Dushyant Kunungo joins Timothy Keirnan for a discussion about enterprise UX.  * Duhsyant's professional background * The importance of user experience to employees working in an enterprise--both to their morale and their productivity. * Dushyant and Tim share eyebrow-raising anecdotes from enterprise user experience projects they have been on. Employees need effective, efficient, and enjoyable products/tools as much as external customers do. * Dushyant talks about his book, UX Decoded: Think and Implement User-Centered Research Methodologies, and Expert-Led UX Best Practices. You can reac ..read more

Barry McBride joins Timothy Keirnan to discuss the history and content strategy of The Orange and Brown Report, an independent news and analysis business catering to Cleveland Browns football fans. The Orange and Brown Report offers both free and paid subscription tiers of news and interaction with its beat writers and analysts. Across 80 minutes, Barry talks about: * The origin of his Cleveland Browns fan advocacy and community-building in 1995, when Browns ownership and the NFL betrayed Browns fans by moving the team to Baltimore and the legacy media refused to cover all aspects of the story ..read more

Eric Penn joins Tim Keirnan and Ken Mayer to discuss the first customer experience phases of his new 2023 Subaru BRZ after a month of ownership. The "Toyobaru Twins" (Toyota GR86 and Subaru BRZ) are the same car with some slight differences. This vehicle is one of the best examples of "user-centered design" we have ever encountered in a product, and Tim owned the first generation for four blissful years. Eric has purchased the long-awaited and much celebrated second generation, and we go into intense detail on our first four defined phases of the customer experience: Encounter (02:44) Decision ..read more

John Leavitt, Senior Industrial Designer at Intelligent Product Solutions, joins Timothy Keirnan for a conversation about industrial design, using two firefighting products as a starting point. Besides the two case studies, we talk about general design process and philosophies, methods, education recommendations, and our ambitions for a world in which UX includes respect for users' privacy and security as a selling point. 00:00 Introduction 03:30 Design Process 08:06 Self Contained Breathing Apparatus case study 19:45 Fire Truck Inventory Feature case study 36:45 How does John recommend p ..read more

David and Jo Lau discuss the five phases of customer experience with their 2022 Kia Niro EV  (Encounter, Decision, Purchase, Initial use, and Longitudinal use). Vehicle purchases are often a negotiation of two or more people's preferences and needs in domestic situations, and we are delighted to have talked with the Lau family about their customer journey. The human-machine interfaces (HMI) in the cockpit are the simple and effective designs we're used to seeing from Hyundai-Kia vehicles, and Tim was most impressed with the EV charging indicators on top of the dashboard that face through ..read more

Larry Rusinsky joins Tim Keirnan for a new kind of episode: critiquing  the user experience of food. Because the UX of food is so very subjective based on genetics, culture experiences, individual preferences, and a potential inconsistency of "production" for a particular dish, frozen foods are at least somewhat consistent in their production. Our critique is of Kroger's house brand Private Selection Artisan Stone Fired Pizza in the Cuban-Inspired Ham & Swiss flavor. We also ate a "control pizza" to attempt to create a reference point to describe the test pizza and which listers can r ..read more

Yousef Hegazi joins the show to help Tim Keirnan critique Pine64's PineTab, a low-cost 10-inch tablet that uses Linux as its operating system instead of iOS, Android, or Windows. Pine64 provides "system on a chip" computing devices that run free and open source software (FOSS) as their operating system and applications. The PineTab follows earlier projects such as the PineBook/PineBook Pro (a laptop), the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro (a smartphone), and the PineTime (a smart watch). Projects are shipped early to a community that can help with development and, at some point, the project will be ..read more

John Loss joins David Mettler and Tim Keirnan to talk about his book Not Always Homeless, created from ethnographic interviews with local people who were homeless in his area. Its subtitle is "The personal stories of 13 people who survived and escaped a life on the streets". After we discussed how he published his first book at age 80 based on  interviews with homeless people in the Niagara Falls area of New York State, we talked about about the 501c3 charity he and some fellow concerned citizens created to help local people without homes build a more stable life for themselves, called He ..read more

Tec-Ed CEO Stephanie Rosenbaum joins Tim Keirnan for a critique of two different electric kettle designs that heat water quickly and precisely: the KRUPS BW3140 Savoy and the Cuisinart CPK-17 PerfecTemp. Both designs accomplish the goal but in very different ways. The KRUPS kettle has its user interface in its base and excellent balance in its carafe, while the Cuisinart has its user interface in the handle of the carafe with better labeling, but worse ergonomics for the carafe itself. We discuss the details thoroughly, along with reflecting on how complex a user population can be for even the ..read more

Tim recounts a 401K benefits website usability failure to cohost Dave Mitropoulos-Rundus. They then discuss the foundational importance of usability testing and of tracking the all-important time on task metric. Even in 2022, the most professional-looking website can disappoint customers if if UX fails at the most fundamental tasks ..read more