Ux Cake

Does UX Strategy even exist? or is it the same as the product of business strategy?Being able to develop a UX Strategy is really useful and can be used to differentiate between the big picture and the holistic user experience from the tactical aspects of designing page flows, and wireframes, and UI.My guest today is Craig Nishizaki, and he's the head of business for up top, a user experience design and development agency based in Seattle. Now, what makes Craig's perspective here so valuable is that he's coming from the business side of UX.With over 12 years of understanding the value of UX, he is now able to convey that value to the business leaders who are making the decisions to help them create change, innovation and impact for their organizations.Connect with CraigLinkedinUpTopCraig 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

One thing is asking the right questions when you are a UX Expert but another is listening to your customer about what they really need against what they think they might need.Today we are joined with special guest Indi Young, an expert author, and leader in the UX field.We dive deeper into deep listening and how you can start implementing it into your workspace.She uncovers the different layers of description and interior cognition, As well as understanding the difference between the guiding principle and infinity.Connect with Indi Young Website LinkedinTwitterChapters:00.13 Welcome back from 202003.20 Indi Young05.50 Why- Impact of deep listening14.37 Solution Space18.44 Understanding the purpose19.25 Moving into the Strategy Space22.36 Deep Listening28.28 Layers of a topic30.55 Topics covered34.16 insights36.17 Pinning a place and time37.15 Identifying trends39.27 Micro Reflection techniques42.01 Analysis & Synthesis43.30 Description VS Inner Cognition48.29 A guideline50.47 Thinking Styles54.04 Learn wi

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.********If you enjoy this podcast, there are some really simple ways you can help us: follow us on twitter - like and reshare our postssubscribe to the newsletter for updates and bonus contentshare this episode, or any of our episodes, with a friend. rate & review us on Apple Podcast or iTunes on desktop!Listen Apple | Spotify | Google | WebsiteConnect with UX Cake! leigharredondo.com | Facebook | Twitter&nb

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://www.linkedin.com/in/carynwille/https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ux-of-you/id1476322309http://www.meetup.com/seaDUXXCaryn is currently a Senior Interaction Designer at Google. Since 2011, Caryn has been help

Ep. 42: This week we're talking about Permission to Speak - 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. That may be words or art or music or action. There are many ways to sp

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 Innovat

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,

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 Universit

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 JaimeJaime Levy is an author, university professor and a user experience

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 unedi

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 cu

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 organizationa

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, a

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 YazdiFiz 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

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

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 wome

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

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 va

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.&n

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