UXDesignCast

John Karat is a Research Scientist within IBM’s Research Division.  John outlines the role the research division plays at IBM and summarizes some of product user interaction inventions that have come out of the division.  He also describes his own current research program and the impact that it has had on knowledge and products.  John and Karel discuss the process of taking projects from the research laboratory to product, point out some recent successes, and consider what the future of user interfaces might look like.  They also talk about John’s involvement in professional organizations including the Life Time Service Award he was recently awarded by the Computer-Human Interaction or CHI organization.  John also articulates what he believes are the benefits and the challenges of working in a commercial research organization.  John has a personal web page and a recent project page as well.

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Kevin Bury is Principal Interaction Designer at LinkedIn and was previously Director, User Experience Design, at Yahoo! where he managed a team of designers responsible for all of Yahoo’s “Front Door” products - including the Yahoo! Front Page (www.yahoo.com), My Yahoo! (www.my.yahoo.com), Yahoo! Buzz (www.buzz.yahoo.com), and Yahoo! Glue. Kevin describes his roles at LinkedIn and Yahoo!, characterizes the type of User Experience Design approaches used at both companies, and shares the design work he is most proud of over his long and distinguished career.  Kevin and Karel discuss the importance of a design culture in companies, the trend toward the realization of the importance of the business value of design, and the benefits and challenges of designing in a Web 2.0 world.  Kevin shares his insights on the most important skills that designers should have in order to be successful in commercial design.  He also describes how he keeps up on new developments in discipline and technology directions.  Kevin naturally has a profile on LinkedIn and he also has a blog at kevinbury.com.

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Valerie Fox is Director, Innovative Technology Solutions, at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.  Karel interviews Val in her office at the university.  Val starts off by describing Ryerson and her role there.  She outlines the transformation she went through from being the creative director for web and other digital user experiences in previous jobs to this one which essentially involves her designing a university.  Val articulates what she believes are the portable skills she brings as a designer to her role at the university and reinforces what she believes are the fundamental techniques and skills all successful designers should possess.  Val’s job is a one-of-a-kind one and demonstrates how well-rounded designers can effectively apply their knowledge and skill to virtually any canvas.

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Mike Beltzner is Phenomenologist at Mozilla. He describes what that interesting job title is all about, his company’s approach to user experience design, the transformation they went through in adopting a design culture (a particular challenge for an open source organization), and how he and his staff work with the rest of Mozilla. Mike outlines the benefits and challenges of working with 160 million users. He also summarizes the work that went into Firefox 3 and points out the user experience and design enhancements included in this latest version of the popular browser. Mike and Karel also discuss the role a browser now plays in a world of cloud computing and the influence of Web 2.0 and visual design trends. The session finishes up with Mike providing advice on the skills and techniques he thinks are critical for user experience designers to have in order to be optimally effective. Check out the main Mozilla site as well as a screencast of the new features in Firefox 3. Please note: we experienced technical difficulties during the first part of the podcast recording which were resolved during the later part. We apologize for the impact that this had on sound quality.

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 Standard Podcasts [26:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player