Adaptive Path Podcast

Google’s Margaret Gould Stewart and Graham Jenkin discuss their experience and ideas from their UX Week workshop about managing UX teams. Topics covered in this conversation include:
# Prioritization and project tracking
# How to gain insight into career development paths within a user experience team
# Finding out about performance management
# Discovering how to tailor your own management style
Margaret and Graham also tackled other tough issues during their session, such as:
# Building a culture of constructive feedback
# Developing leadership within a team
# Effectively managing team dynamics
# Evangelizing user experience practices
# Managing stakeholders
Margaret and Graham also had participants of their workshop develop haiku’s about the importance of working with and managing UX Teams. They were kind enough to compile this collection of Haiku’s from the workshop for you. They also provided an example of the leadership cards. These cards can be printed off and shared with members of your team about which characteristics of a leader they deem to be most essential. Not every leader will be strong in all categories, however. Such information can help leaders understand the expectations of those they are working with on a daily basis.

TVs in trouble! It might be terminal, but Rod Naber and Dan Levine from Current TV urge everyone not lose hope just yet. Discussing their presentation “TV with an API! Current at the Collusion of TV and the Internet” Rod and Dan describe how using their cable and satellite TV network along with their social news website, Current is experimenting across both media, looking for a cure.
In this conversation we talk about how Current got started, the power of the community in generating content for Current News, and how the Internet is allowing users to create ads for companies. All this could change the way marketing approaches innovative solutions for their customers.

Dave Wolf, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Cynergy Systems was kind enough to join me for this conversation about his presentation “ben: A Prototype for Democracy in the 21st Century.”
We talk about Cynergy’s awarding winning application “ben” at the PhizzPop competition – a National Design and Development Challenge sponsored by Microsoft.
“ben” is a series of interconnected, cross-platform applications that leverage the power of Microsoft Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation, Live Services, Twitter, VoIP technologies.

Jennifer Bove from Huge and Ben Fullerton from IDEO sat down with me shortly after their presentation to discuss ideas from “We’ll Always Have Paris – What Makes a Memorable Service Experience.”
We explore the six key elements about what it takes to design services that keep people coming back for more.
We probe into the dynamics of service design from real-world examples of business that provide unique experiences. One shoe company will actually order a pizza for their clients as well as order products from competitor sites to keep their customers satisfied.
Jennifer and Ben outline why people get excited about intangible services in the same way they lust after the latest shiny toy that just came out on the market.

Peter has a conversation with UX Week 2009 presenter Scott McCloud, best known for his book Understanding Comics, and more recently for the comic explaining Google Chrome. They discuss comics, visual expression, Edward Tufte, and the importance of believing in the message.