Userability

This week, calling in from beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah, is Grady Kelly. Grady is inspired by Seth Godin's new book, Linchpin. He wants to know how UX professionals can work to become indispensable team members and not just another cog in the machine.

Joe Sokohl calls in with a question about using distributed teams on UX projects. Robert Hoekman and Jared Spool have plenty to say on the topic!

Hugh Griffith from Boise asks Jared and Robert, what happens when you swap radio buttons and checkboxes with more stylish graphic replacements?

Our guest Jon Wold from Oslo brings up a really great point about test results: It’s hard to report on problems without providing suggestions for correcting the problems you observe in testing. Tune in to get Jared and Robert's suggestions on the topic.

It seems we've failed to offend our international audience sufficiently, so this week we'll try again by chatting with Jay Vidyarthi, a designer hailing form Montréal, Québec, Canada. Jay is working on a project with social design aspects. He's helping design a site where the goal is to build "an involved and contributing community of users." He wants to know if there are any user experience techniques to encourage participation.

This week, Mohammed Alaa calls in from Egypt with questions about convincing stakeholders of the value of UX and about improving his own UX skills. Robert Hoekman and Jared Spool are back with another episode of Userability!

This week we have our longest, and certainly one of our most interesting episodes to date. Jared and Robert met Joshua Muskovitz on the IxDA discussion list when Josh posted an innocent-enough question to the list: what do you call someone who sits squarely on the fence between interaction design and implementation? How do I market myself while job hunting when I have been in the industry so long that I have a really broad range of skills?

This week a Tatum Dutile asks how many links should one have on a single page that all point to the same content?

This week a question from one of the world's most well-read cities fittingly enquires about the must-read books in design. Damon Dimmock asks Jared and Robert to recommend their top three books on design.

A special episode recorded live from Voices That Matter 2009 conference, with two audience questions!

This week's episode features a shadowy UI Designer from a secretive organization located somewhere in Texas. He asks, "how should you style links that trigger different types of interactions?"

This week's guest Dana asks Jared and Robert, "What can I do to court favor with design teams to let them know that I, as the usability consultant, am not just an enforcer, but I'm on their side and that we can learn from one another?"

This week's episode features a surprise guest for Jared and Robert. Actually, every guest is a surprise, but this one is a surprise and an ambush by a friend of UIE, the always entertaining Scott Berkun. Scott wanted to know, why twenty years beyond The Design of Everyday Things, why so many usability failures still abound?

This week, Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. spoke to Mile Dowsett from Cambridge, UK who is stratling the worlds of desktop and web-based applications. He wanted to know, "What do you think is the most important or significant UX deliverable/activity in a web project, and why?"

This week we continue the international flare with a call from Shanghai, China. Daniel Szuc, of ApogeeHK had a question that stopped Jared and Robert in their tracks.

This week, Keith Lang from Canberra, Australia, asks about common UI devices that stump new users.

This week the guys spoke with Jon Hartmann of Morgantown, West Virginia. Jon asked about transitioning to UX and usability from development.

Our newest creation: The Userability Podcast. Our listeners call into to ask Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. their most vexing design questions. This week: Rob Fay asks about exploring design alternatives.