Moving Beyond Static Forms with Luke Wroblewski

Web forms are the mouth that feeds most web apps. There’s no way around that. Yet few people are thinking about how to make one of the more unpleasant parts of the web more pleasant. The world’s foremost authority on web forms is Luke Wroblewski, author of the heralded book, Web Form Design.

It’s no coincidence that we lean on Luke often to join us at events including our upcoming 2011 Web App Masters Tour.

Jared Spool sat down with Luke to discuss what’s been happening with web forms since his book came out. It turns out there have been some interesting developments recently.

Read more and listen to the interview with Jared and Luke.

Stephen Anderson’s Designing Seductive Business Apps: Live!

It’s becoming common to see behavioral cues in everyday web applications. Designers are looking to encourage certain actions, and are turning to the principles of behavioral psychology to achieve their goals. No longer solely the domain of social and gaming apps, you can leverage many of these in your daily work.

Stephen Anderson is the first person we think of when it comes to these kinds of interactions. Stephen is an independent consultant and creator of Mental Notes, a set of reference cards with design insights from the world of psychology.

Stephen was also a presenter at this year’s Web App Masters Tour. In this podcast, you’ll hear an excerpt from Stephen’s tour talk. He presents three concepts: Scarcity, Set Completion and the Feedback Loop.

Read more and listen to Stephen’s podcast.

Userability #19 – Be a Linchpin

In this Userability episode, we hear from Grady Kelly in beautiful Salt Lake City, Utah. 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.

Jared Spool believes that indispensability starts with demonstrating the value of your work. Robert Hoekman believes just being a user experience professional makes you more than a cog. Hear how Jared and Robert answer Grady’s question, and see if you’ve put into practice their recommendations.

Read more and listen to the Userability podcast.

We try hard to accommodate all these learning environments for you. There are the articles we publish on our web site and in our newsletters, the virtual seminars we produce, and the live conferences and workshops we organize. And then there are the podcasts.

2010 was a busy year in our recording studio. We recorded 14 podcast interviews, 6 Userability podcasts, and 6 UIE Virtual Seminar follow-up podcasts (you can find all of them here.) In part one of our two-part series, we gather three of the most popular podcasts of 2010. Without further ado, and in no particular order, here is part 1 of the 2010 most popular podcasts.

Design Lessons from Facebook’s 350 Million with Julie Zhuo

When Facebook tweaks anything, it gets coverage across the IT and design realms, and sometimes the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. If the users don’t like the changes, they form protest groups’ how can a team operate under such a public microscope?

Julie Zhuo knows. She is the Product Design Manager at Facebook. As the principal designer behind the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect experiences, she has contributed to the last two major site redesigns. She also leads the front-end user interface engineering team. On her watch the site grew from 8 million college kids to 350 million people across the globe.

The stories she shares in this podcast are fascinating. When was the last time a throng of people gathered outside your office because you changed a feature on your site? Julie tells that story plus many more interesting design facts related to Facebook.

Read more and listen to Julie’s podcast.

Userability #14 – Growing in UX

The Userability Show gets questions from all over the world. In this episode, our caller Mohammed Alaa is looking for ways to expand his experience design skill set. Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman take a stab at his questions on getting buy-in for usability testing and specific courses of study to become a user experience designer.

What you hear from Robert and Jared might surprise you. At the very least, it’s certainly food for thought. Read more and listen to the podcast.

Leveraging Search Patterns & Discovery with Peter Morville

Peter Morville is the co-presenter of one of our most popular UIE Virtual Seminars of all time, Leveraging Search and Discovery Patterns. As is often the case, our audience came up with a heap of thoughtful questions that we didn’t have time to address during the virtual seminar.

In this episode, Jared Spool sits down with Peter to address many issues including the idea that browsing doesn’t scale, best result first pattern, and advance search.

Even if you did not attend, there’s a lot of great information in this podcast. Read more and hear Peter Morville.

Next week we’ll have part 2 of the Most Popular UIE Podcasts of 2010.

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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.

Jared believes that indispensability starts with demonstrating the value of your work. Usability improvements reduce frustration and create delight. Have metrics in place that document that progression as your designs are implemented. Are your changes reducing calls to support or increasing sales? Showing those metrics is concrete evidence.

Robert believes just being a user experience professional makes you more than a cog. Set a goal for yourself in your organization, and measure your progress. Reach out to teammates with help, educate them on UX, and build trust. Then, when people come to you for help and their suggestions improve, you know you’ve made a positive impact.

Tune in to the podcast for the full story. Don’t forget, if you have a serious UX question, send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

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This week, Joe Sokohl from Richmond, Virginia calls in, with a sharp question. Joe is doing some research into distributed, collaborative teams working on UX projects, and wanted to get Jared and Robert’s perspective on the issue. What characteristics do successful teams with remote members have? Are distributed teams even a good idea?

Robert jumps right on the question, as his work is almost exclusively remote. Robert works with teams around the world, and says the experience is very different than being able to hop into a conference room and do some whiteboarding on a moment’s notice. But that doesn’t make the experience better or worse, just different. If you’re comfortable with using remote collaboration tools, it’s definitely possible to be successful.

Jared offers some observations from our research at UIE. There are many teams that make remote work, just like there are teams that make co-location work. But, we’ve found the most successful remote teams are all remote, with no (or nearly no) co-located members. When 80% of the team is co-located, that changes the team relationships in a way that negatively affects the work.

Robert and Jared find the best way to encourage cohesion and engagement across a team with remote members is to have the members meet in person, if only once. Robert adds that he would like to start all of his remote projects with a couple days in person with the team.

Tune in to the podcast to get their full thoughts. Don’t forget, if you have a serious UX question, send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

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This week, Hugh Griffith from Boise, Idaho calls into the show. He’s curious about the pluses and minuses of replacing standard interface elements. What happens when you swap radio buttons and checkboxes with more stylish graphic replacements?

Jared and Robert discuss two major points you should consider before rolling out such changes on your site:

1. Are stylized, non-standard interface elements appropriate for the tone your site?
2. If you use graphics, do they obviously convey that they are clickable, and can you determine their current state easily?

Tune in to the podcast to hear Robert and Jared walk you through the decision process.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

We’ve tackled questions around accessibility, usability testing, deliverables in UX projects, relationship building within UX teams, design styles, and a bunch more topics that inquiring minds want answers to. In all, we have 16 Userability podcasts and more on the way.

This week’s UIEtips covers the last three Userability podcasts produced. The first one, Growing in UX, is on the importance of usability testing when creating a project. The next one, Going Social, covers techniques to encourage participation in a social community. And the last Userability podcast, Testing Without Solutions, explores how to handle testing problems you encounter during a usability study.

If you’re on our RSS feed, you may know about these podcasts and even tuned in already. Or perhaps you didn’t get the opportunity when they first came out. Whether it’s your first time hearing them, or taking a second listen, I think you’ll find them to be entertaining and hopefully educational.

If you’d like to ask a question, write us at userability@uie.com or questions@uie.com. Or you can share your questions and thoughts below.

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This week we have Jon Wold, an interaction designer calling into the show from Oslo, Norway. Jon’s writing a book on usability testing and brings up a really great point about test results: It’s hard to report on problems without suggesting corrections to the problems you observe in testing.

Both Robert and Jared reflect upon how they’ve handled this situation in the past, when conducting tests along with clients. They both agree that presenting test results without ideas for next steps is a recipe for inaction. So how should you improve your testing methods to set your organization up for success?

Robert and Jared both feel it is critical to involve the product’s designers in the testing. The most important takeaway from the testing process is knowledge about how real people use your stuff. With this knowledge, the team’s designers are equipped to suggest solutions.

Tune in to the podcast to hear Robert and Jared’s thoughts for helping teams make design improvements.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

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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.

Jared and Robert think human psychology is the place to start. They discuss a couple of recent issues in the social web realm, like the launch of Google Buzz. They suggest a few books which examine the intersection of psych and web design, including Joshua Porter’s Designing for the Social Web, and Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone’s Designing Social Interfaces.

Tune in to see if Robert and Jared manage to help Jay with an answer without offending our friendly neighbors to the north.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

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It is a good Friday indeed, because the Userability Podcast is back from hiatus! We have several all-new episodes in the pipeline that you’ll see in the coming weeks.

This week’s episode features guest Mohammed Alaa, calling in all the way from Cairo, Egypt. Mohammed is a UI designer who wants to expand his skills to include more from experience design. He asked two questions:

• I mostly work with business applications. I want to convince my manager and my client of how important it is to have a plan for usability testing, during the process of creating the project. How?
• My current position is as a user interface designer. And I would love to know if there is any specific course of study to become a user experience designer? And what’s the difference between a UI designer and a UX designer?

Two questions means twice the ridiculousness as Robert and Jared stall for time with their replies. Eventually, they arrive at useful advice for Mohammed (and perhaps you) even if there was a hike involved getting there.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

This past year we produced some outstanding podcasts covering a range of topics with several invited experts. We’ve selected our favorite podcasts that we feel strongly benefits anyone who works in the web design world. They’re loaded with some great take-aways.

Our top 5 podcasts, in no particular order, are:

• SpoolCast: Achieving Pattern and Component Reuse

  Dealing with real-life web app production isn’t as glamorous as some aspects of design in the digital realm, but it is full of challenges and can honestly make or break a project. There are ways of truly optimizing certain aspects of the production so that you can create a product with consistent quality at a faster pace. To find out how, I turned to Nathan Curtis.

• SpoolCast: Ajax Aids Accessibility

  If you do it right, using Ajax techniques can improve accessibility. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Ajax, like most techniques and technologies on the web are what you make of them. That’s why I asked Derek Featherstone to speak with me about his latest work. Derek is a world renown expert on web accessibility. As principle of Further Ahead, he also helps clients deploy sites that exploit the latest techniques.

• Presentation: Revealing Design Treasures from the Amazon

  On its surface, Amazon.com just seems like a large e-commerce site, albeit a successful one. Its design isn’t flashy, nor is it much to write home about. But deep within its pages are hidden secrets — secrets that every designer should know about.

• Userability Podcast: The Most Influential Books in UX Published

  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 Robert Hoekman and me to recommend their top three books on design.

• SpoolCast: Visual Design for the Non-Designer

  What can a non-designer do to harness the power of visual design without calling professional help? Quite a lot, says internationally-regarded visual designer Dan Rubin. We called Dan to talk about what design techniques are accessible to mere mortals.

We’ve really enjoyed putting together these podcasts and hope you find the content valuable. Thank you for encouraging our behavior throughout 2009. We wish you a successful and productive new year.

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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?

Josh certainly does claim a wide range of skills, from interaction design and usability to front-end development, back-end programming, and business development. That brought up the question an employer might also have when reading his resume… “Is this guy for real? Can he really do all of this stuff well?”

As with most debates that Jared and Robert delve into, this one got messy, fast. But it also became very interesting. I knew I had to find Josh and invite him on Userability. I’m glad I did, as it made for a great podcast. Tune in to hear the debate, and if you have an opening for a man like Josh, won’t you let him know?

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

We want to hear your take on this debate. Can someone do all the things that Josh can, really well? Can he fit into a corporate structure, or does he need to find a small operation who can really put all his tools to work? Get the debate started again in the comments

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This week we receive a call for help from Louisiana, where the gumbo isn’t the only thing that’s hot. Ms. Tatum Dutile had this to ask the panel…

Is it good to have multiple links to the same destination on one page, for instance, a link in the text, in the navigation bar, and on the right side of the page?  Or do too many redundant links make the page harder to use because people have to scan through more things to get to what they’re looking for?

Tune in for a detailed discussion of the desert climate of Arizona compared to the oppressive humidity of the deep south… or tune in to gain some insights on where your users expect to find certain links within your designs. (We cater to many audiences.)

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

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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 of Cambridge, MA, asked,

If you had to recommend just three books on user experience (classic, new, fundamental, etc.), which ones would they be?

How will Robert hold off from recommending his own books? You’ll have to tune in to see!

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

Here are links to each of the books Robert and Jared recommended:

Robert:

• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper
• A Project Guide to UX Design by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug

Jared:

• Designing for People by Henry Dreyfuss
• Designing Interactions by Bill Moggridge
• User and Task Analysis for Interface Design by JoAnn Hackos and Janice Redish

What are the most influential books you’ve read in the field? Share them with us in the comments!

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For our tenth show we bring you a special edition of the Userability Podcast… recorded LIVE from the Voices That Matter 2009 Conference, held in San Francisco in April.

We had two audience questions. The first question asked, are there are any applications or research best practices that Jared and Robert use to aid in persona creation?

The second audience question asked about the the usability of iPhone applications, especially considering that on-the-go, handheld, touchscreen apps are a relatively new concept.

Tune in to hear Jared and Robert duck and dive in front of a live studio audience.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show!

Do you have any persona tricks and tips? What’s your take on the “new” territory of iPhone apps? Is it new territory? Let us know in the comments!

PS— During the show, Robert referenced Apple’s iPhone/mobile Human Interface Guidelines, which are fully available from Apple.

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This week’s episode features a compelling question from Will Evans. Usually, this is the point in the post where I say something witty, but this is a question we hear so much, I will cut right to the chase!

Will asked,

When you are creating a web application or website, and you are ready to unleash it to the world, at what point can you say that it is “Usable Enough?”

Tune in for one of the most in-depth Userability Podcasts yet, as Jared and Robert give you advice on how to find that “good enough” launch point.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show! Till then, if your’re in a situation like Will, let us know how you would handle it in the comments!

Since it’s inception, we’ve answered questions ranging from design exploration, career changes from coding to interface design and usability, and the most common UIs that confuse or impede the average user.

Robert Hoekman and I use our wits, humor, and knowledge (it occasionally creeps in) to answer these vexing questions. I know when I get notified about an exciting new episode I want to immediately check it out, however I’m usually too busy to do it at that moment, and then it slips my mind.

I’ve always appreciated receiving a summary on episodes I may have missed, so I thought you might appreciate it too.

Our latest episodes, podcasts 5-8, cover these topics:

• The most important UX activity in a web project
• Why so many basic usability failures are still around
• How a consultant can woo over a design team
• How to deal with link treatments when content display varies

With each podcast there is a place to share your thoughts with us, or you can let us know what you think below.  

If you want to hear more of me, you can see me live in Seattle, Denver, or DC at the UIE Roadshow: Secrets Behind Designing Great User Experiences. Use the promotion code SHOW09 and get $75 off the registration price.

Enjoy the podcasts.

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This week’s episode features a shadowy UI Designer by the name of Jamis Charles, from a secretive organization located somewhere in Texas. Honestly, that’s all we know about him. Cloak and daggers aside, he brought an intriguing challenge to the show.

Jamis, if that is his real name, asked,

Should link treatments vary for different methods of displaying content to the user? For example, on a single page I have several links. The first one takes me to another page when I click. The second shows a hidden layer with more content if I click. The third shows more content if I hover.

If these links should be styled differently, should the treatments be organized by type of content, or by the user interaction method?

Tune in to see how our hosts answer this challenge while our guest and his project maintain their anonymity. And to hear Robert wax nostalgic for a steak he once ate in Texas.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show! Till then, if your’re in a situation like Jamis, let us know how you would handle it in the comments!

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Last week we held a UIE Virtual Seminar with Seth Earley and Stephanie Lemieux of Earley & Associates, a premier builder of industrial-strength taxonomies for organizations large and small. As always, we had a number of excellent questions from the live audience that we couldn’t attend to during the seminar, so I got together with Seth and Stephanie to record this podcast and cover a number of those remaining questions.

If you didn’t attend the live seminar, and are interested in taxonomies, then you’ll still enjoy this podcast. If you find yourself wanting more afterwards, don’t forget you can still purchase a recording of the session for another 90 minutes of taxonomy know-how.

During the podcast, I asked Seth and Stephanie to dig into these questions:

• What are “business drivers” and how do they relate to building a taxonomy?
• In the development of taxonomies, how do you avoid being bogged down in an organization’s structure and keep focused from a navigational vantage point?
• Do you use Personas to help develop your taxonomies? Why? How?
• How early do you integrate usability testing in the development process?
• We had many questions about Earley’s experience working with a global enterprise taxonomy system that they developed for Motorola. Stephanie discussed that process.
• How should you think about long term curation of your taxonomy?
• …and more

Tune in to get some tips on how to tune up your taxonomy. Still have questions? Start the discussion in our comments, below.

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This week’s episode features a surprise in-studio guest, Dana Chisnell of Usability Works. Dana is a usability consultant who pairs up with design teams on a regular basis, all around the U.S. She brought a relationship question to the show… apparently she had us confused with Loveline. (No Dr. Drew here!)

Dana asked,

When I work with design teams, there’s often a lot of competition for who on the team can spend the least amount of time working with the usability geek (me). What can I do, what do I have to do to court favor with the team to let them know that I’m not just an enforcer, but I’m on their side and that we can learn from one another? It’s usually a long-distance situation, where the design team is in one place, geographically (and perhaps spiritually, mentally, etc.), and I’m in another.

Tune in to see how our hosts answer this one without resulting to flowers and chocolate! (Though, those might not hurt anything.)

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show! Till then, if your’re in a situation like Dana’s, let us know how you handle it in the comments!

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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, what gives?

Don Norman’s seminal, The Design of Everyday Things, is approaching it’s 20th year in print. It explained why so many basic things in life are poorly designed and hard to use, such as pull handles on doors that need to be pushed. Since the world has been aware of these design flaws for two decades, why are so many basic usability failures still around?

Listen in to hear if Robert and Jared’s answer is what you would’ve said. Would you have answered differently? Leave a comment below.

Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love to feature you on the show! Till then, if you think you know why so many usability failures remain, let us know in the comments!

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Userability is back with another episode. Have a serious UX question? Send it in and Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr. will answer it with a healthy dose of levity. Please send your deep, vexing questions to us at userability@uie.com. We’d love you to feature you on the show!

This week, we spoke to Miles Dowsett from Cambridge, UK who is straddling 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?

Tune in to hear Jared and Robert lock horns on their different approaches on must-have UX techniques… and leave your suggestions here, in the comments!

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Userability is the show that answers your vexing UX questions with irreverence and useful advice. Remember, Userability is 100% Soylent, which means it’s made of people—Err—people’s questions. Please send your deep thoughts to us at userability@uie.com.

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,

If there was ONE thing you would want an organization to take on board immediately to help UX in that organization, what would it be and why?

Tune in to hear what Robert and Jared would tell your executives if pressed. How would you have answered? Let us know in the comments!

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This week’s episode demonstrates the lengths that people will go to be a part of the Userability Podcast. Or, at least how far their Skype connection will go; a bit over 10,000 miles (16,400km) in this case! We were joined by Keith Lang, co-founder of Plasq, makers of Skitch all the way from Canberra, Australia. He blogs at UI&us.

Keith offered this question,

All of us UI designers spend a lot of time with computers and become blind to certain problems. What would you say are the most common UIs, or processes, that confuse or impede the average computer-user?

For example, I notice many people having problems paying attention to dialogue boxes, and recalling what they said. They just click OK, even on ones with brief text–sometimes with bad results.

Tune in to hear what Jared and Robert thought.

We’re always looking for guests to stump Jared and Robert. Send us an email at userability@uie.com with your burning design-related questions.

What do you have to add to Robert and Jared’s list? What do you see confusing users? Let us know in the comments!

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We’re back again this week with more savvy and silliness from the world of Userability. But first we’d like to thank you for making our first show such a success, we’ve had a ton of downloads. Have you told your friends about the show yet?

This week the guys spoke with Jon Hartmann of Morgantown, West Virginia. Jon asked Jared and Robert,

I’m a web developer (programming), not a web designer (graphics), but I love analytics and designing user interfaces. How do I make the career jump from coding to interface design and usability?

Tune in to find out if Jared and Robert can help Jon make the jump. As a free bonus, you’ll also learn where to find coffee in West Virginia.

We’re always looking for guests to stump Jared and Robert. Send us an email at userability@uie.com with your burning design-related questions.

What’s your two cents on the advice Robert and Jared gave today? Let us know in the comments!

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Friends, I’d like to introduce you to our newest creation, the Userability Podcast. No, I didn’t mistype that. As we’ve mentioned previously, each week I’ll pick a caller to ask a UX question of experts Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr., who will do their best to find a good answer. The catch is, I’m not telling Robert and Jared what to expect… they have to answer you on the spot.

Today we’re releasing our pilot episode, with guest Rob Fay, who called in from Washington, D.C. with a great question. Rob asked,

I work for an e-learning company. We have a grading feature in our product that gives teachers the ability to grade an assignment by applying a grade to a gradebook. When we designed this, because of time constraints, we only focused on a few “grading” use cases and we only came up with a few design ideas. I wish we had brainstormed more. How can I influence my team’s culture to value design exploration, even within our current constraints?

Tune in to see if Robert and Jared can answer coherently! That’s the format of our little show: one caller, one question, a handful of useful takeaways, and hopefully some fun through out.

We need your questions. Submit your real-life design conundrums at userability@uie.com.

Give it a listen, and let us know what you think of the new show in the comments!

Robert Hoekman, world famous author of Designing the Obvious and Designing the Moment, and I, Jared M. Spool, a person who co-authored a book in 1996 that you’ve probably never seen, are joining forces to do the unthinkable: We’re starting a new weekly podcast to answer any user experience or design questions you can come up with. We’re calling it Userability. Seriously.

Yup. You’ll give us a question and we’ll give you an answer. We’re not sure it’ll be a good answer, but we’re promising it’ll be an entertaining one.

(Actually, like all good user experience processes, it’s not that simple. You give us a question. We pick your question for the show. We tell you what time we’re recording and make sure you’re available. We call you while we’re recording and you get to ask us “on the air” and then we give you the answer. And we have a lot of fun while doing it.)

And here’s where you come in: We need your questions. Think of a great question. Something you’d love to find out the answer to. It can even be a serious question. Send it to userability@uie.com. Brian Christiansen, our producer, will pick the best ones and tell you how to be on the program.

Don’t worry. Once the first program is ready, we’ll be sure to let you know, even if you can’t come up with a good question..

Looking forward to your questions (and our answers),

Jared Spool & Robert Hoekman, Co-hosts of Userability
Brian Christiansen, Producer of Userability (forced into it — wasn’t his choice)

userability@uie.com