UXDesignCast

Lisa Kamm is User Experience Manager at Google.  Lisa outlines what her role entails and how User Experience Design is carried out at Google.  She describes the design principles that pervade Google’s culture and the impact that they have on projects.  Lisa enumerates the UX projects that have been carried out as a result of the company’s policy of letting employees spend 20 percent of their time on projects of their own choosing.  She lists the disciplines and skills that Google employs in its UX organizations.  Karel and Lisa discuss the benefits and challenges of designing Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that run in a browser and the podcast finishes up with Lisa summarizing what advice she would give to those just starting in this field.  Here are the links Lisa mentioned in the podcast interview with regard to the design principles and Human-Computer Interaction and Visualization work.  

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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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Karel Vredenburg interviews John Robertson who is Director of User Experience and Development, Internet Channel, at the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC). John describes CIBC and the Internet Channel organization as well as his two teams who design and develop the bank’s websites and web applications. He outlines the transformation the bank has gone through in arriving at the current organization and focus. John summarizes the ways in which his teams design and develop visual and interaction designs and the role his user interface developers play in creating early and iterative prototypes for user evaluation and the ways in which that work is used directly by the technology developers. John and Karel discuss the impact of Web 2.0 and visual design trends. John explores the types of skills he has on his team and provides insights and advice on the most effective skills to develop to be effective today.  Check out some of John’s team’s design work by visiting the CIBC main site.

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Karel Vredenburg interviews Victor Chan who is User Experience Designer at Dow Jones based in New York City. Victor describes his role and how user experience design work is carried out at Dow Jones. He discusses some of the benefits and challenges of designing business and financial communication content in a rapidly changing Web 2.0 world. Having been a successful designer at several companies, Victor outlines what he feels are the most important skills for designers to acquire and knowledge to have as well as approaches to take in order to product truly innovative and creative designs.

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Karel Vredenburg interviews Gale Moore who is Director of the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) at the University of Toronto. Gale outlines the mandate and origins of KMDI and outlines the kind of projects carried out at the institute. An exploration of Gale’s background as a Sociologist leads to a wide ranging discussion of the numerous Web 2.0 trends impacting the social fabric of societies worldwide. Also discussed are the various positive and negative impacts of Web 2.0 in the areas of social interaction, university education, academic peer review, intellectual property review, and organizational transformation.  For further information, learn more about KMDI, its faculty, the ePresence Interactive Media project, Project Open Source|Open Access, and access the KMDI newsletter archive and to subscribe to it send to info@kmdi.utoronto.ca.

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Karel Vredenburg interviews Jay Trimble who is Computer Scientist at NASA ARC and the Group Lead for the User Centered Technology Group. Jay tells about the NASA Ames Research Center, the major types of work they do, how user-centered approaches have been introduced there, what has worked best, and what the major contributions have been to the overall NASA program.

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Karel Vredenburg interviews Ilona Posner about her career, views on UX opportunities and challenges, the importance of visual and interaction design, and advice for students and beginning practitioners.

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