Join my conversation with web accessibility leader Natalie MacLees! Natalie has been working in web development and digital accessibility, for over 20 years. She is the co-founder and COO of a small software company NSquared focused on building accessible, user-friendly tools for small businesses. 

Throughout her career, she has remained a passionate advocate for accessibility and has made it her mission to train developers and designers to incorporate accessibility practices into their work.

You should know that with Natalie’s resources at AAArdvark for Accessibility, teams get a full accessibility platform that helps make auditing easier and faster while still maintaining high-quality work. AAArdvark does not offer a misleading quick-fix overlay, but rather offers tools for designers, developers, and accessibility professionals to quickly and easily identify, track, and fix accessibility issues on websites.

Related interesting reads or resources

• Perform professional accessibility audits: Aaardvarkaccessibility.com
• Accessibility statement generator tool from WAI
• Software solutions for small businesses: NSquared.io
• Mule Design
• Ruined by Design – A design ethics and activism book by Mike Monteiro
• Just Enough Research – the 2024 Edition by Erika Hall
• Leaders of Awesomeness with Jared Spool

In this episode, we continue a critical conversation about the challenges we face together on computer science, ethics, and unintentional consequences with emerging technologies that lack defined purpose and regulations.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen has published countless valuable courses on LinkedIn Learning reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers from all over the world. He also contributes to the web community as a public speaker, author, educator, developer, and design philosopher.

Related interesting reads or resources

• Invite Morten to speak: Thinking out loud about the internet
• Code of Ethics for Bloggers, Social Media and Content Creators
• Recent Talk: Y OSLO – TO­WARDS VAL­UES AND ETHICS IN DE­SIGN AND TECH­NOL­O­GY
• Towards a Technoethics (Abstract) – Mario Bunge
• Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It – by Kashmir Hill

I am talking with Jessica Ivins about strengthening stakeholder relationships via UX research operations in this episode. Jessica is the Lead UX Researcher at The Predictive Index, overseeing research and research operations. She plans, conducts, and synthesizes strategic UX research projects that provide critical insights for organizational stakeholders. We’ve got some actionable professional strategies and resources to share too.

Related interesting reads or resources

• An Essential Tool for Capturing Your Career Accomplishments by Jessica Ivins
• Leaders of Awesomeness – Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman, Jared Spool, and the team at Center Centre – UIE launched Leaders of Awesomeness, an online community of more than 46,000 UX design, research, and content leaders – Free to join

Thanks to Vitaly Friedman for the following useful links:

• How To Manage Challenging Stakeholders and Influence Without Authority (free eBook, 95 pages) (https://lnkd.in/e6RY6dQB), a practical guide on how to deal with difficult stakeholders, manage difficult situations and stay true to your product strategy. From HiPPOs (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) to ZEbRAs (Zero Evidence But Really Arrogant). By Dean Peters.
• The Delicate Art of Interviewing Stakeholders, by Dan Brown https://lnkd.in/dW5Wb8CK
• Good Questions For Meetings With Stakeholders, by Lisa Nguyen, Cori Widen https://lnkd.in/eNtM5bUU
• UX Research Studies to Win Over Stubborn Stakeholders, by Lizzy Burnam 🐞 https://lnkd.in/eW3Yyg5k

In this episode, I am joined by special guest, Jared Spool! We are talking about transformational UX research and design strategies. We cover a lot of actionable insights and share a few laughs too. You will learn about how to evaluate the readiness and urgency required to make a maximum strategic UX impact within organizations, what actual leadership means, and how to improve future experiences with research-led, human-centric practices and more.

If you and your design/product teams need weekly motivation and resources, join the Leaders of Awesomeness community or sign the team up for a deeper intensive. Lift up your career and your organization with an amazing knowledge base and uniquely thoughtful teacher, Jared Spool.

Related interesting reads or resources

• Leaders of Awesomeness – Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman, Jared Spool, and the team at Center Centre – UIE launched Leaders of Awesomeness, an online community of more than 46,000 UX design, research, and content leaders – Free to join
• The Evolution of a New UX Design Resolution – UIE – Deliver Better Design
• Advanced Approaches to UX Research – Intensive led by Jared Spool
• How to Win Stakeholders and Influence Decisions Program – Intensive led by Jared Spool
• Deconstructing Delight – by Dana Chisnell
• Walt Disney’s Synergy Map – Napkin sketches from 1957 and 1967 by Walt Disney diagramming the company’s core strategy

Hey, everybody, it’s Cathi Bosco from rethink.fm the forward-thinking podcast about experience design. Join me and special guests to discuss effective design, technology, and the intersection of helping people and entrepreneurship. From user experience research to product roadmaps. We’ve got you covered. The big news today is that I will officially be taking over the rethink.fm podcast, founded by Jackie D’Elia and then co-hosted by Jackie, Monique Dubbelman, and myself. Moving forward, I will be conducting one-on-one interviews with experienced professionals to gain insights into their practices, their projects, and their teams. Let’s face it, design is a team sport, technology and user needs are continuously evolving and we can learn a lot from each other’s experiences along the way. Since this episode is a transition episode each of us will answer a few questions and at the end of the podcast, I’ll give some definitive insights into where we’re headed moving forward. I hope you’ll enjoy this episode. Thank you for joining. What does UX mean to you today, compared to early in your career?

It’s been a while, but in this episode, we have a guest! And what a guest: Rian Rietveld, accessibility specialist at Level Level is joining us to talk about accessibility. We talk about the problem with accessibility overlays, educating people, and how we can help more people develop, design, and create content in a way it’s accessible for everyone. Big take away: make it about themselves.

Related interesting reads or resources

• Selfish accessibility – talk by Adrian Rosselli
• 6 tips for accessible web design – (UXATT blog)
• Accessibility isn’t magic that comes from tools (UXATT blog)
• WP Engine partners with AudioEye
• Overlay Fact Sheet
• A11y-collective (accessibility courses by Rian Rietveld)
• Gravity Forms accessibility guide for developers
• Axe Dev tools Chrome extension

Sometimes, product teams or clients can be too focused on output or features. This is a problem, because you can end up becoming a feature factory, without knowing if the user really benefits from these new features.

If you want to avoid endless iterations of a design with clients or developers, it’s time to start focusing on outcome instead of output. In this episode, we discuss our experience with clients or teams focusing too much on output.

Related interesting reads or resources

• Design for outcome instead of output – UXATT
• Design Outputs and Design Outcomes – Love.com
• Outcomes vs outputs – uxdesign.cc
• Minimize Design Risk by Focusing on Outcomes not Features – NNgroup.com

Chosing the right color

• Common color palette mistakes – Career foundry
• Colour blindness – Colour blind awareness
• Color psychology – verywellmind.com

In this episode, we discuss our learnings and experience from working as a team, after decades of working solo. What are the pro’s & cons? What tools do we use to collaborate online and remote?

In episode 31, Cathi, Jackie & Monique talk about user-centered design practices. This podcast is based on the talk Cathi did for the GoDaddy online event Expand 2021. Listen in and learn from our mistakes.

Related interesting reads or resources

YouTube recording of Cathi’s talk for GoDaddy’s online event Expand 2021

In episode 30, Cathi, Jackie & Monique discuss designer-isms. As designers, we tend to use too much jargon. This episode is based on the article we wrote for UXATT (link below), where we wrote about 15 design terms. We talk about why you should avoid jargon. And give suggestions on how you could speak about the same thing in plain language. And yes, we need to get better at it too.

Related interesting reads or resources

• 15 designer-isms – how to avoid jargon – UXATT.com
• Why Design-isms are a problem – UX Collective
• How to deal with information overload in everyday life – Monique Dubbelman
• Most Used words/terms in UX Design – Linkedin post by Akash Solanki

In episode 29, Cathi, Jackie & Monique discuss the value of UX research. Many designers, including larger agencies, have difficulties ‘squeezing’ user research into a project, because clients prefer to immediately jump to the visual part of design. But what is the value of UX research?

List of used terms

• UX research
  User eXperience research. Find out how people feel when they use your product.
• UI
  User Interface. The visual part of a digital product that people see when they use it.

Related interesting reads or resources

• Just Enough Research, by Erika Hall
  Start doing good research faster than you can plan your next pitch.
• Exposure is key to evidence-based decision making for product teams. Presentation for WPVIP- BigWP – 2020, by Cathi Bosco
  Why speculate about the people we are building and designing for? Our teams need a deep understanding of their needs and their environments.
• What Proactive User Research Looks Like, by Jared Spool – UIE Articles
• Unsplash plugin for WordPress by XWP