, or maybe you know him as a co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, or any one of the other many influential writingsand talks and work he’s created. Don is generally recognized as one of the early framers of the discipline we now call user experience, which is a term he coined while he was a VP at Apple, though he really doesn’t like how the term UX is being used -- it’s often misused, it’s overused and it’s lost its original intent. He talked about that a little in our conversation, but mostly we talked about why, and how, designers and researchers in our discipline should be changing the world.

Don Norman is the founder and Director of the Design Lab at the University of California, San Diego. The UC San Diego Design Lab does fundamental work in a number of different areas, with healthcare and public health being the largest. He is also cofounder of the Nielsen Norman Group [https://www.nngroup.com], a member of the National Academy of Engineering, IDEO fellow, and former Vice President of Apple. He serves on numerous company and educational advisory boards and boards of directors. He has published 20 books translated into 20 languages including Emotional Design and Design of Everyday Things. He can be found at www.jnd.org.

Don is one of the keynote speakers at this year’s IxDA conference, Interaction19.

Books by Don Norman:

The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition

Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things

From the show:

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

by William Easterly

ERIC VON HIPPEL evhippel@mit.edu - Professor of Technological Innovation at MIT

FREE INNOVATION – (A book on how citizens create and share innovations) (free PDF download)

Community-based design organizations for change:

San Diego

Design Forward Alliance

Seattle

Design for Good | AIGA Seattle

Design in Public

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Designing a Life You Love Nov 27, 2018

This week, I had the opportunity to speak with Ayse Birsel, a renown designer and the co-founder of Birsel + Seck, an award-winning design and innovation studio in NY, working with Herman Miller, IKEA, and Toyota, among others. Ayse is also the creator of Design the Life You Love, which is a guide for anyone who wants to create their very best life. Ayse developed this transformative process when she decided to try out a design methodology she created called Deconstruction-Reconstruction, on her own life. Also, we talked about how this is a process you can apply to designing anything - a product, a team, a company, even a family! We did not, however, sing a song. Next time.

Ayse is going to be a keynote speaker at Interaction19 in February, IxDA’s global conference, which I’m excited to say will be held in Seattle this year! This year’s conference looks amazing - Go to interaction19.ixda.org to learn more and register.

Show highlights:

As designers and leaders, we should improve people’s lives and help people find more joy and simplicity in their lives.
Ayse says she used to design products, and now she designs lives! Fear and excitement went hand in hand when Ayse made a shift in her career.
There is something about the intersection of life and design that people are drawn to, as Ayse has discovered through meeting others through her workshops or who read her book.
Deconstruction-Reconstruction teaches us the key to doing more with less, says Ayse. You can’t have everything, but you can be intentional about what you choose to have in order to create something unique. This process is for everyone – any age, any stage of life, no design experience required!

Step 1: DECONSTRUCTION. Taking the whole apart.

Step 2: POINT OF VIEW. Seeing the same things differently.

Step 3: RECONSTRUCTION. Putting it back together.

Step 4: EXPRESSION. Giving it form.

Design The Life You Love shows people how to use proven design principles to curate the lives they most desire.
Ayse’s method provides a roadmap of sorts for channeling your creativity and inspiration into steps that end with practical goals and action steps for creating a more personally fulfilling life.
The Hero Exercise Ayse uses in her workshops is often a revealing process which helps people discover their values.
Ayse shares that our values are the foundation of everything we do. Without them, we wouldn’t know how to make choices. This is important for any kind of design.
Designing the Company You Love is based on using non-threatening tools to help businesses solve problems, and helps build trust and ownership.
Ayse has a course on 42courses.com you can access if you do not have access to her workshops.

Resources:

Design The Life You Love, by Ayse Birsel (you really need the physical book for this one)

Ayse’s website

Link to Ayse’s podcast, Design the Life You Love, on salon.com

Design the Life You Love on Itunes

Ayse on Design Matters podcast with Debbie Millman

Ayse on Twitter

Design the Life You Love on Facebook

Many thanks to UpTop user experience consulting firm in Seattle for use of their location for recording!

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Being in UX at a Startup Nov 07, 2018

I recently joined a start-up called Spruce Up so topics related to startups have been top-of-mind for me. In this episode of UX Cake, I am joined by Phillip Hunter of Pulse Labs and Cassie Wallender of Invio, Inc. We really enjoyed recording live in Seattle and had a candid conversation about the challenges and benefits of being in UX at a start-up and shared the techniques we have found effective while working in this type of start-up environment.

Phillip Hunter is VP of Products at Pulse Labs in Seattle, WA, and has designed and created strategy for voice-based products and services for hundreds of customer service systems, and has led, managed, inspired, trained, and mentored hundreds of UX and product management professionals.

Cassie Wallender is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Invio, Inc in Seattle. Cassie is an effective senior contributor and team manager in both product and design for several successful startups (iLike, acquired by Myspace for over $20m in 2009, and Appature, acquired by IMS Health for over $100m in 2013).

Show Highlights:

Challenges of working at a UX start-up including often being the only designer, you often don’t have customers or users yet, and if you do have customers, you may have a very limited budget/resources.
No one hands you a charter stating the problems, objectives, and how to solve them. Everything is ambiguous, and you have to be a part of the discovery/inquiry/problem-solving processes.
Everything is on the line while working at a UX and pressure can build. The investors, founders, and employees are all counting on you.
Despite all the challenges, we do it because of the special rewards and potential, and opportunities to be part of something new, and important.
Techniques we use to address the challenges of startups.
Leigh, Phillip, and Cassie tell their very different stories of how they got into startups.
Check out Angel Lists or Techstars to find start-up job opportunities.

Resources:

You can now support the future of the UX Cake podcast and be a part of the UX Cake community at Patreon.com/uxcake

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Redesigning The Way We Work Oct 23, 2018

This week on UX Cake I had a chance to catch up with David and Mary Sherwin about their new book, Turning People Into Teams. I love this topic — how do we go from being just a bunch individual people with different motivations, attitudes, working styles, communication styles, into a team where the whole is better than the sum parts? It’s about redesigning the way we work together. And the exciting thing about it is that it can happen in small incremental ways; it doesn’t mean a big re-org or overhaul. This is great for all kinds of working collaboration with very practical techniques you can put into place.

David and Mary Sherwin are co-founders of Ask The Sherwins, LLC, a consulting and training firm that helps organizations around the world develop the capabilities they need for stronger teamwork. They have coached product and service design teams and developed innovation training for organizations such as Philips Oral Healthcare, Google UX Community and Culture, and Eventbrite. The Sherwins have collaborated on three books, including the bestseller Creative Workshop.

Show Highlights:

Mary shares a short synopsis of Turning People Into Teams. Teams have the ability to improve any aspect of their working process by creating rituals to create the outcomes they want. Teams have the power to create change without waiting for a budget, a great mandate, or another person in leadership.
David defines what they mean by rituals and routines, for the purpose of the book.
Mary shares how the new book can be useful to managers who want their teams to use the book, but may also be used by individuals on a team can benefit from the ideas in Mary and David’s new book.
David elaborates on a section of the book dealing with when teams are stuck and offers useful tools in a “stuck” situation.
Mary says teams need to acknowledge when they noticed something going wrong.
“It’s really easy for a team to develop a robust vocabulary around all the crap that’s going wrong, but it’s difficult for them to talk about what is going well in a way that’s meaningful.”
David shares that teams need to figure out where they are in a project and what the expectations are between the manager and the team.
“If you’re going to have leaders participate in one of the rituals, everyone needs to have equal time and equal voice in sharing what’s needed throughout the ritual so that there won’t be a power imbalance.”
Mary discusses the 4 Player Conversation by David Kantor which was referenced in their new book. This can can help individuals understand the differenent roles in team conversations.
Getting the team to test an aspect of the ritual and sharing the data as proof of success can be important.

Resources:

The Sherwins

The Sherwins on Twitter

Article about rituals

Their new book Turning People Into Teams

Turning People Into Teams Toolkit

David Kantor’s book, Reading the Room

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Creating and Nurturing a Culture of Diversity and Inclusion Oct 08, 2018

Even if we consider ourselves advocates for diversity and inclusion when it comes to considering gender, race, age, LGBTQ or ableness, how do we stretch ourselves even further? How can we create a truly diverse team in thought, background, and culture, and how do we make sure we are creating products that are inclusive to all? How do we break the molds that are exclusive in their very nature? On today’s show, I have a candid conversation with Timothy Bardlavens, an outspoken advocate for equity, about cultivating a culture of diversity and inclusion, and what that really means.

Timothy Bardlavens is a Product Design Leader, Cultural Strategist and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Specialist who approaches Organizational Culture challenges through the lens of of Design strategy. His work shifts the focus of DEI from a Human Resources to a User Experience challenge, helping business leaders to understand teams, organizations and companies are designed entities which need unique approaches to cultivate and thrive in an increasingly diverse space. Most importantly, Timothy works with business leaders to develop people-centric strategies with clear, actionable steps to increase diversity, retention, innovation and revenue. As a Sr. Product Design Manager at Microsoft, Timothy leads a team that focuses on core UX and Intelligent experiences in Outlook online in addition to platform experiences that span the O365 Suite and various endpoints.

Show Highlights:

Working with leaders at Microsoft, Timothy is able to teach them the actions to take relating to cultural initiatives, and how to create processes and actions around them.

● Tim explains how referring to himself as the “black guy” is an icebreaker when it comes to helping others feel comfortable and to be true to themselves.

● Tim speaks to how developing a culture of diversity relates to design and UX. How do we, the design entity, (the organization) help users (people within the organization) be effective, happy be productive and grow?

● Tim points out correlations between/among how we think about organizations, people and products, and relates all of this to a design challenge and tells how to meet the challenges.

● Tim says designers need to realize their own power, and need to provide others access to that power.

● For a designer or a PM who wants to create inclusive products, step outside yourself or outside what you’re trying to develop, and ask the questions from others. Watch others, ask for advice, and do the research. Tim says to go the extra mile to understand people unlike yourself.

● Culture does not have to be initiated by leadership, but should be supported by it.

Resources:

Tim’s website

Ithink_idesign on Twitter

Ithink_idesign on Instagram

Timothy on the Revision Path Podcast, episode 215

Timothy on CtrlClickcast, episode 113

The Borderlands - Pakou Her, Tseng Development Group — LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pakou-her-tdg

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Work Together Better to Design Great Products Aug 29, 2018

Ep. #19: Much of the time we like to work independently, maybe because of work environment, preference, or pride. And yet we know there are great benefits and advantages to working as a team and collaborating with other people. This week’s episode is a re-edit of episode 3, one of my favorite episodes, when I spoke with David and Mary Sherwin, co-founders of Ask the Sherwins, about doing the impactful work we want to do, through improved collaboration and effective teams. David and Mary work with companies and teach workshops around the globe about effective teamwork and affecting change within the workplace. In this interview we discussed how to affect change when there doesn’t seem to be much traction, how to get collaboration from teams across orgs, helpful resources like the Sherwins’ Team Words, and much more.

The Sherwins help teams 'make better cake' (we love that!) and you can learn more on their website at askthesherwins.com where you can also find advice, info about their books and products, and get on their mailing list.

• About Frog's Collective Action Toolkit: The Collective Action Toolkit puts design-thinking tools into the hands of local change agents to transform communities (which David helped create and which Mary helped edit) Download the PDF

• Teamwords: The Working Deck - a simple way to align your teams. Fast.

•: ‘Thanks For The Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well' by Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen

• Pre-order their new book Turning People Into Teams: Rituals and Routines That Redefine the Way We Work

Connect with us!

Website: uxcake.co

Podcast music by hip-hop band Eaters (song Cruziero, album Simian Samba) Hear their music on Facebook

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/uxcake.

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Designer-founded startups Aug 14, 2018

Ep. #18: Over the past few years we’ve seen a growing trend of designer founded startups. There are a few really notable designer-founded startups like — Airbnb, Kickstarter and Lynda.com have paved the way… and in general startups are realize the value of user-centered design as a competitive differentiator, so there’s definitely more value placed on design and user experience. But the designer as founder is still not the norm for startups. This week I’m talking with designer-founder Will Sykora of Covailnt, to find out more about the benefits and challenges he's faced as a designer in the startup world.

Will Sykora is a Product and UX Designer, and startup founder. When not focused on Covailnt, he works with companies to craft, validate, and focus their product experiences on their customers. Over the years, he's experienced the success that comes from putting people first, staying grounded in empathy, and delivering on customer needs to build great businesses. Will is well versed in LEAN, Design Thinking and the various flavors of Agile. He's a Certified Scrum Master and Scrum Product Owner, and holds a Masters in Technology Entrepreneurship from the University of Maryland.

Check out Covailnt-- where freelancers go to find freelancers.

Covailnt: https://covailnt.com/freelance_directory/will/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willsykora/

Website: http://www.willsykora.com

Connect with us!

Website: uxcake.co

Purchase Tarot Cards of Tech

Podcast music by hip-hop band Eaters (song Cruziero, album Simian Samba) Hear their music on Facebook

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/uxcake.

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Outcome-focused Design - Tarot Cards for Tech Jul 31, 2018

Ep. #17: Using tarot cards to create outcomes-focused designis a very out-of-the-box approach, and yet it's actually really simple and approachable. In this episode I talked with Sheryl Cababa, an executive creative director at Artefact Group design agency, about their Tarot Cards of Tech. It's a card deck of prompts for team discussions, a fun product that's meant to be playful, but with a serious purpose – to get teams thinking differently about their strategy and design. In this fun interview we touch on everything from British vs american spelling, and "satanic strategists,” to the more serious subject of design ethics and taking responsibility for the consequences of the products we create. But mostly we discussed how to use these cards to think more broadly about the bigger picture of your strategy and design.

"Think first about the outcomes you want to achieve, and work backwards from that."

Sheryl is a multi-disciplinary executive creative director at Artefact Group with more than 20 years of experience in human-centered design. She has experience working with companies such as Microsoft, Philips, and IKEA, leading projects across industries from retail to robotic surgery systems. With her design weapon of choice (the Paper Mate Flair) handy at all times, she has helped clients spark their creativity by leading workshops in design innovation and strategy.

Resources:

Artefact Group

Tarot Cards of Tech (get the PDF)

Sheryl Cababa

Sheryl on Twitter

Artefact Group on Twitter

Connect with UX Cake:

Website: uxcake.co

Podcast music by hip-hop band Eaters (song Cruziero, album Simian Samba)

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/uxcake.

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Shark-proofing Your UX Presentations Jul 16, 2018

Ep. #16: This special episode of uxcake was a panel discussion recorded live in front of an audience in Seattle on June 28. If you’ve been in ux design or research for awhile, it's almost certain you’ve been involved in a review of your work, or your team’s work, and chances are you’ve experienced a review that goes off the rails, or that causes chaos after the fact, or you just don't get the feedback you really need. In this episode we discuss lessons learned and techniques you can use to make ux reviews more effective, and how to prepare for, and deal with, the sharks and the other perils that can derail ux reviews.

My guests on the panel were Laura Barboza, a CX Research Strategist at REI, (you can also hear Laura on UX Cake podcast episodes 11 & 12); Tony Yates, Director of Design Strategy at Smartsheet; Laura Blanchard, co-founder and creative director of Blamo Corps Agency; and Ruth Kiken-gil, a product designer and innovation strategist at Microsoft.

Connect with the panelists

Laura Barboza LinkedIn

Tony Yates LinkedIn Twitter

Laura Blanchard LinkedIn Twitter

Ruth kikin-Gil LinkedIn Twitter

Connect with UX Cake

Twitter @uxcake_

FB @uxcakepodcast

Instagram @uxcake

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/uxcake.

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Understanding Client Dynamics Jul 02, 2018

Ep. #15: Have you ever had a meeting with a stakeholder or client who you thought you were in alignment with, and afterward thought “What the heck just happened in there?” Well it happened often enough to Morag Johnston and her team that she’s created a website and blog dedicated to the problem of understanding client dynamics, called understandingclients.com. Morag is a digital strategist and leadership coach at Effective by Design in Toronto, Canada, and she joined me for a conversation about how to have more effective UX outcomes through understanding client dynamics, and she shares some specific techniques she uses to do this.

Show links:

Four Stages of Learning model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

Books on Influence by Robert Cialdini

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

Influence: Science and Practice by Robert Cialdini

Pre-suasion: Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini

Connect with Morag Johnston

Moragjohnston.com

Understandingclients.com

Connect with UX Cake

Twitter @uxcake_

FB @uxcakepodcast

Instagram @uxcake

linkedin.com/in/fizyazdi/

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/uxcake.

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Getting More of The Work You Want to Do Jun 18, 2018

Ep. #14: Besides needing strong technical skills, much of the work in UX and in our careers requires convincing others, about our ideas, our work, or our ability to do the work we want to do. My guest is Fiz Yazdi, a managing director at cxpartners in London and Bristol, UK. Fiz developed an approach to selling based on what’s called a ‘consultative’ model which Fiz adapted into a simple framework she uses in her own UX practice and has begun sharing it with others.

Fiz Yazdi is generously offering her tips on 'Getting the work you want to do' to UX Cake listeners, so you can see the full details of her framework. Get a link to download the PDF from UX Cake

Books referenced in the podcast:

The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson

SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham

Consultative Selling by Mack Hanan

Connect with Fiz and cxpartners

www.cxpartners.co.uk/

Twitter: @cxpartners

Connect with UX Cake!

Twitter @uxcake_

FB @uxcakepodcast

Instagram @uxcake