Podcast appearances and mentions of lou rosenfeld

Matt Webb doesn't just talk about emerging technologies—he builds with them, lives with them, and prototypes the futures they might bring. In this episode, Lou Rosenfeld talks with Webb—designer, technologist, and featured speaker at the upcoming Designing with AI 2025 conference—about how GenAI represents a kind of temporal leap: a sudden arrival of capabilities that feel like they should've taken another decade to develop. Matt shares how he explores "weak signals"—small, often personal experiments or observations that hint at larger shifts to come. From building an early website with GPT-3 to creating an app that tracks the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, Matt explains how play, laziness, and curiosity drive his invention process. He also touches on how GenAI changes our relationship to search, learning, and even design itself—pushing us into a world where conversations with information replace traditional retrieval methods. The discussion spans adaptive design, epistemic journeys, and the potential for everyone to become a maker of tools, apps, and meaning.

What happens when two brilliant minds from the world of information architecture team up to create a podcast that's part leadership playbook, part intellectual high-wire act? That's exactly what Harry Max and Jorge Arango set out to explore with their new podcast, Traction Heroes. Lou Rosenfeld chats with two and learns how they envision their project and how their podcast differs from traditional interview formats. Instead of scripted discussions, Traction Heroes features Harry and Jorge reading thought-provoking passages from books to each other—without prior preparation—sparking impromptu, insightful conversations. The goal? To decode complex ideas and turn them into actionable advice for leaders and decision-makers. The pair leverage their complementary strengths: Harry's applied, results-driven approach, and Jorge's deep, theoretical mindset. Together, they aim to help listeners gain traction in their careers and lives, all while keeping the dialogue engaging and accessible. Launched in January 2025, the podcast avoids technical or siloed jargon, and focuses on practical tools for structuring decisions and creating meaningful outcomes. Available on major platforms and at TractionHeroes.com, the show promises a fresh take on leadership and decision-making.

An exciting new conference is just around the corner, ​Advancing Service Design 2024​. We ​recently had a chat​ with Lou Rosenfeld, the conference organizer, about key ideas behind the conference. Now, we're doing a deep dive into the two-day conference program with ​Sylvie Abookire​, who's part of the curation team. In this episode, you'll hear about the main themes, the inspiring (and somewhat surprising) speakers, and of course how it all ties together to advance our field. Sure, you can also get some of this info on the conference website, but I promise this conversation is much more fun 

I'm excited... There's a brand new conference just around the corner – ​Advancing Service Design​ – and it's organized by none other than Rosenfeld Media, the publisher behind some of the most iconic books in our field. Now you might be thinking... another conference? But trust me, this one is different. That's why I invited ​Lou Rosenfeld​ himself onto the Show to give us the inside scoop. In this episode, you'll learn: * Why Lou decided to launch a brand new conference. * Who is Advancing Service Design for? And what makes the conference different. So if you're curious about what all the excitement is about, make sure to tune in to this conversation. And as you can guess by the title there will be a part 2 where we'll dive deep into the full conference lineup and speakers. --- Want to attend Advancing Service Design? Well, you're in luck! Answer the simple question over here https://www.servicedesignshow.com/asdc2024-survey to get a 10% discount on your ticket. But that's not all! When you sign up using the provided code, you'll automatically enter a contest where you can win sweet prizes. --- [ 1. GUIDE ] --- 00:00 Welcome to a Special Episode 01:30 Q&A with Lou 03:30 Long-Awaited Service Design Conference 06:00 Why Service Design Now? 08:45 Conference Program 12:00 Target Audience 14:00 Conference Success Secrets 19:00 Benefit in Time, Support, and Labor prep 20:00 Why Ben Reason and Patrick Quattlebaum 23:00 Speaker Insights 26:00 Speaker highlights 30:00 What to expect 33:00 What Lou looks forward to 36:30 How to get tickets 39:15 Topics to stay tuned to --- [ 2. LINKS ] --- Get your Advancing Service Design tickets here: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/advancing-service-design/ --- [ 3. CIRCLE ] --- Join our private community for in-house service design professionals. ⁠https://servicedesignshow.com/circle

In this episode, I sit down with veteran boot fitter and former ski shop owner Lou Rosenfeld to dive into the art of customizing ski boots for the perfect fit. With years of experience, Lou shares expert insights on how the right boot adjustments can significantly enhance your skiing experience.We debunk common misconceptions, like opting for larger boots to relieve pressure points, and explore why starting with a snug fit is key. Lou discusses essential modifications for bunions, toe length discrepancies, and heel spurs, showing how professional adjustments can boost both comfort and performance.From reshaping the forefoot to solving calf issues, Lou explains how custom fitting can transform high-performance boots for any skier. This episode is packed with tips on achieving the perfect ski boot setup for a comfortable day on the slopes.A big thanks to Ski West, Calgary for letting us use their Big Press for the video examples. https://www.skiwest.caWant to see the recording where Lou shows the modifications? Checkout the YouTube version of the podcast here https://youtu.be/VCz5NyVUqKg?si=xJbLnItXdQG7asMx⭐️ Links:-Contact Lou about buying a press or any questions: lou@lous.ca-IAESS https://iaess.org-Big Picture Skiing Merchandise https://big-picture-skiing.myshopify.com-Big Picture Skiing Boot Fit Guide https://bigpictureskiing.com/pages/bps-boot-guide⛷️ 25% off coupon code! Want to Join the most comprehensive ski improvement platform for skiing? Big Picture Skiing? Tom curates all videos to make the learning experience as good as him coaching you in person, but at a fraction of the cost! Improve all types of ski turns making you a master of the whole mountain. And podcast listeners can claim 25% off ANY membership plan using code PODCAST making the annual deal great value and a fraction of the cost of a private lesson. Plus you can utilise the strength and mobility videos in the pre season period and off season to stay mobile and strong.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Join Tom Gellie and Lou Rosenfeld in this enlightening episode of the Big Picture Skiing Podcast, where they delve into the intricacies of ski boot selection. Discover why Lou recommends specific boot types, from beginners to seasoned experts, and the surprising benefits of opting for a "race boot." Explore the crucial role angles play in ski boot design, and how they can significantly impact your skiing technique and performance on the slopes. Plus, gain insights into the often-overlooked aspects of kids' ski boot design and the potential pitfalls of excessive ramp angle. Whether you're a novice or a seasoned pro, this episode promises valuable insights to elevate your skiing game.Ready to take your skiing skills to new heights? Unlock exclusive online learning resources by subscribing to our YouTube channel! Check out some of our top-notch content for free by clicking the link below:https://bigpictureskiing.com/yt/154-seethebigpictureAnd hey, why not show off your love for skiing with our trendy "Skellie" T-shirt? Grab yours today at:https://big-picture-skiing.myshopify.com/?_ab=0&_fd=0&_sc=1Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Robb and Josh welcome renowned publisher and information architect Lou Rosenfeld for a conversation that gets into the roots of experience design, while exploring the full bloom of generative AI. Running Rosenfeld Media for nearly two decades has given Lou incredible insights into the publishing world as well as UX, which most Rosenfeld titles explore in specific ways. This great conversation brings lessons from the past to the fore as we race ahead with technology.

Did you know not all ski bindings have the same height between heel and toe piece. Some have a higher heel piece than toe and some are flat. This angle is referred to as binding delta and has an impact on your balance and feel of your skis. Find out what this means for your skiing as it could be limiting your ski performance. Not inhibiting you from skiing but possibly leaving something on the table in terms of carving your turns. Lou Rosenfeld helps inform us of the simple method of measuring your binding delta and also how your ski boot length is a factor to this angle. Don't ski blindly on your equipment, find out what angle works best for you. Please leave a comment below if you discover binding delta was a factor in why you liked or disliked a ski. -How to simply measure your binding delta angle. -Difference between brands of binding -Ramp angle vs delta angle-Effect on how the ski tip engages -Effect of ski boot size on delta angle-Stories from Tom and Lou on binding delta.If you are seriously into your skiing then you will find the Big Picture Skiing App and website a great resource for your learning. Designed for skiers from intermediate to full time professional instructors, BPS is a method you can be taught and coached by Tom Gellie. Find out more and try a 7 day free trial at https://bigpictureskiing.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Bio Jeff helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. He is the co-author of the award-winning book Lean UX (now in it's 3rd edition) and the Harvard Business Review Press book Sense & Respond. Starting off as a software designer, Jeff now works as a coach, consultant and keynote speaker helping companies bridge the gaps between business agility, digital transformation, product management and human-centred design. His most recent book, Forever Employable, was published in June 2020. Social Media ·         LinkedIn ·         Jeff Gothelf - coaching, consulting, training & keynotes ·         OKR-book.com ·         Twitter ·         Instagram ·         Jeff Gothelf - YouTube    Interview Highlights 04:50 Early career 16:00 Thought leadership 19:10 Outsource the work you hate, it shows 23:00 Defining a product 24:35 Product Managers as navigators of uncertainty 28:15 Succeeding as a Product Manager 37:25 Strategy, vision and mission 42:00 OKRs 48:00 Leading and lagging indicators 54:10 Do less, more often    Books and resources ·         Forever Employable - how to stop looking for work - Jeff Gothelf      ·         Best product management books - Lean UX, Sense & Respond... (jeffgothelf.com) ·         Lean vs. Agile vs. Design Thinking: What You Really Need to Know to Build High-Performing Digital Product Teams: Gothelf, Jeff ·         Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously: Gothelf, Jeff, Seiden, Josh ·         The role of a Product Manager: Product Managers are Navigators of Uncertainty https://jeffgothelf.com/blog/product-managers-navigate-uncertainty/ ·         Information Architecture, Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, Jorge Arango ·         The Lean Startup | The Movement That Is Transforming How New Products Are Built And Launched ·         Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making, Tony Fadell ·         The Creative Act: A Way of Being: Rubin, Rick Episode Transcript Ula Ojiaku Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. So I have with me the legend, Jeff Gothelf, who is an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, highly sought after keynote speaker I must add, coach and much more. So Jeff, really honoured to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast, thank you. Jeff Gothelf It's my pleasure, Ula, thanks so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here. Ula Ojiaku Oh, good. Well, I usually start with a question for my guests to find out more about themselves as individuals. And during our pre-recording session, you mentioned something that was intriguing to me, that you actually played piano and you were part of a touring musical band, could you tell us about that? Jeff Gothelf Absolutely. I've played piano my whole life, my dad plays piano, there was always a piano in the house, and I had pretty big rockstar dreams as I was a kid growing up. It's really all I wanted to do. I can remember in high school everybody's like, what are you going to go to college for? I was like, I'm going to be a rockstar, figure that out. And, you know, I played in bands in high school, I played in bands in college, and towards the end of college I started playing in a couple of relatively serious bands, serious in the sense that they were decent bands, in my opinion. They were touring bands and they, you know, they made enough money to sustain themselves. They weren't jobs, they didn't sustain us as individuals, but they sustained the band system. And it's fascinating because, you know, at the time I was 19 and 20, I did this really until just about the time I met my wife, which, I was 25. And so I did it until about, I was about 25, and, you know, in hindsight you don't see it when you're in it, especially if you've never really done anything else. I'd always had jobs, but the jobs were always, you know, I delivered newspapers and I made sandwiches and I was a, you know, worked for a moving company, whatever, right? But in hindsight now it's clear to me that I was being entrepreneurial. In those days, the bands, each of them, especially the touring bands, were startups, you know, it's a bunch of folks getting together with a crazy idea, thinking that everyone in the world will love it, it's going to change the world, and doing everything they can and putting everything into helping folks realise that, and building that vision and, and executing on it. And, you know, scraping by and hacking things together and hustling and doing what you can to build a successful, in this case it was a musical group, but it was essentially a startup. And these days, not only do I look back fondly on those days and all those, all those guys that I played music with are my best friends to this day, we still talk almost every day, but I learned so many skills about being entrepreneurial, about experimenting, about learning, about failure, about iteration, about, you know, what's good, what's good enough, when do you call it quits, that's a really tough thing to do, you know, letting something go that you love is really difficult. And I know now, you know, 20 years later, that so much of that experience figures into my day-to-day work today. You know, even to this day, like if I get a new speech to give, if I get, a new client or a new, you know, assignment, I call them gigs. You know, I got a new speaking gig, I got a new consulting gig, I got a new coaching gig, that type of thing. It's impossible to remove that. And it's, it's amazing to me really, because at the time, you know, I could not have told you what I just said to you and, but in hindsight it's super clear to me what I was doing and what I was learning because I've put it to use over and over and over again in my life. Ula Ojiaku That's fascinating. It reminds me of what one of my mentors said to me, and he said, whenever you are given an opportunity to learn versus, you know, get more money doing what you already know, always choose to learn because there's no wasted knowledge. So it's more of tying it back to your days that, you know, as a musician, as a part of a touring band, you were learning and you're now using those transferrable skills, right? Jeff Gothelf Yes. Ula Ojiaku And would you, well, I don't play any instruments, but I used to be part of, you know, different choirs and my daughter also now does that, you know, kind of sings. But there are times when, you know, things would go wrong and you're finding yourself having to improvise so that the audience wouldn't know, okay, this isn't part of the script. Would you say that has also played a part in your experience as a band member did such? Jeff Gothelf I mean, the thing that comes immediately to mind is just comfort on a stage, right? Comfort in front of people and being able, you know, being comfortable in front of a room and performing to some extent or another. I think that that's, that came from that, the ability to, you know, hide or improvise, mistakes that happened. You know, I remember I was, we did this as a band all the time, and nobody ever knew really, unless they knew a particular song of ours very, very well. And you know, some things like that happen all the time when you're, giving a speech or teaching a class or whatever it is. I mean, I remember giving a speech in Budapest one time at Craft Conference in front of 2000 people, and the screen kept going out, my slides are up there in front of, and they kept flickering and, and going out. And it was just a question of, you know, what do you do? Do you just sort of collapse and be like, well, the slides are gone, I can't do anything, or do you keep going? And I think a lot of that drive and that ability to land on my feet in those situations came from being in that band and putting on so many shows. Ula Ojiaku And I'll say it helps that you knew your content as well, because if you had just read it 10 minutes before and you got on the stage, then it would be a different thing. Jeff Gothelf It would not have gone well. Ula Ojiaku Yes. Okay, now I understand you have a BA in Mass Communication and you also went on to do a Masters in Human Factors in Information Design, and in your previous life you used to be a software designer. Jeff Gothelf Correct. Ula Ojiaku How did the winding road go from band member, you know, through the academics, to Jeff we know today, I mean from software designer to now. Jeff Gothelf Yeah, it's interesting, it's a great question. The, look, the rockstar thing didn't work out, you know, there's a thousand reasons, but I think the bottom line is we just weren't good enough, that's, that's probably where it netted out, but… Ula Ojiaku  And you were getting married, you said you met your wife. Jeff Gothelf I was getting married, yeah. You know, and having no money doesn't, those two things don't really play well together, you know, and so the band thing was ending and, you know, the web was starting, so we're looking at the late nineties at this point, just to kind of date myself a little bit, we're looking at the late nineties and in the late nineties as the band was, the last band that I was in, was winding down, the internet was coming up and I'd always been prone, you know, to computers and a little bit of computer programming, just very basic stuff, you know, and I started building websites, basic, you know, brochure websites for my band and for other bands, and I taught myself HTML to be able to do that. And then as the band was winding down, web 1.0 was happening and, you know, back in 1999, if you could spell HTML, you could get a job, you know, and I could do a little bit more than that, I did a little bit of graphic design, a little bit of, of HTML, and so I got a job, I got a job because it was easy to get a job back then, they took a lot of risks on people, and we learned on the job and that's what kicked things off, that got me doing web design and shortly thereafter I moved into Information Architecture, which was a brand new term and a brand new field as defined in a book by Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville called Information Architecture for the Worldwide Web. And that book really changed my life because it gave me a sense that I, instead of just doing kind of the last step in the process, which was the markup and the design portion, I could move further up the waterfall, if you will, in the website creation process and do a lot of the Information Architecture, and that was great, and that was really, that really spoke to me and having sort of landed in that position, as the web evolved and became more interactive and Information Architecture expanded into, well, more fields showed up in interaction design, UI design, UX design, I expanded my skillset into that world. And then that really began the trajectory of starting to build design teams and then going into product management, eventually launching our own studio, our own firm, and then finally after selling that studio, going out on my own and teaching all this stuff. But that's, that's sort of like how I went from band, to the web and everything, and there's, you know, there's a lot, I skipped a lot of steps there, but that's the story in general. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that, Jeff, and I think you also told part of your story in your book Forever Employable, How to Stop Looking for Work and Let your Next Job Find You. Since we're already on this topic, could we just delve into that? So you said something in that book about, you know, in your job as a software designer, you know, Information Architect, I can't remember the exact role you had, but you had an aha moment where you felt you, quoting this in my own words, I'm not quoting your book exactly, but you felt like you could always be replaced in that role and you wanted to carve out a niche where you are always in demand. Do you want to tell that story in your words so that I stop butchering it. Jeff Gothelf Yeah, I mean, look, it was interesting, you know, I progressed in my career in the same way that, you know, most people progress in their career, the way that my parents told me the world works, you know, you go to college, you get a job. It took me, and there was a little, you know, band break in there for me, but, you know, I got my first job, and then you work hard for a few years and you get a promotion, and then you, maybe you move to another company and you get a raise and, you know, you just kind of move your way, you climb your way up the corporate ladder. And that's what I did, I did that for a decade and I, you know, I clawed my way up into middle management like everybody does, or like most folks do. And when I turned 35, on the morning, in fact, of my 35th birthday is how the story goes in the book, I kind of woke up in a panic. I was concerned, like you said, that this wasn't going to last. I was going to become more expensive, the number of opportunities available to me as you climb, available to anyone, as you climb the corporate ladder gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Right? Exactly. Right. That's by design, right? You want fewer managers and more people doing the work. And I was genuinely concerned that I was going to run out of, I was going to get fired, I was, there's, I was hiring people at the time and the people that we were hiring were younger than me, they were smarter than me, faster than me, they were better than me, and they cost a lot less than me. And so I was really worried, and I saw this with my friends too, I had friends who were maybe five years older than me who were struggling with this very thing. They were struggling to find a job or stay employed, and stay relevant. And I was terrified. I was terrified I wasn't going to be able to feed my kids, you know, that was the big thing for me. And so I made an explicit decision when I turned 35 that I was going to stop chasing jobs. Like, as the subtitle of the book says, How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You, I was going to stop looking for work, and I was going to create a situation where jobs were constantly finding me, where opportunities were finding me, because that way if something happens to my current job, well there's a stream of inbound opportunities available to me. And to kind of cut to the chase here, the way that I decided to do that, and the way that I write about it in the book, is through thought leadership. That's it. Like, that's the, you know, recognised expertise, personal branding, right, becoming somebody who people know and somebody who can help solve specific problems, and that's what I did. And look, it took me years, a lot of years, to really build up my reputation and my profile, and I've done it to an extent, and it's impressive to me today to see how many people are doing it so much faster than me. Now, you can credit it to the tools that's available to them, the nature of conversation online these days that's fundamentally different than it was 10 or 15 years ago, and these folks have just kind of nailed, nailed the system here. But it's thought leadership is what's worked for me to do that. Ula Ojiaku And I'll say, I mean, yes, there are people who might have done it faster than you did, but there is this saying that people are able, if I'm able to see as far as I did, it's because I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. I'm just saying it's credit to you for sharing your experience because it's helping us to know what to do moving forward. Jeff Gothelf Look, and that's, I think that that's the benefit here, right? I think I talk about this in the book, right? About sharing generously, giving back to the community, helping people avoid the mistakes that you made, helping them skip a step. And to me that's, you know, a lot of folks would see that as, well, aren't you enabling the competition? No, I'm helping the community get collectively better. And eventually I hope that if I get to a position of need, the community will help me, that's what I hope. I don't expect it, but that's what I hope happens. Ula Ojiaku So how, how did you go about setting up the systems then? Because you, you got this realisation, oh my gosh, I am going to be, I may be obsolete in my current role faster than I'd rather admit, so you said you now went, you said, okay, you're going to be a thought leader. How did you decide on what area to start from and how did you then go about setting up the systems and the structure you have right now that are helping you? Jeff Gothelf The first thing was really to decide what I wanted to be known for. You know, in the book we call it planting your flag, but it's a question of what is, if I'm going to be a thought leader, if I'm going to build a personal brand of some kind, if I'm going to be known for something, what is that thing? And, and you know, our natural tendency is to go for professional things. What do I know best at work? What do I do best? I'm a Project Manager, a Product Manager, I'm an agile coach, I'm a software developer, I'm a designer, but doesn't have to be professional. Could be personal, right? I told you I play piano and I happen to really love old vintage electric pianos. And I used to have a fairly large collection of vintage electric pianos. I could have built my thought leadership around vintage electric pianos, right, and it's viable to an extent, but the target audience here, so this is where kind of the product management hat comes on, right? The target audience is tiny. It's tiny. Like, even if you took all the keyboard players in the world, right? And, and then all those keyboard players who play vintage electric pianos, which is a subset, and all the people who care about this kind of stuff. I mean, it's still an infinitely smaller audience than say, web design, or product management, or even agile software development or things like that where I ultimately ended up. And so I chose that I wanted to be known for User Experience Design, and more importantly, UX design with Agile, because that's the problem that I was solving at the time, or solving for at the time, and nobody had a really good answer for it when we started solving for it, and that to me felt like an opportunity. And then that was what I, so then I started doubling down on that. And what that meant was starting to write, starting to share generously, speaking at conferences, getting on podcasts, things like that. And really starting to, at the very least, tell the story of the work that we were doing at the time, as I was the Director of UX at TheLadders in New York City at the time, and we were working on a daily basis, on a Sprintly basis, to tackle the challenge of good user experience design and agile together. So that's what I was writing about. And that eventually led to Lean UX, the book. But that's how it all started and that's where the focus was. Ula Ojiaku Okay. And how have you then set up the structure? Do you have a team currently or do you work in a lean manner? Jeff Gothelf So these days there is a system and there is a team. It's interesting, years ago I did a gig in the UK, see I said gig, comes out naturally like I told you. I did a gig in the UK for rentalcars.com in Manchester. And at the time, their Head of Product or Chief Product Officer, was this fascinating woman named Supriya Uchil. And she was a fantastic client. I really enjoyed working with her. And when the gig was over, she emailed me, she said, hey, would you like to hear some feedback about what it's like to work with you? No client has ever done that, by the way, not before, and not since. And I said, absolutely. I would love to get some feedback about what it was like to work with me. And she gave me a bunch of feedback, a lot of the work. And I took a lot of notes and I took a lot of post-it notes. One of those post-it notes has stuck with me for years now. It still sits here on my whiteboard, I still have it here, and it says outsource the work you hate, it shows. Right. And that's what she said to me. And she said, look, it's obvious to me that you hate doing sales. She goes, every time we had to have a sales conversation, you were clearly uncomfortable and not really into it. Right. She was right. I hate doing sales, I really do, and so over the years, as I've built this business, as it's grown, as it's become a, you know, a viable, successful business, you know, business of one per se. I have built a team of outsourced professionals to support a lot of the work that I do today. So, for example, I have a content marketing team. Now that team takes content that I create and they repurpose it across multiple channels, and they help me build, you know, my email newsletter and they help me build my LinkedIn presence and other things like that. It's my content, but they do all of that work. In addition to that, I've outsourced all my accounting. I have a fantastic accountant who works with businesses, only with businesses like mine, and so they understand my business and my way of working, everything's online, everything's digital, and that's super helpful. There is a woman that works for me part-time who basically handles the entire logistics of my business, scheduling, calendaring, travel. And then on top of that, she also handles BusDev and sales for me. And so that, to me, all that does is it removes all the things out of my way that I hate doing, and it leaves me with a tremendous amount of free time to do the things that I love doing, which is content creation and delivery. And that has made the ability to generate that content and distribute that content far more efficient and successful. And I'm super grateful to be able to, you know, to be in a position to be able to do that. And it supports the lifestyle that I'm trying to create and it allows me to, again, to focus on the things that I truly enjoy doing. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for sharing that, that's really insightful. Now, going back to something you said earlier about putting on your Product Management hat, there are some people in the audience who might be wondering, okay, what would you define a product as? Is it always something tangible or could we expand that word to mean anything that someone consumes, which might also be intangible, for example, going to a show, would a show be called a product? Jeff Gothelf That's a great question. The simplest definition that I've used and that I like for product is the way an organisation delivers and captures value. To me, that's a product. Now, that product could be a service, right? And I don't want to open up that can of worms. So if you're a band and you deliver a show, you cap you. that's how you deliver value. And if you capture value, like you sell tickets to that show, and merchandise, and maybe streaming revenue, then your product is the music and the show. So, yeah, absolutely, right, that's the way that you capture value. And so to me that's the simplest definition, the way an organisation delivers and captures value. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that definition, and this leads me to my next question, which is, so how does it relate to the discipline of product management? What does a Product Manager do then? Jeff Gothelf I believe that Product Managers are navigators of uncertainty. So a Product Manager's job is to take an idea, right, or, you know, the way an organisation delivers value, and to take it from concept, to market, to successful business. Now, the challenge with that is that we live in a continuously changing world. The pace of that change is increasingly faster, and this idea that you can confidently predict exactly what to do, how to do it, when to do it, and be right all the time is false. There's just too much change in the world. I mean, think back three years ago, right? The world was radically different three years ago than it is today. Radically different from 10 years ago, we could, we could not have predicted the things. I mean, I started my job at TheLadders in New York City, I talk about this, in October of 2008. Everything was going great in October, in the early part of October 2008. Right, we had a roadmap, we had plans, you know, in three weeks after I started my brand new job as Director of User Experience, Lehman Brothers melts down, and the financial crisis ensues, right, and we, you know, we're a job market site and all of a sudden the whole ecosystem's upside down. And so, and so I believe that the Product Manager is a navigator of uncertainty. They take a specific set of skills, a specific set of qualities, like curiosity and humility, and they build a process for de-risking the product idea and maximizing its chances for success. That's what I believe Product Managers do at a very high level. How that manifests will vary from Google, to Bank of America, to Boeing, to whatever, to, you know, I'm thinking, I'm trying to think of something like Cisco, the food service people or whatever, right? Like every organisation is going to do Product Management differently for a variety of reasons. You know, domain, industry context, corporate politics, blah, blah, blah, you know, technology stack, whatever. But at the end of the day, I think if you're looking at sort of fundamentally what a Product Manager does is they help a team navigate the uncertainty of product development. That's their job. Ula Ojiaku I dare say that even within a sector, even an industry, the way it's carried out could also vary from company to company, would you? Jeff Gothelf A hundred percent, yeah, I mean, a hundred percent. I mean, it's absolutely true. And so I think to say like, oh, I did Product Management at Google, so I'm a great Product Manager. Well, you might have been a great Product Manager at Google, congratulations, right? Does that mean that you're going to be a great Product Manager at, you know, Barclays, I don't know. You're going to bring that skillset to bear in a completely different environment, in a completely different industry. So I think if you've got the fundamentals in place, you'll do great. But trying to sort of copy and paste what you did at Google very tactically into a different environment, I don't think it's going to work. I mean, happy to be proven wrong, but I don't think it's going to work. Ula Ojiaku So what are the fundamentals then that a Product Manager would have that would give them a higher chance of success? You know, transferrable success from one area to one another. Jeff Gothelf I'm going talk about two qualities that are, I believe are fundamental to the success of a Product Manager, and then kind of four things to keep in mind. And I think those are, I think that to me, those are the fundamentals. I think that the two qualities that a Product Manager needs to have is humility and curiosity. I think all successful Product Managers are humble and curious. And those are really two sides of the same coin, let's be honest, okay. There's really, there are two different ways to describe a very similar quality in a person. Now, humility simply means, people misunderstand humility. People think humility is a lack of vision or a lack of conviction or a lack of ideas. Or being a doormat. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And it's not, humility simply says that, look, I have, uh, I'm going to use my expertise and my experience to come up with a strong opinion about what we should do. However, in the face of evidence that contradicts my strong opinion, I'm willing to change course. That's humility. That's saying, you know what? I was wrong about this. The evidence proves that I was wrong, so we're going to change course. The curiosity side of the story is the excitement in finding out if you were right or wrong, and to me, those two fundamental qualities of a person make for excellent Product Managers. Somebody who's willing to admit that they were wrong about their strong opinion, and somebody who's excited to find out if they're right or wrong about their strong opinion, and curious to see if maybe there's a better way, right? I think this is a good idea, but there's got to be a better way, no, let's go find it. To me, that makes for excellent Product Managers. So those are the fundamental sort of personality qualities. I think those are really hard to teach. I think you can train people to some extent but, you know, ego's tough and humility challenges the ego a lot. And so do the facts for that matter, facts challenge the ego a lot, the evidence you collect from the market. So then there's that. And I think the four sort of things to keep in mind for excellent sort of transferrable product management are customer centricity, agility, evidence-based decision making, and continuous learning and improvement. So a lot of agile concepts in there, you'll hear sort of a lot of agile concepts. You can argue all of them are agile concepts, although not exactly how all agile is implemented these days, but nevertheless, so customer centricity first and foremost, right? As a curious and humble Product Manager, your primary focus is making the customer successful, not shipping features, making the customer successful. That means understanding the customer, understanding the problem that you're solving for them, understanding what's getting in their way, understanding what they're doing today, understanding how the competition is solving this problem for people, understanding technology and how you might apply it to better solve this problem, understanding where the market is going so that you get ahead of it, you don't get caught behind, right? But it's all about understanding the customer. What are customers looking for? What are they trying to achieve? What's getting in their way? And really knowing them, not just quantitatively, but qualitatively, meeting them, talking to them, having regular conversations. To me, that's the first sort of key quality of a successful Product Manager. The second is agility, and that stems directly from those qualities of humility and curiosity. Agility is the ability to change course, it's the willingness to change course. It's the flexibility to say, you know, we started going down this path and I know we've spent a couple of Sprints heading down this path, but it doesn't make sense anymore, and so we're going to change course. And yeah, we burned two Sprints on this and that sucks, and I'm sorry, but we didn't burn two months on it, we didn't burn six months on it, right. And so we're going to shift to something more successful because of what we've learned in the past. And that brings me to the third point, which is evidence-based decision making. So those course corrections are being made based on data that you're gathering from the market, qualitative data, quantitative data that lets you know that, yeah, this is a good path to go down. Or, you know what, we really need to pivot here or to completely change course into something else, but you're making decisions based on data and not just opinion. And then finally, this continuous learning and improvement. This, again, this is that curiosity that says, we did a good job, we solved the problem, the product's successful, great. How do we make it better? How do we keep learning whether or not this still makes sense? Right? To me, that's what makes for successful Product Managers, right? Those multiple focus areas and two core qualities of humility and curiosity. I think that's what makes for good Product Managers. Ula Ojiaku That's awesome, thank you for that. And would you have, I mean you do, in your books, you've shared lots of war stories where you know, you had experience with product management or product leadership and to the audience, I'll say read the books, but is there any example maybe that comes to mind of someone who was a Product Manager that, you don't have to name names, you don't have to share like details, but that kind of brought to life all these personal qualities and focus areas and how that affected the work? Jeff Gothelf I mean, look, I've worked with a ton of remarkable folks over the years. I think I started really meeting folks who were working this way when I met folks like Janice Fraser who, in fact came up with the phrase ‘strong opinions, loosely held', which is exactly what I was just describing a few minutes ago. Janice has built multiple businesses and has really helped pioneer these ideas into sort of the mainstream. And I've seen her repeatedly do this. Eric Ries, you know, with The Lean Startup, really brought a lot of these ideas to light in a very easy to digest way, hence the success of his work in the past, and he lived this stuff in the businesses that he's built over the years. I had a colleague and co-worker and co-founder in a business named Giff Constable. Most recently, Giff was the Chief Product Officer at Meetup, but he's been a serial entrepreneur his whole life. Giff really embodied these ideas, like he's a smart guy, tons of experience, really great ideas, but he would test them all, and if he didn't get evidence that convinced him that they were right, he was willing to change course. And I learned a ton from working with him and building businesses with him. And it was inspirational because in many ways, you know, I appreciated his ruthlessness. You know, we all, it's hard, you know, this is personal stuff, this is my idea, all my ideas are great, I love my ideas, right. And he loved his ideas, but he was very, very good at separating emotion and evidence. And I really learned a ton from him as well. So those are three folks that kind of come to mind immediately. Ula Ojiaku Thanks for that, it reminds me in terms of what you said about Giff being ruthless, I think is a term in journalism to “kill your darlings” because you could write an article or, you know, write your first draft and you're so in love with it, but by the time the editor brings out their red pen or something and starts striking it out, you have to separate emotion from the love. Jeff Gothelf That's exactly right, kill your darlings is the reality of this, of good product management. It's, you know, if the data doesn't prove it, and the data we're looking for is changes, meaningful, positive changes in the behaviour of the customers that we're serving. And if the data doesn't show it, then no matter how brilliant this idea was, how much you love it or how much you thought it was just revolutionary, it doesn't make sense to continue to invest in it, we've got to find, figure out a different way. Ula Ojiaku That's awesome. I'd love to get to your take on the terms, you know, vision and strategy. How would you define these terms would be my first question, and my second question, and I'm happy to, you know, share this again, is how would you then tie this to, you know, for example, product development? How would they, how should they influence product development? Jeff Gothelf Yeah, so look, a couple things. There are, I'm not going to lie to you, you know, I struggle a little bit with, you know, vision and mission. Strategy is clear to me, but differentiating between vision and mission, some will say a vision is like what will the world look like in five years or something like that? Or if you're successful, what changes will you see in the world? That type of thing. Whereas a vision is sort of like the big motivational, like what was it for Google? Cataloguing all the world's data, that was their vision. Right? Ula Ojiaku Can I give you my own take? So my understanding mission is more like, okay, what do we stand for? We're going to save the world? And vision is like, okay, in this amount of time, you know, this is how we're saving the world. So it's kind of a picture from the future, say if we travel five years into the future and we see our customers, what are, how are they behaving? You know, what exactly does the world look like for us? While mission tends to remain constant. That's my understanding anyway. Jeff Gothelf Okay. Yeah. And so to me, look, it's directional, right? In the sense of like, we are, you know, we're going to make sure everyone is clean drinking water, like clean drinking water for everybody, right? That's our, is that our mission or our vision? I don't know. But like, or maybe that, maybe that's the mission and the vision is, you know, a world where no one's thirsty. To me, those are like you, I think you need that in the sense that like, you need to know sort of at a high level what problem is the company solving for in the world? I think that's important, right? Because I think that inevitably there are going to be initiatives that seem to stray from that. At the very least, you can point and say, look, is it our mission to bring clean drinking water to everybody in the world? And why are we like investing in a sports website? Right, doesn't make any sense. So at the very least, it gives us that perspective. Strategy, however, and I think strategy is really, really, really important. Strategy is super important for aligning the organisation so that everybody is pulling in the same direction, so that everybody is clear on what the short term goals are for the organisation and it gives people, if done correctly, it gives people the freedom to experiment and learn to figure out the best ways to achieve the strategy, because I do believe that strategy is a hypothesis. Our hypothesis is that we want to expand into the North American market in 2024. Okay, great, let's figure out all kinds of ways where we might start to build some market share in North America in 2024. Right. And to me, I think that that is the true benefit of strategy. I think that it can also be misused, at least, for alignment, that's very specific. Our strategy is, you know, North American market share and we're going to do it this way. And you can get very prescriptive with that. Now everybody's aligned, everybody knows what we're doing, but it doesn't allow for the flexibility and that push and pull that ultimately reveals a better way to do something or is more creative or more innovative. And so I think strategy is key. It's key to articulate it clearly and simply, it's key to disseminate it clearly and simply across the organisation. And I think no team in the organisation should have their project approved if they can't clearly state how they believe this might help achieve the strategy. That's what I believe. Ula Ojiaku And on that note, so you said no project or team should have their initiative approved unless they can show how it helps move the needle towards the desired strategy, the direction of travel, the organisation, I suppose that's what you mean, the organisation's direction of travel or what they want to achieve. Now how, because one of the shiny new objects, or, well, not an object per se, but more like a buzzword is OKRs, objectives and key results. So how can we use that? Or, let's say, can it be used to help with tying strategy with the work that, you know, the lower levels of the organisation might be doing? Jeff Gothelf I think it's critical to be able to tie the pieces together. Now, I don't expect an individual contributor necessarily to be able to do that, but certainly their manager can say, hey team, we're working on this very tactical thing because it's a component of these five other tactical things that when you put them together, they roll up and they achieve this much more meaningful thing together. Right, and so I, again, I think that there needs to be a clear, and it's rare, look, let's be honest, right? Everyone in the organisation needs to understand what the strategic focus is for the next six months, six to 12 months. Okay. And again, if you can't speak directly to why you're working on the thing that you're working on, then your boss should be able to answer that question for you. Ula Ojiaku So it's really about, what I'm hearing you say is that there needs to be a strategic focus for an organisation at least that looks ahead six to 12 months into the future to say, okay, this is what we're going to be doing. And for teams, they have to find a way of articulating how they are contributing to that strategic focus, to the fulfilment of that strategic focus. Now, how can OKRs be used? I know you said, okay, individual contributors may not necessarily use that, but in the situations where you feel they apply, how could they be, and by they, I mean OKRs, objectives and key results, how could this format help? Jeff Gothelf OKRs to me, are the key to bringing this alignment. So if there's a clear strategy. Without a clear strategy, the OKRs don't help, okay. But if there's a clear strategy and we've set success criteria for that strategy, for that strategic hypothesis, then, or we can start to say, okay, great. We are, our strategic focus for 2024 is North American expansion, we'll know we've achieved it when, you know, we've got 10% market share, this much revenue and a, you know, new customer referral rate of 20%, something like that. Right. All of a sudden, the organisation knows what it's targeting, not only what the strategic focus is, but the actual behaviour change that we're looking for. So fundamentally, every team in the organisation can then start to say, okay, we work on X, and X is a leading indicator of Y and Y is a leading indicator of market share. Okay. So the objective, while it should be local to the team, as well as the key results, they function as leading indicators for the strategic goal, right? So let's try to make an example on the fly, right? So we're talking about North American expansion in 2024. Let's assume that we are in the, you know, online furniture business, something along those lines, right? And so if, maybe you work on a merchandising team, right? And so there, in order to do proper merchandising, you need access to specific suppliers, right? And so there is a team that does supplier and vendor relations. Right. That team understands that for the merchandising team to be successful, they've got to build these relationships with these vendors. So their OKR is going to be about building those relationships, right? Those relationships in turn allow the proper merchandising to take place, which then allows for the proper, you know, for market share to grow in the North American market, for example. So, but that connection can be, you can literally draw it on a board because people understand the strategy. And so objectives and key results become the, sort of the tactical strategic beacons for each of the teams. Each team knows exactly what they're targeting and why, and they understand, in theory, how it might help achieve the overall strategy, which again is a hypothesis, it might be wrong, but at the very least, they've got a shared direction. Ula Ojiaku Thank you for that example. There's something you said about the leading indicators. So I assume that would fall under the key results part, because we'd have the objective which is like the, you know, ambitious statements and then the key results are like, this is what success looks like in terms of achieving that broad statement, the objective. Now, would you, I've read articles from respected thought leaders who say, okay, yes, leading indicators are good, but there also needs to be, you know, the lagging indicators, kind of a balance of, will I say measures, you know, leading, lagging and quality indicators. I don't know if you have any, I mean, I'd love to hear what your view would be on this, because if we're only looking at leading indicators, there might be a temptation to just be short term in our thinking and not also try to measure the lagging indicators, like okay, the actual revenue of the profit that you get versus our likelihood of getting that revenue. Jeff Gothelf Yeah. So look, so short answer is both are important, I think, obviously, and I think both are required. Slightly longer answer is the lagging indicators in an organisation often tend to be the, what we call the impact metrics for the organisation, the high level measures of the health of the business, like you said, revenue, sales, you know, customer satisfaction, etcetera. Right. So yeah, those things need to exist. Typically, they exist at the leadership level, and so then whatever's happening within the teams, tends to function as a leading indicator ultimately to those sort of high level lagging indicators. Right? So we're going to, you know, I've got a team working on email marketing, and they're working on email market opening click rates, right? Those are leading indicators of eventual sales, and those sales are leading indicators of revenue, which is a lagging indicator of the health of the business. And so those, that's,to me, both are needed. Typically the lagging indicators tend to be at the strategic and the leadership level. Ula Ojiaku I read on your blog post that you have another book coming up, whilst we're on the subject of OKRs, and you're going to be, or you are in the process of co-authoring yet another book with your co-author Josh Seiden. Could you tell us about that? Jeff Gothelf Absolutely. So, yeah, so Josh and I have been working and writing together for a long time. We have been talking about outcomes and OKRs together for a long time, and we feel there's an opportunity in the marketplace to build, to write a tactical how-to implementation guide for all, organisations of all size. And that's what we're doing. It doesn't have a title yet, we do have a website at okr-book.com where you can sign up and learn a bit more about it and then kind of be on the mailing list when we do have more info about it. We're writing it right now. To be honest, I've been writing it in public for the last two years on my blog every week at 500 to 700 words at a time. All those just kind of getting those ideas out there and experimenting to see what works and what doesn't and what gets feedback and what doesn't, and that's been super helpful and I expect this to be a popular book, and I expect this to be a very helpful and tactical book for organisations who are going through the process of implementing OKRs and are trying to make them work both as a goal setting framework, but also truly understanding the kinds of changes to ways of working that come after you've implemented OKRs. Agility, or agile ways of working, product discovery, Lean UX, right? Those types of activities as well, to help teams build that evidence-based decision making that we talked about earlier. Ula Ojiaku Awesome. Is there any timeframe or do we just go to your, to the website you mentioned and sign up to get more updates on the book as they unfold? Jeff Gothelf okr-book.com - that's the website? Ula Ojiaku Yes. And when do we expect it to be released? Jeff Gothelf October. Ula Ojiaku This October, awesome. So that would also be in the show notes. Are there any books or materials that you have found yourself gifting or recommending to people that have impacted or shaped the way you think right now? I mean, that is in addition to your, you know, Sense and Respond book, Lean UX. Unfortunately, I don't have the physical copy of the Forever Employable ones and, but yeah, are there other books that you could recommend to us? Jeff Gothelf Yeah, I think so recently I've read Tony Fadell, his book Build, the Tony Fadell of Apple and Nest and various other fame, Build is a really good book and really interesting insight as to how he works and builds products, and most recently I just finished the new book by Rick Rubin, legendary music producer Rick Rubin, it's called The Creative Act, and I found that book to be fascinating and really inspiring. I mean, it's, you know, he is very like, listen to this, you know, get into the zone and just the flow and, you know, there's a lot of that fluffy guru kind of stuff in there too. But I agreed with 90% of what I read in there about creativity, about, you know, working with an idea, about developing an idea, about getting feedback on an idea, about letting an idea go, about changing context and constraints to create more creativity and innovation. And I really enjoyed it. So it's called The Creative Act, it's by Rick Rubin, and it's an easy read and I would recommend that if you're looking for that kind of motivation, I think it was really smart. Ula Ojiaku Awesome. Is there anything else you'd like to ask of the audience? Jeff Gothelf I just hope that if you've got anything you'd like to ask me, don't hesitate to get in touch via Twitter or LinkedIn or my website. If you're interested in OKRs, do sign up for my newsletter, and go to okr-book.com and sign up there. And beyond that, I hope to see you online or in person sometime in the future, because it's nice to meet people in person again these days. Ula Ojiaku Great. Thank you very much, Jeff, for these. Any final words of wisdom for the audience before we go? Jeff Gothelf The pithy phrase I'll close with is this, do less, more often. That's the phrase that I would recommend for you. Ula Ojiaku Wow. Do less, more often. I am going to be pondering on that statement. Thank you so much, Jeff. It's been an honour speaking with you, learning from you, and I hope we would get the opportunity to do this again, hopefully. Jeff Gothelf Thank you, Ula. This was amazing. Thanks for having me on the show. Ula Ojiaku That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!   

Brendan Jarvis & Lou Rosenfeld bring you a special episode, featuring Brendan's keynote from Design at Scale 2022 - Framing Tomorrow by Questioning Today. Highlights include: ⭐ What's been going on for Lou, lately? ⭐ What were the best parts of Design at Scale 2022? ⭐ How is the field been coping with global uncertainty? ⭐ Where can people find out more about the DesignOps Summit? ⭐ Brendan's opening keynote from Design at Scale 2022 ====== Who is Lou Rosenfeld? Lou is the Publisher and Founder of Rosenfeld Media, through which he and his team release some of the best books on UX, produce world-class conferences, and curate a number of specialist design communities.    He is also the host of the Rosenfeld Review podcast and the co-author of “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web”, often fondly referred to as The Polar Bear Book.  Who is Brendan Jarvis? Brendan is the insatiably curious Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, formerly an award-winning digital design studio and now the only specialist UX research practice and world-class UX lab in New Zealand. His mission? Helping enterprise design leaders to develop brave and inclusive design cultures, through effective UX research and research experiences that build the capabilities of their teams. ====== Find Lou here: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisrosenfeld/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/louisrosenfeld Website: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/ Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/rosenfeld-media Find Brendan here: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/brendanjarvis Website: https://thespaceinbetween.co.nz/ Podcast: https://braveux.podbean.com/ ====== Liked what you heard and want to hear more? Subscribe and support the show by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listen). Follow us on our other social channels for more great Brave UX content! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/TheSpaceInBetween/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-space-in-between/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespaceinbetw__n/  ====== Hosted by Brendan Jarvis: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/ Website: https://thespaceinbetween.co.nz/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/brendanjarvis/

Many in the UX world are familiar with the likes of Don Norman, Jakob Nielsen, Peter Morville, Lou Rosenfeld, and Richard Saul Wurman, but are you familiar with others who helped pave the way for the discipline? For the 100th episode of The World of UX, Darren takes time to pay homage to several pioneers of the discipline, especially many who have been tremendously impactful, but overlooked by the masses. Tune in to hear who's on Darren's list of special UX pioneers."#ux#eq#podcasts#cxofmradio#cxofm#realuxtalk#worldofux#uxhomageCheck out the new World of UX website at https://www.worldoux.com.Visit the UX Uncensored blog at https://uxuncensored.medium.com. 

Mike Oren, Head of Design Research at Klaviyo, joins today's episode to discuss how we do UX research for data products—and why qualitative research matters. Mike and I recently met in Lou Rosenfeld's Quant vs. Qual group, which is for people interested in both qualitative and quantitative methods for conducting user research. Mike goes into the details on how Klaviyo and his teams are identifying what customers need through research, how they use data to get to that point, what data scientists and non-UX professionals need to know about conducting UX research, and some tips for getting started quickly. He also explains how Klaviyo's data scientists—not just the UX team—are directly involved in talking to users to develop an understanding of their problem space. Klaviyo is a communications platform that allows customers to personalize email and text messages powered by data. In this episode, Mike talks about how to ask research questions to get at what customers actually need. Mikes also offers some excellent “getting started” techniques for conducting interviews (qualitative research), the kinds of things to be aware of and avoid when interviewing users, and some examples of the types of findings you might learn. He also gives us some examples of how these research insights become features or solutions in the product, and how they interpret whether their design choices are actually useful and usable once a customer interacts with them. I really enjoyed Mike's take on designing data-driven solutions, his ideas on data literacy (for both designers, and users), and hearing about the types of dinner conversations he has with his wife who is an economist ;-) . Check out our conversation for Mike's take on the relevance of research for data products and user experience.    In this episode, we cover: Using “small data” such as qualitative user feedback  to improve UX and data products—and the #1 way qualitative data beats quantitative data  (01:45) Mike explains what Klaviyo is, and gives an example of how they use qualitative information to inform the design of this communications product  (03:38) Mike discusses Klaviyo data scientists doing research and their methods for conducting research with their customers (09:45) Mike's tips on what to avoid when you're conducting research so you get objective, useful feedback on your data product  (12:45) Why dashboards are Mike's pet peeve (17:45) Mike's thoughts about data illiteracy, how much design needs to accommodate it, and how design can help with it (22:36) How Mike conveys the research to other teams that help mitigate risk  (32:00) Life with an economist! (36:00) What the UX and design community needs to know about data (38:30)   Quotes from Today's Episode “I actually tell my team never to do any qualitative research around preferences…Preferences are usually something that you're not going to get a reliable enough sample from if you're just getting it qualitatively, just because preferences do tend to vary a lot from individual to individual; there's lots of other factors. ”- Mike (@mikeoren) (03:05) “[Discussing a product design choice influenced by research findings]: Three options gave [the customers a] feeling of more control. In terms of what actual options they wanted, two options was really the most practical, but the thing was that we weren't really answering the main question that they had, which was what was going to happen with their data if they restarted the test with a new algorithm that was being used. That was something that we wouldn't have been able to identify if we were only looking at the quantitative data if we were only serving them; we had to get them to voice through their concerns about it.” - Mike (@mikeoren) (07:00) “When people create dashboards, they stick everything on there. If a stakeholder within the organization asked for a piece of data, that goes on the dashboard. If one time a piece of information was needed with other pieces of information that are already on the dashboard, that now gets added to the dashboard. And so you end up with dashboards that just have all these different things on them…you no longer have a clear line of signal.” - Mike (@mikeoren) (17:50) “Part of the experience we need to talk about when we talk about experiencing data is that the experience can happen in more additional vehicles besides a dashboard: A text message, an email notification, there's other ways to experience the effects of good, intelligent data product work. Pushing the right information at the right time instead of all the information all the time.” - Brian (@rhythmspice) (20:00) “[Data illiteracy is] everyone's problem. Depending upon what type of data we're talking about, and what that product is doing, if an organization is truly trying to make data-driven decisions, but then they haven't trained their leaders to understand the data in the right way, then they're not actually making data-driven decisions; they're really making instinctual decisions, or they're pretending that they're using the data.” - Mike (@mikeoren)(23:50) “Sometimes statistical significance doesn't matter to your end-users. More often than not organizations aren't looking for 95% significance. Usually, 80% is actually good enough for most business decisions. Depending upon the cost of getting a high level of confidence, they might not even really value that additional 15% significance.” - Mike (@mikeoren) (31:06) “In order to effectively make software easier for people to use, to make it useful to people, [designers have] to learn a minimum amount about that medium in order to start crafting those different pieces of the experience that we're preparing to provide value to people. We're running into the same thing with data applications where it's not enough to just know that numbers exist and those are a thing, or to know some graphic primitives of line charts, bar charts, et cetera. As a designer, we have to understand that medium well enough that we can have a conversation with our partners on the data science team.” - Mike (@mikeoren) (39:30)

Luke Elvy talks with Boomer and Pinder to weigh in on Tiger Woods' potential return at this year's Masters Tournament. He discusses his expectations for this Major tourney.Former Flame Jamie Macoun provides insight on Volt Hockey and who they're trying to help.Lou Rosenfeld headlines The Snow Show this week!The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate. 

Stanley Cup Champ Ken Daneyko gives his take on the latest storylines surrounding the Devils and their key players.  Tommy Wheeldon Jr. gives an update on Cavalry FC's offseason and changes to their team.Lou Rosenfeld headlines The Snow Show this week!The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate.

Lou Rosenfeld needs no introduction. If you are listening to this podcast, you have most likely read or are aware of the Polar Bear book he co-wrote, or one of the many other design books published by his company, Rosenfeld Media, or have attended one of his many excellent IA conferences. In this episode of the podcast, Sophia and Lou discuss why portals should be banned, what precisely is the definition of "moment prison," and why we shouldn't get emotional about our professional metaphors. LINKS: Polar Bear Book: https://amzn.to/3o0f9mT Get tickets for the Advancing Research 2022 conference: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/advancing-research-2022/register/ Next OOUX Happy Hour, with Marsha Haverty: https://www.meetup.com/objectorientedux/events/283051710/ Email us about creating an internal OOUX Masterclass Cohort at your organization: hello@rewiredux.com Get one of the last spots in Cohort 6 of the OOUX Certification Program: OOUX.com/certification Sign up for the OOUX newsletter: OOUX.com/newsletter --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/ooux/support

Former Buffalo Sabre Rob Ray joins the show to discuss the Sabres, Rick Jeanneret and the excitement surrounding the Buffalo Bills.  The boys end the show with Whatcha Wanna Talk About and Lou Rosenfeld headlines The Snow Show this week.The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the hosts and guests and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rogers Media Inc. or any affiliate. 

Today on the show we have Louis Rosenfeld, publisher and founder at Rosenfeld media.In this episode, we talked about what information architecture is and how it led to the formation of Rosenfeld Media, how the UX Design space is evolving, and the importance of understanding your customers' needs when building out your product's information architecture.  We also discussed Lou's plans to introduce Memberships and Subscriptions at Rosenfeld Media and how introducing Attendee Cohorts at their conferences, increased retention, and engagement of their community. As usual, I'm excited to hear what you think of this episode, and if you have any feedback, I would love to hear from you. You can email me directly on Andrew@churn.fm. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter.

In this episode of Surfacing, co-hosts Lisa Welchman and Andy Vitale speak to information architect and educator Jorge Arango. This episode saw a discussion of digital ethics and the roles that designers, business leaders, policymakers, and ethicists play in keeping digital spaces safe. Jorge considers the responsibilities associated with architecting online experiences and offers insight into the dynamics that come with the long arc of technological innovation. Episode transcript About Jorge Arango Jorge Arango is an information architect and strategic designer based in the San Francisco Bay Area in California. In his consulting practice, Jorge partners with product, design, and innovation leaders to create digital places that make people smarter. He has designed information environments for all types of organizations, ranging from developing world non-profits to Fortune 500 corporations. Jorge is a frequent speaker at global UX conferences. He is the author of Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places (Two Waves Books, 2018) and co-author of Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond (O'Reilly Media, 2015). He has also served the global UX community as president and director of the Information Architecture Institute, and as thematic director of the first World IA Day. Besides his consulting practice, Jorge is also an adjunct professor in the Interaction Design program at the California College of the Arts (CCA). Jorge's Personal Links Jorge Arango Website The Informed Life Podcast Jorge Arango on Twitter   Books Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge Arango Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond by Lou Rosenfeld, Peter Morville & Jorge Arango   Topics Discussed Twitter blocked in Nigeria The Code of Hammurabi Drop-in Audio App Clubhouse is Dying. It Was Fun While It Lasted Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast Simone Biles doing amazing things Platform for the Ethics and Politics of Technology (University of Amsterdam) Clayton Christensen Calvin, God, and Architecture  

No guest in this episode. Instead, I answer listener questions. If you have a question you'd like me to address on the show, please email me at live@theinformed.life or tweet to @informed_life. Listen to the show Download episode 67 Show notes The Informed Life episode 17: Rachel Price on Improvisation The Informed Life episode 65: Sarah Barrett on Architectural Scale A brief history of information architecture (pdf) by Peter Morville Information Architects by Richard Saul Wurman David Macaulay Alexander Tsiaras Why Software is Eating the World by Marc Andreessen (WSJ paywall) Dave Gray The Information Architecture Institute How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango The Information Architecture Conference World IA Day Information Architects Facebook group UX Design Information Architecture LinkedIn group Mags Hanley's Information Architecture Masterclasses Jorge Arango's Information Architecture Essentials workshop Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript A question from Vinish Garg The first question comes from Vinish Garg. And I apologize if I have mispronounced that. Vinish is based in Chandigarh, and he writes, "the design agencies with around a hundred plus headcount have big and experienced teams in user research, interaction, design, and UX design. But many of them don't have an information architect. How do they see the need of a specialist IA and make space for this role?" And he adds a postscript, he says "those who have an IA, I spoke to many of them, but they are doing wireframes or card sorting without really understanding anything of taxonomy or findability. This is misplaced IA." All right. So, let me take the question first. Information architecture in general has withered as a job title. In the last 20 years, we've seen fewer and fewer people signing up to become information architects in organizations, not just in internal design teams, but also in agencies. In fact, I don't know many organizations that still have internal information architects. One notable exception — and I'm just calling it out because we've had two of their folks in the show — is Microsoft. Rachel Price and Sarah Barrett, both former guests of The Informed Life, are information architects within Microsoft. So, that's an example of an organization that still has the role internally. But I think that the more common scenario is that there is someone with another job title. It might be a UX designer or interaction designer or something like that, is tasked with structuring the system somehow. Sadly. I think that the even more common scenario is that no one does this explicitly at all, and they're just basically painting screens. I suspect that is the more common scenario. And it's a shame, because information architecture is very important, especially if you're dealing with a large complex system that presents a lot of information to end users. I want to comment a bit on the postscript. I think that it may be the case that there are people who, as Vinish points out, are practicing what they call information architecture, but they're doing it very superficially. And I encounter this most often in the confusion that people have between site maps and information architecture. I've seen folks draw up an outline in the form of a site map and basically call it a day. A site map is a useful artifact for communicating structural intent, but there's much more to information architecture than making a site map. And for many interactive systems, a site map might not even be the most appropriate artifact to communicate intent. Site maps tend to be very hierarchical, which is something that is more appropriate for some systems than others. I expect that, given the waning of information architecture, as I was saying earlier, much of what is practiced today under the rubric of information architecture is kind of cargo cult IA, where folks go through the motions of doing something like putting together a site map without understanding the reasoning behind the decisions they're making or why they're even making the artifact at all. And this is not something that's unique to IA. There are a lot of other areas of practice, other disciplines, where folks adopt the superficial trappings of the practice without really understanding the foundations. And in the case of information architecture, the foundations have to do with making meaningful distinctions. So, setting things aside in categories that are recognizable to the users of the system, that allow them to relate to the information in the system in meaningful ways, with the goal of ultimately making the system easier to use by making information easier to find and understand. Now, Vinish asked specifically about the context of agencies. I don't know much about the Indian market, but here in the U.S., the role of agencies in the design process has also waned as compared to 20 years ago. A lot of the work is happening internally in organizations, and that might be part of the reason why the role has waned as well. Because I think that people think about information architecture — if they think about it at all — when there's a major system change, when there's a redesign or a new product is being built and not so much during the day-to-day operations of the system. Again, there are exceptions. I called out Rachel and Sarah, who are part of a team that has ongoing responsibilities, because it's such a large system where so much content is produced. But in many cases, folks only need to do this sort of thing when they're making a major change, when they're implementing a new system or redesigning a system, as I said before. Which would lead me to expect that it is a role that would be more appropriate for design agencies, if, for no other reason, because design agencies do deal with more projects at the beginning their life, as opposed to the operational phase of the project. But alas, as Vinish points out, the role has also been waning in agencies as well. I don't know how they see the need for IA specialists. I don't know that they'd see the need for IA specialists. I believe that more likely they are experiencing the pain of not having an information architect in the team. Peter Morville has written of the "pain with no name" in reference to information architecture, this idea that people in the team might know that there's a problem, but they don't know how to name it. And they don't know that I'm more careful distinction making our structuring of the information in the environment might be part of the solution. And the net result is that frankly, information architecture isn't as popular as it used to be. And that may be a failing on the part of us who practice IA. We simply haven't been very good at explaining why it's important, why it's needed and why teams should consider having folks look after this stuff. That said, I know that there are people doing it out there. They just don't have the job title information architect — or at least that's what I would like to be the case. A question from Jose Gutierrez The next question comes from Jose Gutierrez; I think Jose is writing from Costa Rica. He writes, "I'm curious about what subjects does IA impact, but people normally don't associate with." These days, most people who think about information architecture — at least the few that do — think of it in relation to user experience design or digital design. But when I first learned about information architecture, I did so through Richard's Saul Wurman's 1996 book Information Architects. The impression that I got from that book was that IA was much, much broader. The very cover of the book has three definitions of what information architects are, and the first one says, "the individual who organizes the patterns inherent in data, making the complex clear." There's nothing in there about digital anything. We encounter patterns inherent in data and complexity in many different parts of reality, not just in digital systems. In fact, while the book touches on digital design, it's remit as much broader. It profiles folks like author David Macaulay, who has produced a series of wonderful books that explain how things work, or Alexander Tsiaras who works in medical imaging. And there's also cartography and illustration and yep, also some digital design, like structuring websites and that sort of thing, which is what we today, mostly associate with information architecture. And this isn't surprising because as software has eaten more of the world — to use Marc Andreessen's memorable phrase — more and more of our information is digital, and we experience more of the information that we deal with in digital environments. But structuring information to ease findability and understandability is much older than computers. I remember seeing a presentation many years ago by Dave Gray on the history of the book as an artifact, which really opened my eyes to this. Before there were books, we would write down information in things like scrolls. And what we know of as books — the form of a book, what is called a codex — was an innovation. It allowed for greater portability and random access to the information in the book, because you didn't have to unroll the whole thing to get to a particular section. Those were all innovations, right? But the very first codexes didn't have things like page numbers or tables of contents or indices or any of those things, and those were all innovations that allowed readers to find information more easily in books. I think that those are examples of information architecture, and they are many centuries old. So, any time that you're trying to make things easier to find and understand — whether it be in a book or a built environment or a medical image, or an app — Information architecture can help. As I said, in response to Vinish's question, I consider the essence of information architecture to be about making more meaningful distinctions. And this is something that applies to all sorts of aspects of reality. In fact, part of the intent for launching this podcast was precisely because I think that information architecture manifests in so many different fields. And I'm very interested in hearing from folks about how structuring, categorizing, organizing information more mindfully helps them get things done. A question from Elijah Claude Finally, here's a question from Elijah Claude. And again, I hope that I am pronouncing your name properly. I believe that Elijah is writing from Atlanta. He writes, " what are some of the best ways to learn good information architecture outside of school and work. In other words, how do you do personal projects where you can practice real information architecture? Great resources for IA books, podcasts, videos, et cetera." This question has two parts. So, there's a part that has to do with learning IA. And there's another part that has to do with practicing IA in our everyday lives. I must note upfront that I personally don't like to draw hard lines between life, work, school and all these things. I think that you can practice information architecture at any time. Information architecture is as much a mindset as it is a practice. And it's a mindset that has to do with looking beneath the surface of things to the way that things are organized and structured, and the ways in which we create shared meaning in how we organize and structure things in our world. That sounds a little abstract, so I'll give you an example. When we moved into the house that we're currently living in, my wife and I had a conversation about where we were going to store the various objects in our kitchen. So, we had boxes with things like plates and cutlery and food items, spices, and such. There are many categories of food items. There are dry foods, and there are big bulky foods that take up a lot of space, things like sacks of flour, rice and stuff like that. And here we are in this new house with a different layout than the one that we're used to, and many places in which to put things. And we had to coordinate where we were going to store things. Because if not, we would make it very difficult for each other to find things when we need them. And that's something that happened somewhat organically. We had an informal conversation saying, "Hey, maybe the cutlery can go in this drawer. And maybe this cabinet close to the stove would be perfect for things like spices and so on." Some things were obvious where they should go, others less so — and the arrangement has evolved over time. Over the time that we've been living here, we've occasionally moved things and found better ways to organize our kitchen. So, it's an ongoing thing and we talk about it. I think that it would be different if either one of us was organizing the kitchen for ourselves as individuals. When you must consider that at least one other person is going to be sharing the place with you, then you must take into consideration how they are going to be able to navigate the environment to find the stuff that they need. And I consider that to be an information architecture challenge. I'll give you another example. And funny enough, this one also has to do with our kitchen. Recently, we discovered that we have a minor problem. This is something that has emerged in the pandemic. It used to be that before the pandemic, I would often work outside of the house. And of course, with the arrival of the pandemic, more of us have been working from home. And as I've started working from home — and I tend to wake up very early — I would find that some days I would feed Bumpkin, our dog. I would feed bumpkin. And then, later in the morning, my wife, who normally feeds Bumpkin, would come along and would feed him not knowing that that I had already fed him. Bumpkin can be very insistent if he's hungry. So, if he comes knocking on my home office door, I will feed him because that's what gets him to stop knocking. And my wife and I have been prototyping a system to let each other know if Bumpkin has eaten or not. I wrote two sticky notes, one that said, "Bumpkin has eaten breakfast" and the other one said, "Bumpkin has eaten dinner." And we put it up on the cabinet where we keep his food. And the idea was that every time that she or I fed him a meal, we would place the appropriate sticky on the outside of the cabinet door. And that kind of worked for a while. But the glue the sticky started wearing out after switching them around so many times. So, we tried something else. We tried another sticky, this one on the refrigerator door with a checkbox. And one checkbox says, "Bumpkin has eaten breakfast" and the other checkbox says, "Bumpkin has eaten dinner." And we have a little magnet that we move between them. And what we discovered with that new prototype is that the sticky is much more resilient, because we're not moving it around, but it's in the wrong part of the environment because we're normally not looking in the refrigerator when we're feeding Bumpkin. So, we often forget to move the magnet. And I'm now thinking about the third rev of this thing, which would combine the two. And this will probably involve putting some kind of magnetic board on the door where we keep the dog food. And I consider all of these to be information architecture problems. On the one hand, clarifying the distinction between what was the last meal that Bumpkin had eaten, that's information architecture. And another is the location of this marker in the environment. Like I said, we were having a lot more traction when we had the sticky on the door that had the dog food in it than when we put it on the refrigerator door. And the only reason why we did it, there was a completely technical reason, which is that the fridge is already magnetized. So, these are examples of information architecture or architectural thinking at play in real-world problems — admittedly a very simple one. But it's not unusual. It's not unusual for us to apply that kind of mindset to organizing the real world. It's how we make sense of things. It's how we structure our environments so that we can get things done. And it doesn't just happen in information environments, it happens in physical environments as well. So, that's with regards to the practice question. The learning question is a bit tougher, because as I have said in the previous questions in this episode, interest in information architecture has waned over the last 20 years. So, resources are less plentiful than they used to be. The Information Architecture Institute, which was the preeminent place that I would point people to who wanted to learn about IA has seized operations. It feels to me like the discipline is in something of a state of transition. I am sure that there is a robust future for information architecture, but it's hard for me right now to point to any one definitive resource and say, this is what you should check out. There are books. That is the first thing that I recommend that folks check out. And Elijah, given the fact that you asked about non-work or school related contexts, the number one book that I would recommend for you, if you haven't seen it already, is Abby Covert's How to Make Sense of Any Mess, which is a primer on information architecture. It's a beautiful book in that it really articulates the core issues that transcend digital in a very useful way. Another book — and this one is, alas, a bit self-serving — is the fourth edition of the polar bear book, Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond. And I say it's self-serving because I had the great privilege of having been invited to coauthor the fourth edition alongside the original authors, Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville. And that book is more specific to digital information environments, but I still think that it's one of the best places to learn about IA. There are also conferences. The two most prominent are the Information Architecture Conference and World IA Day. Both of those happen in the spring. The IA Conference is global. It usually happens in one city and folks fly from all over the world — or at least they did in the before times. The last two years, it's been virtual because of COVID. But it's more global, and it's a central gathering for IAS and the IA-curious. If you are interested in learning more about IA, I would recommend that you participate in the IA Conference. World IA Day is more of a localized initiative. It's a single day event and many cities participate around the world. It's driven by the communities in those cities. So again, super local. And it's a great way to meet people who are interested in information architecture in your own community. So, those are two events that I recommend: the IA Conference and World IA Day. There's also social media. There is at least one group on Facebook that is dedicated to information architecture. I know that there are also groups in LinkedIn. I haven't participated much in either of those, but I know that they exist. If that's what you prefer, you have those options. And then there are also courses. I know that Mags Hanley has a course on information architecture and by the way, a little bit of a spoiler: Mags is an upcoming guest of the show. We don't get in depth into her course, we talk about other subjects, but I know that Mags has a course that she does online and that may be worthwhile checking out. And then I have a workshop that I've done several times called Information Architecture Essentials, which is designed to introduce folks to the discipline. And I'm in the process of turning that into an online course as well. And by the way, if you are interested in that, I would love to hear from you, because I'm in the process of crafting that now. I'm also interested. If you have suggestions for folks like Elijah who want to find out more about information architecture. I would love to learn about other resources I might've missed, so please do get in touch. Closing So, there you have it, the first listener question episode of the show. I have other questions that folks sent in, but we didn't get a chance to get to them. So, I might do this again. Please do reach out if you enjoyed this episode, if you think I should do another one, and most especially, if you have a question yourself that you would like me to answer on the show. You can find contact information on the show's website at theinformed.life. That's also where you can find show notes and a transcript for this episode. For now, I want to thank Vinish, Jose, and Elijah for their questions. And thank you for listening. As a reminder, please rate or review the show in the Apple Podcasts app or in the Apple podcast directory. This helps other folks find it. Thanks!

Hello and welcome to episode #70 of the rose bros podcast!This episode we are joined by entrepreneur - Lou Rosenfeld (MSc, Engineering) - owner of Lou's Performance Centre. Lou's provides ski boot fitting services, sells high performance ski equipment, bikes and everything else in between. In short, Lou's specializes in adapting ski equipment with the knowledge of Biomechanics and modern pressure/balance measuring tools to setup alpine skiers for their day on the slopes. Lou has also published numerous academic papers on everything from the science of boot fitting, to avalanche transceivers. In addition, Lou graduated from the the University of Calgary with a Masters of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering (Biomechanics), and the Oregon Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering. We sat down for a smooth cup of rose bros coffee and talked about Covid-19's impact on the ski industry, innovation and technology in ski equipment, learning to ski better, good books and a lot more.  Enjoy !Support the show (https://rosebros.ca/)

Lou Rosenfeld, UX's master publisher, curator and convener, and a founding mind of information architecture, reflects on 30 years in the field, including:   Why has Lou made it his life's mission to bring people together?  What advice does Lou have for prospective authors, before they start writing? What is a moment prison and how do you get out of one?   ======   Who is Lou Rosenfeld?   Lou is Rosenfeld Media's Founder and Publisher. His company is responsible for surfacing and sharing the expertise of dozens of world-class UXers, publishing their books, curating specialist communities, and convening global conferences - all so that we, can learn from one another.    Lou is also widely considered to be one of the founders of Information Architecture and is the co-author of “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” - often referred to as the “IA Bible”.   ======   Find Lou here:   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louisrosenfeld/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/louisrosenfeld   Rosenfeld Media:   Website: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/ YouTube: https://bit.ly/3uTmqWC Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/rosenfeld-media LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/rosenfeld-media/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/RosenfeldMedia   ======   Thank you for tuning in! If you liked what you saw and want more ...   ... please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts (or wherever you listened).   You can also follow us on our other social channels for more great UX and product design tips, interviews and insights!   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-space-in-between/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thespaceinbetw__n/   ======   Host: Brendan Jarvis https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/

Grace Lau is an information architect and user experience designer based in the Greater Los Angeles area. She's the co-president of World IA Day and one of the program chairs of the 2021 IA Conference. In this conversation, we discuss those professional community events, and why you should participate. Listen to the show Download episode 52 Show notes Grace Lau @lauggh on Twitter Grace G. Lau on LinkedIn My Disney Experience UCLA ASIS&T ALA SLA The Los Angeles User Experience Meetup World IA Day San Gabriel Valley UX Meetup The Information Architecture Conference Vito Discord Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the transcript Jorge: Grace, welcome to the show. Grace: Thank you very much for having me. It's an honor. Jorge: No, it's an honor to have you here. For folks who might not know about you, can you please tell us about yourself? About Grace Grace: My name is Grace Lau. I'm a designer and information architect and a product designer and community organizer based outside of Los Angeles. I'm originally from Boston, though I've been in LA for about 20 years now. I started my past in library information studies. I was an IA at Disney where my claim to fame is having worked on the top-secret project for My Disney Experience, in the early days. And most recently I was a product designer at a healthcare startup in Santa Monica. Jorge: Wow. I did not know that you were at Disney behind that product and I'm a big fan and I would love to talk to you about that, but that's not what we're going to be talking about today. You described yourself as a designer, an IA and a community organizer. And I'm especially interested in the overlap between IA and community organizations. Can you tell us a little bit about your career as a community organizer? Grace: I have to say that it really started in my grad school, at the library school. At UCLA, there's a library school program and it is heavily in the archives and library studies. And there's a small number of people who were into the informatics track. During that time period, when I was there — we were just before the boom in 2007 or 2008 — and we were all scrambling to learn, like, "how do we design websites? How did we get database? And what does all that stuff?" So, I started doing a lot of event organizing as part of the student clubs, the student groups there. I was part of the student chapter for ASIS&T, ALA, and SLA. And so, we did a lot of organizing there. So, it really started from there as just hearing what people are learning, or are anxious about, and it's trying to find ways to pull people together and move resources together to help each other learn the skills needed to get into the job force. And once I left... once I graduated from there, it wasn't until the last, I'd say five or six years, that I really got back into trying to build a community. Meaning, like actually hearing what other people are worried about. Because, at Disney, that was kind of, when we first started the IA Meetup group — the older people in the LA area would know this as IA-55, and so now it's the LA UX Meetup group now that has over 6,000 people — but in the early days, it was like trying to get people together to learn about: what is IA, what is UX, what is design? And it was a great community! But over time, it got really large and it was hard to feel that sense of closeness to learn together because once events get really large, it's really hard to find that sense of... that safe space that you can go, meet people, and learn about things together. It turns into events where you have lots of people who are talking, but you're not really learning that much. And so I kind of found that space where I want to do more of that. And I did that through being involved with World IA Day in Los Angeles. And then most recently I had started a smaller UX meetup in Los Angeles called the San Gabriel Valley UX Meetup and we had much more smaller events. And we had speakers who are either very new at speaking, or still learning about products or learning about design and it was more of a learning cohort or a place where we can learn together and speak together and be able to have a platform for us to do that. Jorge: It sounds to me like you were part of organizing a meetup in LA and then you organized another meetup. Is that right? Grace: So, I was part of the World IA Day in Los Angeles. I did some of that event organizing and then I also started another one where it is a small local meetup. So as part of the LA Meetup — it's the large one where I'm a member of, which I didn't organize. Scale and scope Jorge: Oh, I see. What I'm hearing there, Grace, is that there is something about scale that changes the character of communities. Is that right? Grace: Yes, definitely. Because the bigger the platform, the bigger the audience, it's harder for new people to break in, right? So, if you go to a large space and you're hearing all these people are using jargon or terms that you don't understand, it's harder for the introverts or the wallflowers To really jump in there and be part of it and engage in more active ways. And so, having smaller events makes it easier to learn, because then you're free to ask questions and you're free to be closer to the topic at hand. Jorge: So, what I'm hearing there is that the aspect of scale that you're focusing on here has to do with how easy it is for newcomers. It also sounded to me like the communities that you're talking about have at least two factors that define them. One is kind of an area of interest, right? Like you talked about IA, UX, which is I would guess like a career or discipline area of focus. And the other one that you spoke of was geography, where the larger meetup that you talked about, seemed to me to be like LA as the geographic region, which is a huge area, right? It's a very large population. And then the second one that you spoke of sounded to me like it has a smaller geographic scope, is that right? Grace: Yeah. We call it the San Gabriel Valley UX Meetup, because we're located right outside of LA. We're a little bit East of LA. It's a very, minority-majority populated area where there's lots of Latinos and Asians in that area. And so, whenever we need to say, "want to go to a UX meetup?" It usually tends to be in the main LA area where you have to drive through the LA traffic and deal with parking, you know back before normal times. We had to deal with an hour, an hour and a half just to get to a meetup, right? It wasn't very convenient for people who are living in the 626 area, which is the San Gabriel Valley. So, my thought was like, "well, we can start a new meetup, it's closer to home, it's closer to the food that we love to eat." So, we have easy access to good food, free parking, good Boba... All these things that are important for a good meetup. And then we could be free to talk about it, we can spend hours socializing and talking about things. It's not as, I guess, as...I don't know... well, put together maybe as some of the more official UX meetups out on the West side of LA. Jorge: these things that you're talking about — food, parking, Boba, "all the things that make for a good meetup" — those all sound like they're characteristics that were applicable in the "before times," right? Grace: The before times, yeah. Jorge: So, how are you all dealing with that now? Are you still doing meetups? Meetups in the age of Covid Grace: We're taking a sabbatical, a hiatus — because of the holidays and because we're all getting ready for World IA Day. Some of the meet up organizers and also part of World IA Day as well. So, that's why we are taking a sabbatical. But we've been doing lots of happy hours. And then in the early times when we were in lockdown, we were doing lots of co-working sessions. So, lots of co-working having Discord or Zoom open, and we'll be like working and chatting at the same time, reminiscing about the good old days when we could go out and get woven together, all that stuff. Jorge: I'm asking you, because I've spoken with other folks who also run events and especially regional events... a great part of the motivation for folks coming together is like, "these are my neighbors." You know, these are the people that are part of my... not just my community of practice, but my community, right? And one of the effects of the pandemic has been the... I'm not going to use the word "erasure," but these geographic distinctions have become less relevant. I've been invited to speak at meetups in far-flung places around the world that I would not have been able to be invited to if I had had to fly there, for example. And so, it's something that is changing. And part of the reason why I wanted to speak with you on the show is because you are a community organizer, like you said, driving this local event in the San Gabriel Valley, but you've also alluded to World IA Day and you're also one of the program chairs for the 2021 Information Architecture Conference. So, I think that you're quite active in community building and in trying to bring folks together, especially in the information architecture community of practice... bring them together during this time when we cannot meet in person. And I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about these more global events... World IA Day, Information Architecture Conference. Why don't we start with what's your role in each of those? Information architecture events Grace: So, with the IA Conference, my role is as one of the program chairs. I'm one of four. So, there's myself, Cassini and Teresa and Claire. And I am specifically working on the marketing and communications part of the conference. So that means getting people together to understand like what's going on. I [also] do the volunteer updates. Whenever we get emails about like, "oh, I want to volunteer!" I try to get them to coordinate with the people who are leading those particular circles. It's really more around like the attendee and volunteer experience before the actual conference starts. Right now, at least in this phase of the planning. At the same time, I'm also inserting myself with understanding what are the good platforms that we might be using to run the conference. What are different ways that we might want to include as many people as possible, to attend a block. And so also working with the diversity, inclusion, and equity chair as well on creating more diversity at the conference as well. So, there's a lot that I'm doing there, but I guess it's not something that I can summarize in a short way. Jorge: It's worth noting for folks who might not be familiar with the IA Conference, that this is a volunteer-driven event, right? Grace: Yes, it's all volunteers. I spend at least 20 hours a week trying to get things together, trying to, get the website up or working with other volunteers to work on these things. As IAs, we tend to question a lot of what's going on and the words that we're using. So this particular year, we're focusing a lot on clean language and making sure that we're not using jargon and things that might alienate people from understanding what this conference and event is about. And of course, you know, having the name "Information Architecture" can be a little bit of a hard hurdle to run over. Jorge: Why would that be? Grace: I think it's because information architecture can be a very hard term to understand. When people hear "user experience," they're like, yeah, I got it! You know? Because UX is good, right? But then when you say, "oh, IA," because if you're seeing good IA then it's invisible. So, it's not something that is top of mind for most people. But when there is bad IA on a site, on an app, on an experience, you hear all about it. But then people want to know that the reason behind it is that it's because it's a bad IA. Jorge: All right. That's the role you're playing in the IA Conference. What about World IA Day? Grace: World IA Day, for people who don't know what it is, it's like a global awareness day. It's one day where we have local events all over the world, having talks and discussions about what IA is, what IA means. And we have a global theme every year, a new theme. This particular year, for World IA 2021, it's about curiosity. So what does curiosity have to do with information architecture? And so, this might be another way for people to understand what IA means, through the plain language way of understanding what IA is. Like what is this, what is that? How do you structure? How do you understand something? And that in itself is IA. With World IA Day, it's more globally focused. You have local events everywhere. In the past with World IA Day, it's been heavily North American and European. We have lots of events in Europe, like 20 or so in the United States, 20 events or something in Europe. But this past year, or this past summer, we've been focused on growing areas in Latin America, growing more locations in Arabic speaking countries and locations. We've been developing I guess... growing the global board of directors. So, not having just people in North America who happened to be leading the leadership, but also people from Italy and Colombia and Egypt to be part of a team as well, to understand what are the different needs of people in those countries and regions. Jorge: Great! And what is your role in helping them come about? Grace: My official title is "co-president." And my role right now is like... well, we want to do more! So, we trying to nail down sponsorships so that we can support the local organizers in hosting their local events. So right now, we just secured a sponsorship with Vito, the Vito community. They're able to provide a good platform where we can set up and help put up virtual events in a more professional way. It's really more about building community as well. We're happy to partner with Vito because they're also very community focused. They want to build community around topics of interest. We want to build a space where people can get together and learn more about IA, and how we can support that, and how can we like help with transcription and understanding the information and content that is normally just available in English or Spanish, but also in other languages too. So, we're also doing more around translation, transcription, trying to figure out what kind of platforms are out there that we can help I guess coordinate these types of efforts. Again, World IA Day is also all volunteer, all not for profit. So, it's difficult because lots of the local organizers also have full-time jobs. As someone on a global leadership team, you have to figure out how can we best support them without overwhelming them with lots of event planning logistics. So, we're trying, on the global team... we try to make it easier for them to manage their day as well. Jorge: It's worth noting the dates for these things. World IA Day, I think, is in February? Grace: Yeah! World IA Day is February 27th. We're also trying to organize regional roundtables for World IA Day. Just so we can help, you know, build more exposure to what IA is, and also to build communities in those regions. And then the IA Conference is in late April. The difference between World IA Day and the IA Conference Jorge: I've participated in both World IA Day and IA Conference for a long time. And the distinction between them has been fairly clear in my mind. The IA Conference — previously IA Summit — was a yearly gathering of folks from many parts of the world, mostly North America, but many parts of the world, who would come together for a week or so to discuss the discipline, right? And try to move the discipline forward. World IA Day was one day a year and it was more local. The intent was to have it be more regional and encourage folks to develop the community of practice in their own geography. And I'm curious now in the times that we're living in where everything is happening virtually, what happens to the distinction between these two events? Grace: That's been a very tricky question because the IA Conference has always been where people can continue their education. It is one week a year that people get together. But at the same time, it's also one of the cheaper professional conferences that are out there. So, I think before the pandemic, it's been, I don't know, at least $900, $800, to attend a conference in North America, and you usually have to pay airfare and lodging, and you actually go to a place, right? For World IA Day, it has always been either free or low cost depending on where you are. And all the local organizers have the burden of trying to find local sponsors. It's more about elevating the local community as well. So, finding local sponsors to sponsor the event and then being able to be more affordable to people who live in that area. Right now, in these times, you still have the benefit of being regional because it's in your time zone. So, I mean, ideally... yeah, you could wake up really early in the morning, like, five in the morning for me to attend events in Europe. But at the same time, that's one great advantage of it being in these times, that you can attend any of the events. But you still want to be able to maybe... you know, on some faraway date when people can meet up in person again, you can say, "Hey buddy who lives across the street, can you be my mentor? And we could talk about job hunting around here." I think still having a local community still counts a lot, because we're still navigating in our current spaces — even though having a wider global mindset is important. There's still a lot of attachment that people feel comfortable and familiarity around, like, what's around us. So for me, being able to connect with the world's IA community, is very important. At the same time, it's also important for me to build a community around me locally because it's more of a grounding effect. Jorge: What I'm hearing there is that World IA Day still has very much a local focus, where it's about building this local community of practice. I'm wondering, given your experience with doing that in the San Gabriel Valley... and also, I think that you're a local World IA Day organizer, right? Grace: Yes, I work with that, yeah. Remote regional events Jorge: So, given the times that we're in, where so much of this kind of stuff is happening remotely... Like, I have in my mind a clearer picture of how a more traditional conference, like IA Conference, how that can play out remotely, but how does a remote regional event infrastructure work? Grace: With the local events, we're still trying to promote local speakers, right? So, it's still providing more opportunities and platforms for our new speakers to get into the speaking circuit, learn about how to speak in online events. It's still a launching point for people to learn, to get used to and then before they start speaking at larger regional conferences or international conferences, even though, anyone from anywhere can speak. If people say from Atlanta want to speak at an event in Singapore, that's still very possible. It's more about time zone, right? I think the local impact is still about... it's providing an audience. People still find affinity towards, "Oh yeah, I'm going to go to the one in LA because that's still my family. That's still my community of people that I want to be touch with." Whereas when you have like a global IA day, and you have like a IA event where it's including people from all over the world, it might be intimidating for some people to reach out and to talk to people. Jorge: Does World IA Day provide frameworks or infrastructure or advice on... like I'm thinking like very tactically. It's like, what do we do? Do we set up a new Discord site to have these discussions? Like, how do folks... and I'm thinking now, like I'm putting myself in the situation of a listener who might be hearing us talk and thinking, "you know, I might want to organize something like a World IA Day Meetup in my community." What would the experience be like for those folks? Grace: So, the call for locations still open because our success criteria for organizing an event is very low. I mean, if you can get a group of people just talking about IA, then that's an event already. We have a call for location open on the website board at worldiaday.org. You can apply, we'll go through it and see you know if you need any additional support, you get set up with a location page. We'll set you up with an event page. You get access to our Discord. If you are an organizer, then you'll get access to the secret organizing channels. But if you just want to learn about what IA is, you can also get access to the same Discord server as well. We have lots of channels and topics talking about like accessibility and language and how do we want to organize a content repository to help support the events next year? Jorge: And you said it's still open. And just for folks listening in, we are recording in early December. When would that window close? Grace: Hopefully, maybe in January. Jorge: Okay, so there might still be a little bit of time left then for folks to do that. Grace: Yeah! We're not really closing it per se... I mean it depends on how much energy people have to put together a call for speakers and things like that. Why you should participate Jorge: In the last few minutes we have left, I'm hoping that you could tell folks why they would want to participate in either or both of these events. Grace: Being part of the IA community has been really grounding for me. And I think it's really easy to find a family outside of family. For me it's been... so, even if I don't see them in person we've been meeting irregularly, it's been a really great way to get motivated and be mentored and guided through, working with a group of other volunteers. A lot of the volunteers are also veterans in the IA field and in the UX field so there's a lot of researchers, a lot of designers as well, who participate and volunteer their time as part of World IA Day and the IA Conference. So, just being a volunteer just brings you that much closer to the great names of Jorge Arango, Peter Morville and Lou Rosenfeld. So, it's a really, really great networking opportunity as well too to just be a volunteer. Jorge: Well, I'm flattered. Thank you for including me in that august group! That's as far as volunteers goes, but what about folks who might just want to tune in? Grace: It's also just really great to hear like, "Oh yeah. So that's what IA means. And there's a name for something that you've always been doing." Whether or not you are actually practicing IA or its just you learning or being productive... those are all IA things. I think just learning on its own — whether you're listening to podcast or reading from a book — that's also IA work that you're doing. So, I would say, "Come! Come learn with us. Come participate and contribute." It's a great way to meet other people. It's a great way to network. It's also a great way to feel a part of another larger community of people. Closing Jorge: Well, fantastic, Grace. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing to help make all of this happen. Where can folks follow up with you? Grace: You can find me on Twitter; @lauggh it's laugh, with two g's. You can also find me on LinkedIn, Grace G. Lau and you can also find me on my website, graceglau.com. Jorge: Thank you so much. I'm going to include those and also links to both World IA Day and the IA Conference in the show notes, so if folks want to follow up with the conferences and meetups, you can go there as well. Thank you so much, Grace. Grace: Thank you.

This episode we are joined by entrepreneur - Lou Rosenfeld (MSc, Engineering) - owner of Lou's Performance Centre.Lou's provides boot fitting services as well as  high performance ski equipment including  everything from skis, boots and bindings to foot beds, boot lifters and every thing else in between.In short, Lou's specializes in adapting ski equipment with the knowledge of Biomechanics and modern pressure/balance measuring tools to properly set up alpine skiers. Lou has also published numerous articles and academic papers on everything from the science of boot fitting to avalanche transceivers. Lou graduated from the The University of Calgary with a Masters of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering and a specialization in Biomechanics, as well as the Oregon Institute of Technology with Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering.We sat down for a smooth cup of rose bros coffee  and talked about Lou's roots in the United States, being a Vietnam era veteran, becoming an entrepreneur in the ski industry, career paths, the science behind boot fitting, race car driving and what you can do to get the best ski setup for the upcoming season.Enjoy !Support the show (https://rosebros.ca/)

My guest today is Peter Morville. Peter is a pioneer in the discipline of information architecture. Among many other distinctions, he co-authored with Lou Rosenfeld Information Architecture for the World-Wide Web, the classic O'Reilly “polar bear” book on the subject. This is Peter's second appearance on The Informed Life podcast. I asked him back because I wanted to learn more about his recent call for practitioners to emancipate information architecture. Listen to the full conversation Download episode 47   Show notes Peter Morville on Twitter Semantic Studios Intertwingled.org Information Architecture: for the Web and Beyond, by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango The Informed Life episode 10: Peter Morville on Seductive Information Emancipating Information Architecture by Peter Morville Don't Think of an Elephant! by George Lakoff Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star Pema Chödrön Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commissions for purchases made through these links. Read the full transcript Jorge: Peter, welcome to the show. Peter: Hello, there. I'm very happy to be back. Jorge: Yeah. I usually start shows by asking guests to tell us about themselves, but you have the distinction of being the second repeat guest to The Informed Life podcast. The first was our friend Lou Rosenfeld, and I think it's appropriate that as the two co-authors of the polar bear book, you are two of the folks I most want to hear from. And part of the reason that I wanted to talk with you again is, when you were last on the show, you talked about what was next for you. I actually have the transcript up here and I'm going to quote back to you what you said. You said that… well, I'm going to paraphrase first, but you said that you had this not completely formed plan to buy some property and start an animal sanctuary to create a place that can be helpful to people and animals. And now I'm quoting, “and that comes from that deep questioning of what do I want to do with my remaining time here on planet earth. And while I get a lot of intellectual satisfaction from consulting with big organizations, I'm not sure as I look forward to the next 25 years or so, that that's going to fulfill my need for a real sense of purpose and meaning.” Peter: That sounds like me. Jorge: Yeah, it does, doesn't it? And now you've written a blog post where you update us on how that is going. And I'm looking forward to talking with you about that here on the show. Peter's blog post Peter: Yeah, the blog post was called “Emancipating Information Architecture.” Freeing information architecture from the shackles I helped to forge, so that we can use information architecture to free minds. That's the general gist. And on the personal side, since we last talked, we have moved from Michigan to Virginia, which is the place that we're planning to buy property. But we're currently renting, so hopefully 2021 will be the year that we buy the property and get some goats and chickens to get started. Jorge: So, I want to find out more about both of those, but why don't we start with this idea of emancipating information architecture. That's some pretty powerful language. What is keeping information architecture bound? Peter: So, in the article I take some credit or blame for that state of information architecture. And I think back on those early years in the 1990s, when Lou and I were working together to build our company, Argus Associates, and to evangelize this new practice of information architecture, and I was driven by fear. I had spent a year unemployed — sort of — and not really knowing what I wanted to do and feeling lost in the world. And then, ambition, because I had now gotten a taste of entrepreneurship and felt strongly that there was something here with information architecture that I can grow into a career. But you know, it was very dicey. We were paying the bills month-to-month early on. And so, there was a values-based side to my passion for information architecture. I was incredibly excited about the potential of the internet and then the worldwide web to enable us humans to share information all around the world and to become smarter and better. And so there was a techno-utopian side to my passion. But ultimately, I was trying to figure out, how am I going to be able to live in this world? How am I going to be able to pay the bills? So, there was a very strong orientation towards situating information architecture in the business context. How do we make money doing information architecture? How do we turn it into a job, into a field or discipline? And really, the community that grew up around information architecture was predominantly people who were figuring out how do I do this as part of my work in a business context. There were people from nonprofits and education, and there were folks who were more academic and were interested in the intellectual ideas. But 80% plus were folks who were figuring out, how do we do this as part of our work? That really is, I think, where information architecture has been centered. If you look at most writing, most conferences, it's been centered in business. Jorge: What I'm hearing here is that what you're looking to emancipate information architecture from is being bound to these business contexts. Is that right? Peter: Yeah, and I make the point in the article. It's not that information architecture isn't doing good in the business world and can't do more good. So, it's not an abandonment of business at all. But I think that there's so much potential for the ways that we think, the ways that we practice information architecture, particularly In the areas of language and classification — how we use language, how we define or design labels, how we structure and organize conceptual spaces — those skills are so useful beyond business, whether we talk about social or political or environmental areas, I think that part of what is holding us back as people are archaic words and structures: language and classification systems that we have inherited from the past that we're having a hard time getting beyond. What is different about Information Architecture? Jorge: There are other fields that think about this stuff as well. I'm thinking of George Lakoff's book, Don't Think of an Elephant! — I think that's the name of it — where he dives into this subject of labeling and distinctions in the realm of politics, specifically. What is special about information architecture? What is different about information architecture that would make it a good agent for change in this realm? Peter: Yeah. So, as I was working on the article, George Lakoff came to mind. He's one of the few people out there that I know has engaged in these issues in really interesting ways. There are also other books that come from outside of our discipline; Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences comes to mind as a fascinating exploration of the impact of language and classification in all sorts of contexts, for instance, in the kind of the hospital and nursing context. So, as I was writing this article, I was not under the impression or trying to portray the notion that we have a monopoly on these ways of thinking. In fact, in the article, the examples that I provide, one is focused on topics in and around LGBTQ+, gender and sexuality and all of the labels and classification systems around them that. And that work is being done by people who would never identify as information architects or don't even know our field exists. There's so much that we can learn from the work that people are doing out in the world. But I think that the folks who have spent the last 10-20 years thinking about information architecture, learning about information architecture, have a skillset and a talent that could be used beyond business. And I'm really trying to get our community to just at least question, “am I practicing in the contexts where I can make the greatest impact, given where I want to see the world go in the future?” For some people, the answer might be, “yes! I am super passionate about helping to grow this business, and this is what I want to do.” For other folks, they may say, “I need to do this work in order to pay the bills in a business context, but maybe I could volunteer some time and evenings or weekends to help folks work through issues around, how do we present ourselves? How do we label and organize our information so that we might be better understood, or so that we can make a bigger impact?” Jorge: When I hear you talk about the particular skills and talents of practicing information architects, what came to my mind is that information architects put these ideas of classification and distinction-making through language into action, right? It's one thing to think about it in the abstract, in theory, but we are very much practitioners making things in the world, right? Peter: Yes. Jorge: And as such, we are in a position to make these distinctions more palpable, perhaps or more tangible? Peter: Yeah. There's an interesting dance between the abstract and the tangible that we do. Very often, whether it's as in-house practitioners or consultants, we're hired more for the tangible stuff that we do. Most people are able to understand the tangible side of what we do. So, it's very often almost their own secret that the most important work that we do is pretty abstract and hard to explain. It's like, as a consultant, I go into an organization and I immerse myself in their world, in their language and classification system, in their domain, their area of expertise, their content, as well as all their challenges and goals and so forth. And I always go through this journey of initial excitement then feeling completely overwhelmed. Like, “oh my goodness, there's so much here. It's such a mess. How can I ever make a difference?” And with experience, I've built up the confidence to know I will get to the other side and I will start to come up with some models, hopefully some elegant models of how we can move forward. And the highest level, those models are sufficiently abstract that very few people appreciate them. It's when you take them to the next level and they start to become tangible and you can sort of see them, you've got a diagram or a wire frame or sketch, and people get it, and you start to get people behind this shared vision. So, I think you're right in the sense that we have that experience of grappling with the abstract stuff that's really hard to even talk about and then moving it into some tangible artifacts which then eventually move it into the world and it becomes the digital place. It's a website, it's a software application. Or in the physical world, right? It's how the grocery store is organized; it's how the airport is organized and the signage. Whether you talk about digital or physical places, then those end results start to shape how people think. So, that's the part that's interesting. We create environments that then shape people's perceptions, right? I mean, you go back to the Winston Churchill quote, if it was really him, “We shape our buildings and thereafter they shape us.” That's very true, whether you're talking about buildings or digital places or classification systems, and once people get used to a certain structure, it's hard to shift; it's hard to get people to think differently. And that's the challenge I think is interesting. But it's different in every domain. Is a website going to help make this shift or a book or do people need to be teaching this in elementary school? Where are the levers for effecting change in people's minds? Top-down vs. bottom-up structure Jorge: There's a distinction between molding information structures, structuring them, giving them shape, and spotting patterns in the ways people use these systems, that result in emergent structure. And I realize that sounds a little abstract, so I'll give you an example. The hashtag emerged in the use of Twitter. It's not something that was designed into Twitter from the get-go. And I am noticing in the world such structures coming into being, and I'll give you an example — and this one is related to what you wrote about in the article, and I'm hoping that we will get into this — but I've started seeing more and more people appending to their name, on social networks, a description of the pronouns that they want to be described with. You will usually see the name and then parentheses, “he/him,” right? And there's no space in that information system for you to describe your preferred pronouns. So, the users have kind of hacked the system by appending it to their last name field, or what have you. And that came to mind as I was reading your article, because you did get into the — I think you called it the “architecture of identity” — that we do seem to be living in a time where that is becoming more and more of an issue for folks. And I'm wondering what our role is as information architects, with regards to this top-down versus bottom-up spotting of these patterns and enabling their use in our systems. Peter: Yeah, I love that example. And I think, yeah, there's a couple of different directions to go there. One, I think that that notion of identifying patterns and then deciding whether or not to try to spread them, to embed them in infrastructure or to squash them, that is something that I think we should be more aware of our potential to play a role there. When we talk about information architecture, it's easy to think that we are the creators of structure, that it has to come out of our heads. But, as the Twitter hashtag idea suggests, many of the best innovations come from a user, one person who has an idea and tries it out and then other people see it and copy it and it starts to spread. And then, there's an interesting point there where in that case, the team at Twitter had to decide, “do we embrace this and embed it in infrastructure? Does the hashtag become part of Twitter?” And they decided, yes, right? And, the issues around pronouns are so tricky. They're difficult. I guess I'll make a confession that there have been times where I've been irritated by this kind of injecting pronouns into various contexts. Like, I was at a meeting a couple of years ago. The purpose of the meeting was really to focus on helping undocumented immigrants in Michigan. It was hosted at the University of Michigan. And at a certain point, we were all asked to introduce ourselves and to introduce our pronouns. And at an introductory meeting where we didn't even know if we were ever going to see any of these people again, it seemed like that was kind of forced into the conversation. And when I experienced that irritation, number one, I tried to moderate it, like, “hey, there's a plus here. We're really trying to make sure that as we're talking to one another and referring to one another, we're using the right words, right? We're using the words that people are comfortable with, as their identification.” But I also try to grow a little compassion for the people who are on the other side, right? The folks who have very little tolerance for the LGBTQ+ folks, because, the thing that's really interesting in here is I think that there's this little part of our brains that — I'm sure there's a spectrum in terms of like how active this is across the population — but there's a little part of our brains that just gets annoyed at added complexity, right? Like, “oh, now I've got to worry about whether I say you know, ‘he or she,' or ‘they or theirs'? My life's hard enough already. I'm just keeping my head above water. That just annoys me.” Right? And I think that little irritation may be the source of so much conflict, and unnecessary suffering in our society. And the flip side is — which for the most part, is how I feel — is, I love difference. I am so bored by the sameness. Living in a world where there's people of all different sort of races and sexes and genders and people who have different customs and do things differently. I love that. But I have a brain that loves learning, and I also have the privilege of a certain level of stability in my life and a certain amount of confidence that I'm sort of ready for the next thing. “Hey, I want to learn something new! Tell me more about what it means to be trans, right?” That's a new wrinkle; tell me about that, I'm interested. But I think that little kind of irritation is something that probably would be good for us all to be mindful of. We all probably feel that at different points about different issues. The need for progress and leadership Jorge: I can relate to that, Peter. And I'm also thinking again, in the spirit of — you used the word “compassion” — to try to empathize, perhaps with folks who might be irritated by this. You used the word “archaic” to refer to the traditional words and structures. And again, that's a very strong word. It might be read as “obsolete,” you know? And I imagine, and that there might be people for whom there's a counter argument there, which is, these distinctions that you label “archaic” have served us for a long time. What would you say to those folks? Peter: Yeah, that's a great point and I agree. It's a provocative word. So, to explain my perception… why I use a word like that. I am somebody who kind of lives in the future. Like, too much maybe, for my own good. I'm always thinking about what's next, where are things going? Which is helpful for being an information architect and planning ahead. But [it] has its costs. It takes me effort to live in the present a little more, right? To be aware of what's going on today. How am I feeling? To take time, to enjoy just being alive. And I don't spend much time reflecting on the past. And I think to a certain degree, I've missed out a lot on, positive emotions, like nostalgia; looking back at how things were. I think I miss out a little there. But my current mental models — my sense of trajectories and where things are going — is that human civilization is really approaching a very dangerous moment. We are in a very dangerous moment, where we are not only causing incredible destruction to other species and to the environment, but we're doing it to the extent that we're on the verge of destroying ourselves. And so, at a time where I see this crisis, like we're in it and it's getting worse, I feel that we need to be more progressive. We need to move faster. The structures that have served us well, served us well in a different world — in a past world that's not coming back. And so, I think that we need to be more open to change, to embrace change. And I say that knowing, especially just based on how you phrased that question, that that's really scary to a lot of people and very difficult for a lot of people. And I'm not sure what the answer is to that other than, to me, in order to deal with change — especially rapid or dramatic change — what's needed is great leadership. It's times like these, where we need great leaders. And at the moment, at least in this country, we don't have that. And so, we're all feeling lost. We're struggling. We're seeing parts of this crisis unfolding. We probably all see it differently, but, what's needed from great leadership is the ability to say, “hey, we have to move from A to B.” Whether that's physically moving from an island to a mainland location, whether it's moving from the use of fossil fuels to renewable energy. A great leader can get people to think in a more positive way about the challenges ahead to recognize, oh, this is going to be hard, but we can actually do something valuable and meaningful with our lives. We can be the generation that made this change, that sacrificed for future generations. And to view it less with fear and more with a sense of adventure and curiosity. I'm hopeful that at some point in the fairly near future, we will get that kind of leadership because I think that we can make tremendous progress. You and I in our careers, we have been part of the internet revolution and we know that one thing humans are good at is technology, at like being incredibly innovative and moving really fast and doing things that were previously viewed as impossible. We just need great leadership to harness that in the right direction. Jorge: For context, we are recording this before the US election. I'm saying that because we don't know what's going to happen, and people might be tuning in after the fact. But I want to call out that this brings us back full circle to where we started the conversation. You mentioned the fear you had when you were starting out at Argus and we've come full circle back to fear. And I wanted to bring things to a close by asking you about what's making you hopeful today. You are now in a different modality from the last time that we spoke. You have started your sanctuary or in the process of starting your sanctuary. And, I'm wondering, how you are, vis-a-vis how you were at the time of the founding of Argus? Peter: Yeah. I think that one difference is that, I'm sort of on the other side of my career. With Argus, I had no real savings, so, I was living month to month. You know, paying my rent with my paycheck. And so, my fear was very focused on job and career and how I made money. I didn't really have time or emotional space to think about all the other things that could go wrong. I wasn't worried about getting sick. I just… that couldn't happen! I couldn't get sick. Now that I have a little more financial security, and I'm older, I'm more aware of a much wider array of things that can go wrong. I've had had an extra 25 years of having things go wrong. And that's where for me, learning about Buddhist philosophy, listening to tapes from Pema Chödrön, really trying to be more at peace in a world and in a body where so much can go wrong — and will go wrong. Things get better and then they get worse and then they get better and then they get worse and that's life. We can't control those ups and downs all that much. So, with Sentient Sanctuary, with this vision that I have to create an animal sanctuary, it's exciting for me and fun for me to imagine it and to begin to work towards it. But I'm not attached in a kind of negative way to its fruition. I'm not…. you know, if I die tomorrow, it's okay. I've had a great life. I've been really fortunate. And, I think that there's a danger with visions, with plans, with hope, that we cling to an outcome. You know, 25 years ago, that was much more me. “I've got to make this work. It has to work!” And now I'm more comfortable with saying, “you know, I can put in my best effort.” When I trained for the Detroit marathon, that was very humbling in the sense that, you spend six months working as hard as you've ever worked for something. And every day, you know one wrong step and you twist your ankle and your dream is done. And you've got to have a bit of sense of humor about that. Otherwise it'll destroy you. And so, that's where I am today. I wouldn't say I'm incredibly hopeful for the future of human civilization. I just don't know where we're headed. I feel really fortunate, given the life that I've lived so far and where I am right now. And I have some fun, exciting things to work on for the future. I'm starting a new consulting project next week that I'm excited about and I'm actively learning about how to raise chickens and goats. So that's great stuff. Closing Jorge: Words of wisdom, Peter, thank you for sharing them with us. Where can folks follow up with you? Peter: So, my websites are semanticstudios.com and intertwingled.org. And I am Morville on Twitter. Jorge: Well, thank you so much. We look forward to hearing more from you as Sentient Sanctuary evolves, and best wishes with all that you have going on. Peter: Thank you. And thanks for having me.

Sbould you mPunt your bindings on the recommended factory line? What happens if you change the placement? Is there an ideal location for our bindings to be mounted every time?These questions and more are covered in the lates global skiing podcast episode. I interview Lou Rosenfeld a ski ship owner from Calgary but also a mechanical engineer who has been involved in research over the years on the effects on binding mount location on ski performance. I think every skier out there should be privy to this knowledge. I hope you enjoy the episode. I know it has helped me look into my ski setup further to test if there is a better place I can be skiing my skis from.

My guest today is my friend Lou Rosenfeld. Besides publishing books — including my own Living in Information — Lou and his team at Rosenfeld Media organize and manage industry conferences. In this episode, we talk about how they transitioned the recent Advancing Research conference from an in-person to a fully virtual event. Listen to the full conversation   Show notes Louis Rosenfeld Rosenfeld Media @louisrosenfeld on Twitter The Informed Life Episode 1: Louis Rosenfeld on Managing Advancing Research 2020 Conference Some lessons learned from producing a virtual conference by Louis Rosenfeld Zoom Video Webinars Vimeo Cheryl Platz Abby Covert Steve Portigal Natalie Hanson Mailchimp Mural Slack The Brady Bunch title screen Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge Arango Hopin IxDA Berlin The User's Journey: Storymapping Products That People Love by Donna Lichaw Meld Studios Enterprise Experience Conference 2020 DesignOps Summit Doctor's Note (Andy Polaine's newsletter) Power of Ten (Andy Polaine's podcast) Informa(c)tion (Jorge Arango's newsletter) Some show notes may include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links. Read the full transcript Jorge: Lou, welcome to the show. Lou: Thanks, Jorge. Glad to be here – again. Jorge: Yeah. Usually I start episodes by asking guests to introduce themselves, but you not only have the distinction of having been our first-ever guest on the show, you now have the double distinction of being the first-ever repeat guest on the show. Lou: Well, Jorge, I'm glad to be a Guinea pig in any of your experiments, so thank you. The remote Advancing Research Conference Jorge: The reason that I thought it would be interesting for us to have another conversation now is that the coronavirus pandemic has driven all sorts of changes in our society, in our economies, and in the way that we work. And among those changes, we are meeting differently, and we are doing things like conferences differently. And you and your team organize conferences and had the experience recently of having to very quickly restructure an event that was scheduled to be live and in-person. And you had to switch it to have it be all online. And I've heard nothing but good things about that experience, and I was hoping that you would tell us how you did it. Lou: Aw, well, thanks. I'm glad you're hearing good things. I mean, the general response among attendees and speakers and sponsors, actually, seem to have been very positive and I'm really grateful for that. I think it's really important that when you say how you did it, that's a… going to be a collective you, not an individual you, because it was really like a Herculean effort. I mean, I call it a moonshot, where we had like a couple of weeks that involved our speakers, our curators, our internal team, a lot of vendors. It was massive. The conference was Advancing Research, and actually it's the first time we've done it. We were going to do it in New York City, and it was programmed, and it was actually sold out five weeks in advance. And then suddenly everything hit the fan or started to, and at first we were going to create a hybrid event of in-person and virtual because New York City was still open for business, and you know, it's still seemed like a lot of people wanted to come in person, and the venue was assuming we were coming, they weren't going to refund our money, or even a part of it – a lot of moving parts. And then ultimately, we went into a new mode where you could not have people in-person at any scale, and, at least some force majeure clauses kicked in and, you know, we still financially took a big bath, but we had a great program. We felt very strongly that people wanted us to continue with it. The speakers had prepared at that point for probably about four months. Because we do extensive program design and then months of speaker preparation once the program is in place, and we didn't feel it was right to cancel for them. Nor did we feel like it was right to cancel for attendees if we could do a virtual event. Changes to the conference So, what did we do? We decided we had to stick to the original two-day schedule for the main program, just single track. And two days was not ideal in terms of keeping people engaged. You know, you're basically running nine hours a day. But we felt like we kind of had to stay true to that on behalf of the attendees. We didn't think it was going to be easy for them to adjust their schedules at that late point now, two, three weeks before the event. So, we kept that together. We'd have also inconvenienced many speakers to change it. And so, I wrote a little article in Medium if people are interested. They can probably just find me by searching my Twitter ID, @louisrosenfeld. I wrote some of the ideas up, but I will tell you a few highlights. One is that it's hugely important to prep speakers for the remote experience. Our speakers were already prepped from a content perspective. They were in great shape, had fantastic talks. But we did two rounds of tech checks to speakers, one the day of, but more importantly, one during the week prior. And you will see, if you're doing a virtual event of any type, that speakers, if they're new to this, they don't know where to stand or sit. You may want to do one or the other. Their faces aren't close enough to the camera in many cases. Their technology is problematic. And so we actually, gave them a credit to order their own equipment. Go get a better mic, that type of thing. At that point, it wasn't always possible for Amazon to turn it around very quickly, but we did our best. Things like lighting, things like what they wore, and also getting them comfortable with the technology. In our case, we used Zoom Webinar. But, not so simple, we actually then streamed a livecast version from Zoom to Vimeo, and then we embedded… it's a little Rube Goldberg, but we embedded the Vimeo stream onto a password protected webpage on our website, conference website. So, we made the content and the livestream exclusive to paid attendees. Not surprising. Having the speakers in Zoom Webinar was comfortable for them. They were mostly comfortable with presenting in Zoom. But when we did the those tech checks, we made sure they were comfortable because I can tell you firsthand that, when I presented remotely, especially early on when Zoom was new for me, I didn't always know where to find that “share screen” button when the, you know, I had that deer-in-the-headlights moment. You may be very experienced in Zoom but there still may be things that you don't have much experience with as a presenter in Zoom. So, we got them comfortable with that. It was nice in Zoom, to not have the attendees there. Attendees are all experiencing things through the livecast. And that made it easier to manage the Zoom space as a space for speakers and curators and the MC. We also found that the signal actually worked pretty well for people consuming the livecasts. There were surprisingly few technical problems. They were almost exclusively due to poor local bandwidth, which is often correctable by plugging into a router directly or getting closer to the router or turning off background apps that suck bandwidth up and just using the right browser. We found that Chrome didn't work well, it didn't play well with Vimeo, surprisingly. Establishing contingencies So, we also put in place like a huge number of contingencies. Like, I got to tell you, the thing that kept me up at night the most was what if… what if Zoom goes down, what if Vimeo goes down? What if our website goes down? What if the speaker's local connection goes down? And we came up with contingency upon contingency. And we only had one problem technically, with one speaker having to go to the contingency because they're local connectivity was suffering. So, I can get into some of those if you like. I will just say this. I would not rely on a recording as a backup. I don't think that's necessary; I don't think it's very good for the speakers, I don't think it's very good for the attendees. I think just having something as simple as the speaker dialing in to Zoom on their phone, or at least using a phone connection with the Zoom client on their phone. Muting that connection, having it ready to go to unmute should their computer crap out and having us ready to run the slides for them was a much better backup plan than having a recording ready to go. So, there's just like a whole bunch of these little persnickety things that we had to learn in two weeks' time. About the team We also had a fantastic MC, Cheryl Platz, who we already had lined up to be our MC. And we got so lucky because she was someone who was very comfortable with being an MC remotely. And she did it like making sure speaker number one got out of the way while she chatted up speaker number two and made sure speaker number two had their screen shared before she went away. So, she was just a fantastic, fantastic MC. Our curators, Abby Covert, as you mentioned, and Steve Portigal, and Natalie Hanson, all did a wonderful job. Our team did a wonderful job operating the whole thing. And it basically allowed the program to really stand up for itself, and the technology didn't get in the way. The sponsor experience I do want to mention one more thing though. We're a company that puts conferences on that really try to appeal to our sponsors. So, I will say, we never let our sponsors call the shots in our program. We've never done pay-for-play. The integrity of our programming efforts is tantamount, critical for us. That said, we want to have sponsors participate. And when we do an in-person conference, we have an expo and sponsors get involved in other ways. In this case, we went to our sponsors two weeks before the show and said, listen, we'll work with you, and we're going to develop a platform for a secondary program of sponsor-led events that would happen before and after the conference each day and during breaks. And we will basically create a webpage and essentially a platform and some support for sponsors. You are the sponsors, here are some ideas. This is your chance to step up, show your support for the community, your thought leadership, highlight your really great ideas, your great content. And Jorge, they really did step up to the plate. In fact, in a way, we had too many sponsor-led activities. We had something like 43 sponsor-led activities over two days. And they were fantastic. Like we've had people saying, I want to get a recording of that great session that MailChimp did or that Mural did, or whatever, and I don't know if you see that happen very much in an in person event that that people are dying for the sponsor's content. And again, it's because you're doing it virtually, the sponsors are pushed in effect to make sure what they're doing is engaging and not just a pitch or no one's going to come. And we opened the sponsor events to our broader community. We have, each of our conferences has an associated community of thousands of people that can participate. So, the sponsors ended up getting better turnout and better engagement than normal because they did, you know, we opened it up, but they also did a great job with their content. Flattening of hierarchies And a lot of our attendees found that the interaction in Slack – this is where the discussion went on – was superior than the interaction they might have in person. The hierarchy was flattened in many cases, introverts were able to ask questions, even of speakers, and interact with each other… Ultimately, in many respects it was a better experience than people might ordinarily get. And the time zones are an issue, but we always make our recordings as well as our sketchnotes and our trip notes and other materials available to attendees after the event, and that was part of the exclusive deal. They got all that content. So, if they missed something, or slept in or didn't want to stay up late, they could go back to it. So, it was a fantastic experience. But now that we have that under our belt and we have two more conferences we're doing this year and some partially clean slate with one and a fully clean slate with the other, we're really excited to try some new ideas out, as well as folding in the experience we had with Advanced Research. Jorge: I want to touch on something that you said there towards the tail end. I'm actually going to mix two things that you said. So, one was about the flattening of hierarchies, because one of the things that I've observed in participating in remote meetings of all sorts, I have noticed that flattening of hierarchy, where all of a sudden it's like there's no place in the physical room where the person is standing in, and this is the speaker, and you are the audience and sitting over here. All of a sudden, everyone is kind of on the same plane literally, everyone's got a little thumbnail, and you are one of many little thumbnails. And I know that when it's a webinar on something like Zoom, you don't see the “Brady Bunch screen, ” but it's almost like everyone's on the same playing field, more so than they are in a physical space. So that's one thing that I wanted to follow up on, particularly in the context of the sponsor experience, because I was super intrigued when you said that sponsors got more… I don't think I'm going to do service to what you said, but the way that I interpreted it is they got more traction on their presentation somehow from folks. And I'm wondering if the fact that in a physical conference, you have space set aside for sponsors – they have their tables, and that's where the sponsors live – and then you have the presentations, which usually happen in some kind of auditorium-like space. But now, everyone's using the same technologies to communicate, and there is this blurring, this potential… I mean, you made the disclaimer. It's like we've always been, you know, very serious about not letting sponsors drive the program. And it strikes me that there's an opportunity here for potentially blurring the lines between those that doesn't exist in the real world just by the very nature of the places where we're meeting, no? Lou: Well, yeah. I think that's a really good point, and it makes me think of sponsored search results versus organic ones and how you differentiate them. We, as you might expect that we would always err toward being clear:** here are sponsor-led activities. They're optional. They're part of the program in a sense, but they're not. These are not the speakers we've spent the last four or five months prepping, but this has a role and this helps make things feasible for us as a business and you know, one of the really interesting things about this, though it comes back to actually you, Jorge, and the book you wrote for us Living In Information, because I thought a lot about the metaphor of designing place, especially as we put together these sponsor places. Zoom Lounges Zoom already has, like, we did the sponsor events in Zoom, but with Slack channels – and we're going to take a slightly different approach in the future – but, regardless, we got kind of mucked up by Zoom's sort of uneven use of the place metaphor. I mean, you have Zoom rooms and you have Zoom, I don't know, events, and Zoom spaces… Honestly, they're not really clear, and I find that a lot of people, myself included, abuse the terminology that Zoom would like us to use because it doesn't really make sense. I want to call these things Zoom Rooms, but that's a product, that's a specific product. So, we ended up calling the sponsor Zoom areas, “Zoom Lounges,” which are places, they're places that are part of the bigger place, namely the entire conference – I'll come back to that term in a minute – but they had a different flavor. A lounge is not a place that you will necessarily have to… it's a place that you can relax in a way you can still learn and still interact. Some of the sponsor activities were completely interactive, some were, happy hours, and a trivia contest but they were not classrooms and they were not auditoriums. I was actually, you know, along these lines, looking at the Hopin platform last week, because I was a sponsor at IXDA Berlin, and they used the Hopin platform as Zoom alternative. And that's been designed around the place metaphor for events much more concretely, and they have an expo area that we were in, and they have a number of other uses that really kind of run ahead with the place metaphor and there's a bunch of problems with it – we can get into that if you like – but I really thought a lot about your ideas when we were putting this together and it's the second time one of our books has really resonated well for us in conference design. The other is Donna Lichaw's A User's Journey and trying to have a narrative arc to how the events unfold over time. Navigating uncertainty Jorge: Another thread that I wanted to pull on in what you said has to do with how you and the amazing team that helped you put this conference on, how you navigated this period of uncertainty. I'm placing myself back to that time, which seems like a long time ago, even though it wasn't that long ago. Lou: Another world, Jorge. Jorge: Yeah. Well, it was the moment when we were starting to step through this weird portal that we've stepped through or are stepping through still. Right? And it was a moment where we didn't know…. there was a lot of uncertainty. Like we didn't know if people are going to be able to fly. We didn't know if people in this city over here are going to be dealing with it differently than those of us over here, right? I have family abroad. And I talk with them every week and I can compare notes with how they're dealing with the situation and how we're dealing with the situation. And I could tell that everyone was coming to the same conclusions, but not everyone was coming to it at the same times. And when you're trying to coordinate an event that is going to rely on people traveling, I would expect that it would have been tremendously stressful. And I'm wondering if there are any tools, processes, approaches that helped you and your team come to the decision eventually to transition to a fully online conference, even though I don't think it was a given perhaps at the time when you were starting those conversations no? So, can you think back to what it was like making that decision? Lou: About that pivot? Oh, I don't know that there was any one thing that guided us. I think that was part of the difficulty, was this sensation of the sand shifting under your feet every 15 minutes. So to give you an example of that, while we were still in the assumption that we were going to run a hybrid event, last month, and not go fully virtual, there were about three or four days in a row where I drafted a communication to our attendees who had already registered, explaining to them what was going to happen and how it was going to work. Before I could send it, that would change, and then it changed again. And then finally, all right, we're going to go full virtual. We have no choice now. Change again, and it was exhausting. It was just, oh my God, we don't even, we can't keep up with these changes. So, that was the hard part, psychologically. I think once we knew we could only do a virtual event, we were committed to doing it for the reasons I mentioned earlier that, you know, attendees had already booked it, although not all of them want to go forward with the virtual event. I think, 90 or 85% still wanted to do it. And the speakers have already done all their work. It didn't feel like it was fair to them, and we felt like it was just going to be a fantastic event programmatically, which it was, to be honest. So, at that point it was, okay, we don't really have to think, we have to do. It's not an emotional thing anymore. We have a point on the calendar we have to be ready for, and let's just work weekends and nights and we'll get it done. And we did. I'd say, if it was a day earlier, it would have been a lot harder. It just seemed like maybe that's the psychology of how you use your time, and we just managed to get it in, in the nick of time. I don't know. Maybe it's just the way these things work, no matter how much time you have. I was talking with Steve Baty and I probably am mispronouncing her first name, Janna DeVylder at Meld, in Sydney, and they were putting on one of their events, not UX Australia, but a different one, and I think they had one or two days and they pulled it off. Well, here's one of the stressors. So, I also know people who were doing events in May. I would rather not have had one or two days to pull it off because you won't learn as much. You're just going to throw it in Zoom and hope for the best. And they did a great job, but there was very little they could do in terms of trying new things and thinking it through. Or you do it you know, where there's… we're talking about back in March, if you have a May horizon, by time May rolls around, the expectations are going to be much higher and the economics remain uncertain. So, I'm really glad our event wasn't in May or April for that matter. We had just enough time pull it off and still keep our attendees. Jorge: So, what I'm hearing there is that folks may have been more forgiving because they knew how short of a timeframe you had to pull things together. Lou: Yes Tweaks for future events Jorge: So, with that in mind, do you have thoughts on what aspects of the experience you're going to tweak for the next events? Because those are happening further in the future, right? Lou: Right. So, the next one we have is Enterprise Experience used to be known as Enterprise UX. This'll be the sixth one, and it's taking place August 31st through September 3rd. It was originally going to be in San Francisco, and now it is virtual of course. And the program has already been created, it was originally designed, like most of our main programs, two-day, single track. We're now going to have it as a four-day, shorter days, each day, it's like a mini conference, each day has a very strong theme. And we'll allow people to go to one, two, three, or four days. And you know, so there's a lot of sort of how you take something that was designed to flow over two days and make it flow over four days. And that's where things like the narrative arc are really important to consider. How do you keep people engaged? Not just in the middle, but in the beginning and the end, and hopefully they register for all four days. The other conference we have is Design Ops Summit. It'll be the third one of those… no, the fourth one of those. And that's going to be in October. Again, it'll be virtualized. It was originally going to be here in New York. And we're just starting that from scratch. So, we get all three scenarios, something that we can't really change, something that's been programmed, but we can move the sessions around, and then something that has a complete clean slate. The thing that we're going to really work on with both of them, there's a few little things, like having attendee troubleshooting tech check sessions before the conference starts a couple of different times to make sure they can get in so they're not late for the conference because they're having a problem getting in. More importantly though, is working in a different mode with sponsors to emphasize quality over quantity in their engagement. So not 43 sessions, but maybe 15 really high-quality sessions. And not that there was anything low quality, but at a certain point there's too much. So, you want to really focus on, you know home runs for every session that sponsors do. We also are going to be experimenting with a mode for, again, taking your concept of designing digital places, and create a place or a series of rooms for attendees to attend the conference the whole time together, and to do so based on a number of big ideas. So, it could be affinity groups. We'll have to assemble them in advance. You're all from the same industry, or you're working on the same type of problem, and we'll put you together with people like you and with a facilitator. Or, it's your team from your organization who wants to attend together, or you just want to be matched with random people. Either way, they will all be facilitated, you'll get together before the conference kicks off, you'll have an opportunity to meet the other people in your room and you will, together with your facilitators, help figure out what are the things you want to learn over the coming days. And you may check in during each conference and at the very end of the conference, you'll get back together with your crew in your room. And it could be you be figuring out what you learned, figure out what you might not have learned, and see if there's anything you want to do together after the conference. So, we're building an infrastructure to help people do that. It's not too complex, but it's not simple. The easy part is the technology. The hard part will be figuring out who to connect with whom and to make sure they're well facilitated. But that's like, so exciting, like we can then take that model and take it to the in-person events. In fact, you know, one of the things we'll do in the future, I don't think we're ever not going to have a conference that's virtual. I do think we're going to have hybrids, and I'm really also excited by the models we're coming up with to make a hybrid in-person and virtual event work even if we're still in the age of social distancing come 2021. Closing Jorge: That sounds super exciting Lou. Where can folks go to find out more about the upcoming events? Lou: Oh, just go to RosenfeldMedia.com. And, if they really are interested in our three events and want to either first to know when tickets go on sale, especially the cheap tickets or apply for scholarships or even pitch a talk, the way we communicate those is through the corresponding communities we've created for each of our conferences. For those reasons alone, we think you'll want to join whether you're interested in enterprise experience, advancing research, or design operations. But each of those communities, besides having those kinds of connections to the conferences, each has a monthly video conference call where we have a guest presenter or facilitator. And we get some amazing people to lead discussions because we're trying to keep the conversation going between the annual events, the other 360-odd days a year. And so, we have these fantastic, like we had a session with Kamdyn Moore and Kristin Skinner and Alison Rand for Design Ops community. I think it was about two, three weeks ago… we had 240 people participate. That's fantastic. Laura Klein, we had I think 110 people for the Enterprise Experience conversation we had a week or so ago. We do one a month for each community and it's all free. Go to RosenfeldMedia.com, check out communities. You'll see them and, Hey! We love this model; it makes really great sense at this stage of pandemic. And so, we're ramping up to do more. Jorge: Well, fantastic. Lou. I'm going to include links to those in the show notes. Thank you so much for being with us today. Lou: Hey, it's my pleasure. And I'm so happy not only that you bothered to have me on not once, but twice, but that you're doing this. It's one of the… you and Andy Polaine are doing two of the most interesting newsletters and also podcasts. And I just find what you guys are up to so interesting, and it's hard work. I know you put a lot into both the newsletter and the podcast, and I just want to thank you for doing it. Even if you didn't have me on it, I would be grateful. It's just wonderful information you're putting together and making available to the world, and I hope everyone is smart enough after I pitched it to at least sign up for your newsletter if they haven't already. And obviously they're already listening to the podcast, so they know that's great. Thanks again, Jorge, glad to be part of it. Jorge: Thank you Lou, I appreciate that.

Amy Bucher is VP of Behavior Change Design at Mad*Pow and author of our newest book, Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change. Amy has a PhD. in Psychology, so you’d be forgiven for assuming that she works in academia. Instead, she ended up at an agency where she focuses on healthcare and the many different motivational factors that are at play in the way people live their lives. In this episode, Amy and Lou Rosenfeld discuss the ethics of data collection, self-determination theory, fitness apps, her new book, and more. Get Amy’s book: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/engaged-designing-for-behavior-change/ About Mad*Pow: https://madpow.com Amy’s recommended reading: Whisper Network by Chandler Baker https://www.amazon.com/Whisper-Network-Novel-Chandler-Baker/dp/1250205360 More about Amy: amybucher.com Follow Amy: twitter.com/amybphd

Order Writing Is Designing: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/writing-is-designing/ Michael Metts and Andy Welfle, authors of the new Rosenfeld Media book Writing Is Designing, get meta and discuss writing about UX writing with Lou Rosenfeld. They also stress the importance of looking through the “lens of language,” when solving problems – reworking your existing language to make things clear from the outset, rather than fixing problems by adding more copy later. Their book will help those responsible for digital copy communicate more effectively—from designers to marketers who might never have considered themselves “UX people.” Andy Welfle and Michael J. Metts are the co-authors of the upcoming Rosenfeld Media title, Writing Is Designing, available January 14, 2020. Order Writing Is Designing: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/writing-is-designing/ What Andy’s reading: Strategic Writing for UX https://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Writing-Engagement-Conversion-Retention/dp/1492049395 What Michael’s reading: Content Strategy is Boring (and that’s okay) https://www.braintraffic.com/blog/content-strategy-is-boring-and-thats-ok

Erika Martinez y Elena Itchel, leads de Puntolab nos entregan en este episodio sus experiencias y aprendizajes adquiridos en la conferencia más importante de Latinoamérica. Repasamos cuatro ejes fundamentales por los cuales atraviesan la práctica del diseño y la investigación de usuarios: el liderazgo, el futuro del diseño, la expectativa de la práctica y el enfoque del diseño social. Tres días de 80 charlas, 3 idiomas y un sin fin de expositores internacionales buscando un mismo objetivo, mejorar la práctica y elevar la industria de la Experiencia de Usuario mediante anécdotas, casos de estudio, ponentes de gran renombre como Lou Rosenfeld, Donna Spencer, José Coronado, entre otros.

Four members of our Advancing Research curation team join Lou to discuss the research they did to help shape our inaugural Advancing Research conference (New York City; March 30-April 1, 2020). The team analyzed over 700 survey responses (including about 10,000 answers to open-ended questions!) to learn about user and customer researchers, their learning behaviors, and what they want from conference experiences. Read their summary of the results here: https://rosenfeldmedia.com/advancing-research-community/archive/who-does-research-and-how-do-they-learn/ ; you can also explore the study’s quantitative data yourself via Tableau: https://public.tableau.com/profile/lou.rosenfeld.rosenfeld.media#!/vizhome/WhoDoesResearchandHowDoTheyLearn/StoryDraft1 Podcast guests: Abby Covert (principal investigator), Staff Information Architect at Etsy Sean Oslin, Consultant at Aventine Hill Partners Rocio Werner, Senior User Experience Researcher at ZS Patricia Thommi, User Experience Researcher at ZS The rest of the team: Johan Sarmiento, Steve Portigal, Natalie Hanson, Lou Rosenfeld

My guest today is Eduardo Ortiz. Eduardo is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and former Director at the U.S. Digital Service. More recently, Eduardo co-founded &Partners, a social impact design and engineering studio that works with organizations to help improve their communities. In this episode, we discuss how they manage their information to drive change. Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/the-informed-life-episode-19-eduardo-ortiz-2.mp3 Show notes @EduardoOrtiz on Twitter Eduardo on LinkedIn &Partners (Eduardo's company) ASIS&T Sigia-l mailing list Louis Rosenfeld U.S. Marine Corps U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau U.S. Digital Service healthcare.gov 18F U.S. General Services Administration U.S. Small Business Administration U.S. Department of Defense U.S. Department of Homeland Security U.S. Department of Education U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Dana Chisnell New America Vera Institute of Justice Jennifer Anastasoff Asana Google Forms Google Docs Google Sheets @andprtnrs on Twitter &Partners on LinkedIn Read the full transcript Jorge: Eduardo, welcome to the show. Eduardo: Thank you Jorge. I appreciate it. Jorge: I'm very excited to have you here. For folks who don't know you, how do you introduce yourself? Eduardo: I usually don't. I'd say that I'm Eduardo and that I'm a failed engineer trying to make it as a designer. That's about it. Jorge: Well, you and I have been friends for a while and I've been following your trajectory and I think that you have a very interesting background. Why don't you tell us a little bit about that? Eduardo: Sure, I went to school for computer software engineer, and as I was finishing my degree, I was thoroughly bored with it because my focus was on creating software for hardware. And I wanted to do something different and I started looking at what other people were doing so that a lot of my friends were in Parsons and they seemed to actually have fun doing whatever was it that we're going to school for a while I was mostly, most of the time, miserable or in front of my computer. And I started developing a need and a want to do more of what they were doing. So I started taking design courses and just like playing with things trying to figure out what I could do with what I had learned in school, but not do what I was in school for. And I started working on higher levels of the stack and finally being in the front end. And from there, I stumbled upon the ASIS&T list and some guy named Lou Rosenfeld who had sent the message that he was moving to Brooklyn. I lived in Brooklyn, so I offered to pick him up from the airport because there was a strike in New York going on. And then just a bunch of jumps from places to places, I ended up calling myself an information architect then an experience architect then a user experience designer and now I've launched my own firm focus on leveraging search design and technology to help people be able to get it to live a better life. Jorge: That's a great articulation of your professional journey, and I didn't know that little tidbit about picking up Lou at the airport. That's great. Eduardo: I actually never ended up picking him up. Jorge: You didn't? Eduardo: But no, that is how I ended up even making it as an information architect or even taking that route, because of that conversation that we started. Jorge: I pointed out the professional trajectory because I also recall seeing that you've served in the military as well, right? Eduardo: Yeah, I spent 12 years in the Marines. Jorge: And recently you were also working in government, right? Eduardo: Yes, I've done two spins in the civilian side of the government. The first of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, working with the Technology and Innovation Group, and most recently with the U.S. Digital Service focusing on immigration reform. Jorge: What is the U.S. Digital Service, for folks who don't know? Eduardo: Yeah, the U.S. Digital Service is a component of the White House that was established by the Obama Administration after the healthcare.gov nightmare with the vision of bringing thoughtful design, engineering, product, and research capabilities within different government agencies to focus on the most critical products and the most critical services provided to the public. Jorge: So it's sort of like an internal agency for the government? Eduardo: Yeah, it's sort of an internal Agency for the government. Very similar to to 18F within the General Services Administration. And it is the goal was to have technologies — and I'm using the word “technologies” in very general terms — that were able to, for a short stint of time up to a year or two, to focus on critical problems and do so from a position of strength because they had coverage from the White House. But also because they knew that they were not going to end up dealing with much of the bureaucracy that usually federal workers trying to do the same thing deal with. Jorge: It sounds like an opportunity to impact a lot of folks. Eduardo: Oh 100%. I don't think that I've ever done something much more impactful than that. I mean you're talking that any kind of work that you do, you're impacting tens of thousands, if not millions of people. The U.S. Digital Service has had branches at the Small Business Administration, at the Department of Defense, at Homeland Security, at the Department of Education, at Health and Human Services. And you're talking that these are folks that have partnered with federal employees to accelerate the go-to-market stage of a lot of services that have been critical. Jorge: When I hear you use that phrase, “go to market,” it sounds like a phrase that I associate with an enterprise setting, right? Was part of it also infusing that spirit into government? Eduardo: It very much is. And you will hear that in government, the terms that are used have been evolving for quite a while. The focus is no longer on the requirements, the focus is on people and people's needs. The focus is not on meeting, but now on what are the goals? So the conversation has definitely been shifting to a more humane one, where the technology is merely an accelerator and an enabler rather than the “end all, be all.” Jorge: Now, you were saying that you left the government and have started your own firm. What are you doing there? Eduardo: I launched &Partners in the fall of 2017. And our focus has been on leveraging research and design and technology to try to solve critical problems that positively affect the social safety net. And we say so like this because for us, it's critical to the work that we are doing is positive and is actually affecting people in positive ways, and helping people be able to live better lives. So since we launched, we've taken on number of paying clients, but we've also done… I guess our first project was an unpaid, pro-bono work project. It was last year, when this administration callously started separating children from their parents. I was made aware that this was happening sometime in June when the story broke. And a friend from USDS, she asked me, “what are you guys going to do about it?” And I was like completely dumbfounded. I was like, “What do you mean we?” She's like, “If &Partners doesn't do something, no one will.” And I'm like, “We're literally, it's just three founders and we have no money. I'm not sure what you mean.” And we kept on chatting and then that was like the end of it. And that just like started eating at me, the “What are we going to do about it?” And this was very akin to a tactic that Dana Chisnell used on me when I joined the U.S. Digital Service, which was telling me that I needed to do something, know what's meaningful, and that my country needed me. And that kind of call-to-arms was something that I couldn't ignore. And the same thing happened here. My partners and I, we started doing research to try to figure out what exactly what's going on, which really meant making a lot of calls and starting to read the news to truly understand what was happening at the Southwest border. And when we kind of came up to an idea of what we could do or what the challenges were, I started talking to my wife who was a public defender, and she helped me kind of create this understanding, this framework for how children and families could be helped from a position of a legal expert, if you will. And once I had that I made a call out to pretty much anyone and everyone who had cycles to spare to join me. And about 40 people ended up volunteering to to join us and we ended up creating pretty much a relationship management system that we then partnered with New America and the Vera Justice Network, to provide a system that the legal providers at the Southwest border could use to reunify families. Jorge: To me, this is so cool… To hear this, that you're taking something that that you saw playing out in the public sphere and asking yourself the question, “Well, what can I do about it?” And then putting in motion this project to actually do something about it, is something that I think it's inspiring. One of the challenges I think that we face in our time is that we have this illusion that because we're, I don't know, tweeting about problems, that somehow that's helping the problem get solved, right? So it says it sounds to me like you're doing actually something about it, which is cool. Eduardo: It's funny because tweeting sometimes can have that that effect of helping to address and solve problems because it helps amplify information, which oftentimes it's critical. If people don't know about something, it's really difficult for someone to actually do something about it. And just a point of clarification, I had no intent on doing anything about the problem of unaccompanied children at the Southwest border, if it had not been for my friend who called me out, to Jennifer Anastasoff who was the Head of People for USDS before she left. If it had not been for her, I probably would not have done this. We probably would not have done this. But I think that kind of like ends up being what we all try to do, create these networks around us that help us be the best version of ourselves that we can be. Jorge: Well, in any case, kudos because like I said, it's going beyond talking about it and actually doing something about it. But now let me play it back to you to see if I heard correctly. So what you all did is you designed and built a system that makes it easier for folks that are working within the legal system to assist the people who are in need of their services. Is that right? Eduardo: Pretty much, yeah. Jorge: Do you know if it's being used, if it's had the effects that you hoped it would have? Eduardo: So it was used for a little bit, but then the legal system kind of like caught up and threw some injunctions that, in theory, prevented this administration from continuing to separate families, even though we've read there have been a number of news reports that has not been the case. But through those injunctions it meant that the system was no longer necessary, since in theory, the government was no longer going to keep separating families. Jorge: That's an example of the sort of work that you all are doing. I think that would qualify in the pro bono space that you mentioned. Eduardo: I said pro bono because no one got paid. Jorge: Yeah. Eduardo: This is something that needed to be done and number of people jumped on board to get it done. There were almost like 40 people volunteering their time. I'm still flabbergasted at the names and the people that actually joined and I won't start naming them because I will more than likely leave people out and forget about it. But for people that were involved with what was called project Quetzal and who had a hand in helping reunify children with their families know that you will forever have my gratitude. Jorge: You mentioned that the focus of the company is on problems that affect the social safety net, and it's pretty clear how something like the one that you're describing falls into that category. Are you also working with corporations, with for-profit businesses? Eduardo: We are. And funny that you ask… One of the first things [inaudible] when we started was that we were not going to be working with any corporation, that we were not going to be working with the government. And in hindsight. I had no clue what we even thought we were going to be working with had that been the case. But smarter minds prevailed and we shifted our approach and instead what we have articulated has been this rubric that allows us to clearly determine whether an organization is going to be a Good Shepherd in the social space and someone that we actually want to be associated with. So whether it is a government agency, whether it is a corporation, for profit or not, we put everyone through this rubric that we have developed to make sure that they meet the minimum standards that we have set for the organization that we want to work with. And once that actually takes place, we still have an internal vote to determine whether it is something that we should be doing or not. Jorge: Without naming names, can give us examples of the types of projects that you're taking on in that domain? Eduardo: Yeah, of course. We helped develop the future generation of a system that allows lawful permanent residents to apply to become citizens with legal assistance. We have been for the past eight months working on developing a future generation electronic health record system that is focused on the provider's perspective rather than the billing and encoding perspective. And we are working on helping farmers get the workers to work their farms faster by leveraging technology to address the bureaucracy. Jorge: Those sound like really complex, meaty systems challenges. Eduardo: They are and they are so exciting to be working on because it's not just a technology problem. It's not about writing code, it's about taking into account the whole ecosystem around it, like a true people, process, and technology approach. Jorge: You said, when you were telling me the story about offering to pick Lou up at the airport and such, that you start calling yourself an information architect. And I'm wondering as you're describing all this what role information plays in in all this, and more to the point, how you all manage your information to get things done. Eduardo: Yeah, information is central to everything that I do. Relationships, which to me are the the avenues through which information flows, are critical to what we do and how we do things because we are not in a position that everyone knows about. So who we work with is through those relationships, because someone has mentioned to someone else that they should that they should talk to us. And as such, when we are afforded those introductions, for us that relationship and that information that is captured is something that is cherished, very something that is… That is actually taken care of. So yeah, permission is simpler for us. Jorge: Well, I feel like I want to unpack that because you mentioned that the project that you did in the Southwest border revolved around relationship management. And now you're you're highlighting the fact that relationship management is also critical for your own business in getting the word out and all that. How are you managing relationships with some kind of system? Eduardo: So we have developed our own system based on technology, but it is not its own technological system, if you will. We use a series of tools to allow us to document the connections that we have, what information we have on those connections, what actually matters, what we should be sharing, what is often important to that person, the projects that are either linked to them or the referrals that are coming from them. And then we track everything through a number of buckets that allows us to understand where things are during the lifecycle of a relationship. Jorge: When you say “we,” how many people are you talking about? How many of you all participate? Eduardo: There are nine employees, including myself, right now in &Partners, and pretty much everyone has a hand in doing this. Jorge: And you said it's a homegrown system. Is it based on anything like open source technologies? Is it web-based? Eduardo: Well, it's just so it's a system of systems if you will. So we use Asana, primarily but we use Google forms as well and we use a lot of the Google Docs aside from formed to develop the information and capture it. Jorge: That's fantastic. I feel like I want to unpack it a little bit because these are tools that pretty much everyone has access to, right? And knowing you and your and your trajectory, you'll have probably given a lot of thought to the structuring of these things so that they can serve these purposes. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Eduardo: I mean I said this during my keynote of the IA Conference: said I have never invented anything in my life and the same the same is true of now. I think that we took a system and a series of tools and we just mashed them together to achieve what we need. Let's take for example this relationship management that we are talking about. So specifically, on the project intake, on that rubric, so we first started working the developing what a rubric was using Google Docs. Once we had a good narrative and a good approach for what it was, we then shifted to using Google Sheets because we needed to provide criteria for evaluation. And this is where we started trying to figure out, well, are we saying that something is good bad or okay, or are we giving it a ranking from 0 to 5? What is 5, what is 0? What does bad mean? What does good mean? And in order to do that we had shifted to Google Sheets rather than Excel. Once we determined what that was, we needed the input facing side of it. And so, we went back to Google Docs to document what kind of information do we need in order to be able to determine whether something is good, bad, or okay. And we started documenting the type of information that we needed, the type of information that would be good to have, and the type of information that meant — that didn't mean anything and that there was no reason for us to capture it. And once we had those two things together, then the two things we created a Google Form that allowed for the capture of the information for the data entry side, and we created an Asana project along with a number of stages that then allowed the Google Form to dynamically populate the Asana project with those with those things that we're putting through the Google Forms. And then the stage after that, when something has made it past our intake if you will, we will manually take that card, develop it into its own project that has its own structure and then we start the process all over again. Jorge: So this is a way of evaluating the leads for projects that you're going to be working on? Eduardo: Yes. Jorge: I was very intrigued when you said that that you have Google Forms feeding the Asana project directly. So it really is a mash-up of these various tools. Eduardo: Yes, it is 100% a mash-up. A better way that did not involve me having to deal with Salesforce, or having to hire a Salesforce expert, I would greatly look at it. Jorge: I was about to ask you, you know, if you all had evaluated other solutions. Because I know that there are some tools — and Salesforce is one of them — but there are some tools that do this sort of thing. Why did you choose to do the mash up? Eduardo: We did. The mash-up was done in order to allow us to have historical information about any project in about anyone that we work with. So we make Asana work as our CRM through a number of customizations that we have made, and that allows us to be able to track that a project that we that we did came in through a specific person, and everyone that was part of that project, and what were the rules for those different people? What were the things that they had a hand in? Because that will then allow us — which is something that we do at the end of every project — is we develop an after-action report for everything that we do. So it allows us to evaluate how we worked., what were the results, what were the expectations coming into the project, and what were the things that made the project work or not. And allows us almost to compare different projects or projects that actually worked and went well and projects that didn't, and try to in a way, say well, why didn't this project work? Why did this project work? What did we have here that we didn't have there? And allows us to then tweak our rubric but also it helps us understand what we are doing wrong in order to stop it, what we are doing that needs to be improved, and to improve even further on the things that we are doing well. Jorge: There's this aspect of learning to the system somehow, which I'm guessing that by using fairly — you alluded to like having to deal with Salesforce developers, and my sense is that The Google Suite and things like Asana, they don't require this development know-how, right? Eduardo: They don't. The curb to learn how to develop this system into something that works for you is very very low, so it's easy to deal with. Jorge: I can see that. Especially when you have a distributed team. Are you all in the same place? Eduardo: We are not. We are all distributed. We have folks in New York, New Mexico, Seattle. Myself, I am in DC. We have some co-workers in Virginia. We have folks in in LA and we have one of our colleagues in the Netherlands. Jorge: Wow, I didn't realize that you were even International. That's fantastic. Eduardo: Things have happened organically, and I am still trying to figure out why everyone has trusted me and jumped onboard into what is to me an experiment. That an organization that is solely focused on doing the right thing can be profitable and can help everyone be able to go to sleep at night and say, “I did something good today.” Jorge: Well Eduardo, congratulations. That seems like a really great place to wrap it up. Eduardo: Thank you, I appreciate it. Jorge: Good luck with the experiment. And why don't you tell us where folks can follow up with you? Eduardo: Yeah, so if folks want to follow up with me, I'm on Twitter at Eduardo Ortiz. I am on LinkedIn, I think under my same name, is Eduardo S. Ortiz. Or if folks want to figure out what &Partners is doing, we are on both Twitter and LinkedIn as well. On Twitter, it's andprtnrs, and on LinkedIn it's And Partners, all spelled out. Jorge: Fantastic, I'm going to include the links in the show notes to make it easier for folks. Eduardo: That is perfect. Jorge: Well, thank you so much for your time Eduardo, it's been a pleasure talking with you. Eduardo: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you and to your audience.

Today I'm joined by my friend MJ Broadbent. As a graphic facilitator and recorder, MJ uses visual thinking to help people communicate more effectively. In this episode, we talk about how drawing can help folks understand each other and make everyday life more joyful. Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/the-informed-life-episode-16-mj-broadbent.mp3 Show notes MJ Broadbent MJ Broadbent on Twitter MJ Broadbent on Instagram MJ Broadbent on Flickr MJ Broadbent on LinkedIn Mike Rohde Sketchnote Army blog Rosenfeld Media events Enterprise Experience conference DesignOps Summit Pictionary IPEVO document cameras Landau Chartworks Franklin Planners Bullet Journal MJ's Stanford Continuing Studies course Read the full transcript Jorge: MJ, welcome to the show. MJ: Hi Jorge. Thank you for inviting me. Jorge: Oh, thank you for being here. It's good to have you here. Why don't you tell us about yourself? MJ: Wow, that's always an interesting question. I'm an emergent designer. I've studied graphic design, and my career and my way of forging through life has just been completely emergent. I really love to use visual explanations and I think the common overarching theme in terms of the work that I do and have done and looking at doing as I continue is, is connecting people with information in whatever manner that may be. It was originally traditional graphic design and then it became digital space and the nonlinear experience that were websites and apps and software. And then it became how do people… What kind of information do they need when they're being bombarded with information? And so I began to do graphic recording and sketchnoting and so forth and teaching people that really we can do that kind of visual sense-making on our own and with other people by reclaiming our innate human capability of drawing things, of making marks, just the way we write letters, we can write other symbolic language that demonstrate what it is that we're thinking and hearing. Jorge: I've known you for a while now and we've interacted in professional contexts where you've worked in large corporations and we've also interacted in things like conference spaces. And my picture of you in conference spaces has you seated at the back of the room when someone is presenting, capturing the presentation in beautiful — what I guess what are, they're called sketchnotes — but these kind of visual representations of what the speaker is talking about. And it's a mix of like words and pictures, right? MJ: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It's right. Jorge: Is that what you mean by graphic recording? MJ: It is. The term graphic recording in the professional community of practice is generally understood to be someone who is scribing or writing in real time. Graphic recording is thought of as the large scale poster sized or you know, big boards, white boards or large format paper that might be on the wall or on a whiteboard or something that's visible to the participants in a meeting or in a conference room. And the actions are very similar with sketchnoting, which is a term coined by the wonderful designer Mike Rohde, who runs a blog called the Sketchnote Army. And it's just become hugely popular in the recent period of time — I would say, well, a decade or more — as a form of visual expression concurrent with the idea and the cognitive science that when we as human beings make marks on paper, most people have greater recall of the content, whether they're making meaningful marks, that represent content that's coming into their ears and their consciousness or whether they're making abstract marks like crosshatching them in the margin. For me, I am able — I've curated — an ability to listen and choose what it is that I would want to write down to capture what I'm hearing. It's a very personal curation that one does one listening and scribing because it's very different from a court reporter or somebody who's capturing or any kind of true recording where you're capturing all of the fidelity. How we're recording right now is capturing everything and we could get a transcript and that would include everything we say. Graphic recording and sketchnoting by nature of the fact that you're using your hand, you can't possibly write it all. So you have to choose. And I tell people the way that I choose is really same way we think about what level of content fidelity we need in order to communicate. To whom? Am I making this for myself? Am I making this for other people? What is the communication act that I want to achieve through this? So I'm intentional. Sketchnoting conferences — and I've had the good fortune to do sketchnoting for Lou Rosenfeld's events, Enterprise UX, which recently became Enterprise Experience, and the DesignOps conference as part of the support team. So I'm listening and I'm drawing the taste, like kind of the tip of the iceberg. Kind of key moments. Some of it is coming from the slides. Some of it is those interesting fun voiceovers that the speaker has or something that's happening in the conversation that might not otherwise be caught, a key quote or a joke. And sometimes they are words and sometimes they're visuals. And what's nice is for these conferences, there's a body of work that people can look back on — people who were there can look back on and say, “Oh yeah, I remember those key points.” Or, ” Which talk was it that I heard that theme or that particular concept?” And they can look back and quickly see where that was. They can also look at the arc of the whole thing over a period, you know, a set of, I think there's ten pages for a two day conference and say, ” Where do I want to highlight?” Or maybe a trip review, if I'm going back and talking about my experience of the conference, I can say, ” here's a talk.” It's a visual people could use for their teams, just to summarize what it is that was there and add their own thoughts. And then for people who were not able to attend a conference, they can look at what generally went on there very quickly and perhaps make a determination about where they want to invest time in looking at the videos that are available after the fact. That's a key piece of information management, to the main theme of your work and your podcast. That I think, my gosh, so much information is flowing at us. How in the world do we decide where to go back when we missed something? We have… I know I have tons of intention. I've tons of email that I've marked, I've flagged and I need to pay attention to and it's really hard to go back in time if you don't catch something in the moment and take care of it just then, it becomes more effort to go back. So I find that the sketchnoting is tremendous for that purpose. Being able to very quickly visually summarize or assess something. Jorge: I'm thinking that folks might be wondering if it's faster to draw than it is to write. MJ: That's a great question. And the way that I think about it, I started to allude to it earlier. I teach basic drawing or drawing skills for those who say, “They can't draw.” And I do this in a variety of ways. I've done it in a lot of workshops and conferences and it's part of a design thinking curriculum that I'm currently facilitating inside of enterprise. If anybody's ever played the game Pictionary — most people have had some experience with it — it's basically visual charades, very, very simple based on a word or phrase. And the way you win is that have to represent that object or that concept as quickly as possible. And this is the underlying principle in the drawing. Drawing it… By drawing, I mean the act of, of putting a stylus or a pen to a surface, you know, whether it's digital or it's analog. You're making marks, and those marks need to have a meaning. If you're not skilled at quickly drawing a horse and you can much more quickly write the word horse, and you're in a time situation, you're gonna write the word horse. What happens with people who can draw imagery or iconography or any kind of other symbolic representation is that they've developed the ability to make that thing, that representation, really quickly. Where they might say, “I'm going to come back in the break and add a couple of things in.” And generally there's a little bit of finishing work that will happen maybe in the five, ten, fifteen minutes afterwards. You can do some couple of embellishments and kind of finish it up. Letters are visual symbols that form words that form sentences, that form paragraphs. And we can do that similar thing with other kinds of verbal representational language, visual language. Jorge: I know that you do this for conferences and I believe that you also do it for meetings and let's say… a presentation in a conference is a structured argument, right? MJ: Right. Jorge: And one of the keys I think to this type of work, if it's going to serve the filtering or summarization purpose that you brought up earlier, one of the keys to it is bringing out the right visual hierarchy so that the main points somehow draw your attention. And can you talk a little bit about the differences of doing this in a more structured setting such as a conference versus a less structured setting? MJ: Absolutely. That's a great one, and I think you articulated it very well. In fact, at conferences we've all experienced — those of us who've attended any conference — have experienced that some speakers have highly structured, “here's how I'm going to tell you three things or six things.” Or they have really clear visual aids that help mark those chapters or themes or key points. Others are very good at storytelling and some speakers will use no visuals at all and they're really just creating a story arc that we don't know how planned it is or how extemporaneous it is. So it can vary quite a bit even in a structured setting such as a conference. When people are having less structured conversation — and I do support executive briefings, for example at several corporations — and so there are big decision makers exchanging information and time is very valuable, so it can easily go from a structured, “here's our capabilities” to “let's talk about how that serves your particular need” you know, customer, who's a visiting customer. And so I will typically go to a different format where I'm wanting to capture key aspects of the back and forth. And I'll just use two different colors and I will tend to use less imagery. So it presents more like a dialogue. And you can see by the color which party is speaking. So it becomes more like the Q&A that you would see at the bottom of anything. You know, the letter Q and the letter A are there, so you can distinguish which, or an interview transcript, that kind of thing. And so I'm not capturing everything that's there, but at least there's a record of the nature of the conversation and particularly if there's excitement about something that relates back to a theme or capability that's been discussed before. I can link that, I can visually link that on the chart, the chart being what we call the drawing itself, the physical artifact. So it can be challenging and especially if you don't… Managing space when you don't know how long or how deep something's going to go. When I'm doing graphic recording on large format, it's much more freeing because we'll start the day, the start the meeting with a pretty large piece of paper. And if you don't use it all, you can trim it. I'm working on a smaller format in sketchnoting, which is typically a personal size of notebook of some kind , it's either in your lap or it's on a table in front of you or on a workspace that's right in front of you so that people around you can see it. But generally the whole of the room or the audience does not see it until after, until you publish it. So that's another distinction about the size. Graphic recording — the large scale version — can be very valuable for meetings and conferences because people see that it's happening and they can watch in meetings, they can see that they're being heard and that, that they're being paid attention to. And it can change the dynamic of the conversation. They become more focused often, and they feel cared for in a way. There's somebody taking this, this step, this action and that there will be an artifact afterward. So a lot of just times we're in rooms where people are doing a lot of talking and maybe someone's taking notes. Mostly people are looking at what do we need to do coming out of this meeting? And then maybe capturing action items, but the capturing the content or the key aspects of what's being discussed, is something that I think we can do more of. Jorge: You've been talking about paper and notebooks and that brings up another question that I had about your process, which has to do with the mechanics of the actual drawing. I assume that you are drawing on paper as opposed to digitally, right? MJ: Presently I continue to really love the pen on paper, whatever scale is, and I have a lot of different pens, love them all. There's a trend right now and lately with the greater software and app capability to do this on tablets and people… It's just more portable. And I have not fully embraced it yet. I think I have a mental block about working on a screen. We spend so much time with screens. But there are folks who are doing it and I'm excited to continue exploring it because it's just, it's a different way of working. I did recently get an overhead camera. There are many makers, the one I happened to get was IPEVO. And it allows me to connect the camera to my computer and demonstrate to somebody who's not next to me or to a group of people, I can draw analog and it's projected basically onto the screen, large or small. I'm pretty excited about that because it's a little bit of a work around in terms of how do I get to show my work or demonstrate something in action when the human beings are distributed. Jorge: As for the “final deliverable,” to, say, your clients or when the conference has finished, for example, do you photograph the drawings and share them that way? Or how do they make their way from the paper world to the digital world? MJ: That's a great question. Typically for sketchnotes, I will photograph them initially so that I can put them on social media and publish them quickly. So they go out to attendees in Slack or on Twitter or on Facebook or anywhere. And then what I will do for the final deliverable to make PDFs, or in the case of Rosenfeld, they put PDFs on the website next to each of the speakers in the program. So they're stuck there… And they are not stuck there, but they're published there. And before that I will do high resolution scans and make sure that the lighting is even, and the colors are even and so forth. And it's a quick flatbed scan and don't spend a lot of time doing, you know, photoshopping or anything. But just a quick, quick scan. And then same thing goes for the big paper versions. There's a specialty shop that does very large format scanning and digital posts. And then you can have an image, a jpeg or a pdf. And those go to the client and the paper original goes back to wherever it would best serve the folks who generated the content. Jorge: That's great. I wasn't aware of the large format scanning piece of these. That's good to know. MJ: Kind of tremendous. There's a firm, happens to be local to us here in the bay, but they do work for people all over the world, and nice, really great folks. It's Landau Chartworks. Jorge: So I'm wondering how, if any, this way of working influences the way that you manage your own information. So things like commitments to yourself and others. I would expect that like taking notes for your own purpose, like this would play into it, but beyond that, how has it changed the way that you manage your own information? MJ: Oh my goodness, this is… That's a huge topic. Yes. It… Where do I go first? I make visual lists. I do when I sit down and I want to think about something. Last year I did a kind of a, “let me look back on the arc of the different ways I've been a professional in the world.” And I took a big piece of paper and I started thinking about how to organize it. So I did… This was not a straight up graphic design and visual communication, how might I make a PowerPoint slide type of a, an inquiry, a visual inquiry. It was a more organic, “what do I notice about the cycles and themes of the way that I've been making visual sense of things?” So ways that I use drawing and sketchnoting and basically words and pictures in my everyday life to… One of the ways I enjoy using it most is making little notes, little post it notes. And that can be for myself or for my domestic partner or, you know, on something in the refrigerator or on a food item that I have put in a bowl for a gift. You know, I make some interesting lettering, get some cool pens. Recently I got some new black jeans and you have to watch out when you wash them. You don't put light-colored things in there because you know, the dye will leach. And so I made a note to make sure to use cold water and I made the big blue cold with the waves underneath, like kind of just as a reminder. So I'm… That's kind of fun. And then also a really cool way is on a little simple calendar or paper calendars on the refrigerator. And sometimes I'll put a little drawing of something that happened that day. The way people make journals. Yeah. Maybe it was the weather or something you ate. Just drawing simple little icons, or you know, I keep colored pens around the house. We have cups of pens everywhere and so that's keeping it fun. And it's always nice when somebody else is involved. They enjoy it. It's like how we used to be about getting paper mail, getting a letter in the mail. And then, I think the other part is, in terms of how I manage my life, I can't have a conversation with people in, in person, often cannot have a conversation without drawing something. So I keep, I keep pens in my bags and I want to make sure that I have the ability to (unintelligible) and sketch something out, the napkin sketch type of thing. When I was working at GE Digital, I really would just walk around with my laptop and a pad of paper or some stack of printer paper and I'm just drawing things and talking about. Show what I mean or listen to other people and say, “Is this what you mean?” And get into a conversation with them about it. Jorge: You know there was a while back — many, many moons ago as they say — I used to use the a Franklin Planner… MJ: Yes. Jorge: … to keep track of things like meetings and to do's and stuff like that. And there was this kind of tactile pleasure to using this thing. And it was a big bulky thing that I had to drag around in my bag, but I remember that I spent perhaps too much time looking into things like page templates for that thing and being very mindful about where certain things went. Like I would keep track of to do's in one section of the thing and appointments in another. So digital has completely taken over from things like the Franklin Planner, but there's been an interesting phenomenon. Over the past, I would say five years or so, I've noticed that there's been a resurgence in folks keeping track of things and I'm thinking of things like the bullet, um, I think it's called The Bullet Journal? MJ: Yes. Jorge: Where folks have rediscovered the pleasures — the tactile pleasures — of keeping track of this sort of information in an analog format. And when I hear you talk about the various pens that you use when you talked about like, “Well, you know, I did the blue pen the word cool, and I did the little wave,” like to me, that speaks of this… This tangible aspect to drawing with pen and paper, which digital just cannot capture. Yet, at least. I'm wondering if you have thoughts on that or if you can tell us about the pens that you — because you've talked several times about the pens and how much you like the pens… MJ: Oh my gosh. Well, yes, but here's the thing. I'm gonna make an analogy to our ability, the way that we navigate ourselves literally through space, and we use Apple Maps or Google Maps, or when do we need to go from point a to point b, we say, “Please, please computer, tell me how to go.” And then we follow those directions. And then we have no, literally no memory other than maybe the physical experience of, of going through space and maybe whatever you noticed along the way. If you have good visual recall, you might say, “Oh yeah, I remember passing this street and that street,” because you saw the sign. But you could not recreate that because it wasn't memorable, and you didn't … The amount of control that you had, was a little more passive than if you had to look, consult a paper map and create a turn list or create some kind of notes to yourself as you would drive or navigate or walk to the place. And so what we're talking about is a kind of, it's not stickiness in terms of attention, but it's stickiness in terms of memory. And so when you make — this is back to my earlier point of when you physically make marks — and you're being intentional about it, you're saying, “I'm, you know, I want to put this or that onto the surface, the paper, or the tablet or the…” And that's where it gets blurry in the digital space. If you're drawing on a tablet, and you're choosing the thickness and the color and the scale and the hierarchy and you're creating something there, I think that still is just as good, just as meaningful, as if you're doing it on paper because you're in charge, and you're putting it there. What we're talking about is, what's going on for you behaviorally and cognitively with this act? How is it affecting your interpersonal relationships? If it's involving other people, which typically it would be… Well, it doesn't matter. It can be with yourself. If I sit down with a piece of paper, and I want to make sense of something for myself, I tell people, this is one of the things that goes on in my workshops, you're going to have a different relationship with your ideas and with your thinking if you externalize it onto the paper, than if you keep it in your head. I'm not saying it's better, it's just different. I mean it can be better. I think it's better, but it's not, it's not a judgment call. And then if you're going to have a conversation with somebody else, or you're in a conversation, and you're not sure or you want to be sure that you are communicating effectively, drawing anything, drawing scratchy marks and a couple of labels or if it's a model, or it's a plan… Well it could be any subjects. It's going to be easier for you to have accord with the person, agreement. And both of you come away from it, or the multiple of you go, come away from it with a shared understanding. I don't think you know about this, but I'm excited to be taking these concepts into a new course that's going to be offered at Stanford Continuing Studies this fall. And it's taking the need for collaboration — for effective collaboration — that is, that takes people in meetings or in rooms or in conversations and they're speaking words , to make it tangible. To use this very simple, Pictionary-like visual language, which in the course description we're calling Simple Sketching, and to use them in facilitating group communication. So this is going to be six sessions on Wednesday evenings starting September 25th. And we're going to look at how do you do that? How can you listen and draw and engage and make people focus in a way that gives them much more satisfaction and much more traction and allows people to see, who we're not there to see what happened. It allows people who were there to have a common frame of reference and empowers everybody to be doing happier, more focused work. Jorge: That's fantastic. Congratulations. MJ: Thank you. Jorge: And it's also a great summary of what we've been talking about thus far. So I think that's a good place to wrap up our conversation. So, where can folks find out more about you? MJ: I can be found on almost every social media platform at, @mjbroadbent. So I'm on Twitter, on Instagram, on Flickr, and my domain is mjbroadbent.com. I'll be putting information about the upcoming course and some other meetups that I'm supporting into these places. Jorge: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking with you. MJ: Thank you, Jorge, for your excellent work around information, which is critical.

Author, publisher, conference organizer, and all-around renaissance man Lou Rosenfeld talks shop about writing the first book on IA, watching the evolution of design practices, and how he's helping to keep people at the forefront of their respective industries.

In this episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Karen McGrane and Lou address the growing concerns over sexual harassment at the IA Conference and other industry events. Karen and Lou explore the #metoo movement's impact on the industry and what steps we can all take to address what’s happening. Learn more about Karen McGrane: http://karenmcgrane.com/

My guest today is Lou Rosenfeld. Alongside Peter Morville, Lou wrote the seminal book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web — also known as the polar bear book. In 2005, he founded Rosenfeld Media, where he and his team amplify user experience expertise through conferences and books, including my own Living in Information. In this conversation we talk about how Lou manages information to effectively coordinate the various workstreams at his company, including the upcoming Enterprise Experience conference. Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/the-informed-life-episode-1-lou-rosenfeld.mp3   Show notes Information Architecture for the Web and Beyond (4th Edition), by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango Rosenfeld Media Gmail Apple Stickies.app Sanebox Facebook Andrew Hinton on Twitter Zoom Enterprise Experience 2019 conference Enterprise UX community

My old friend Lou Rosenfeld joins the program. He co-authored the seminal book on Information Architecture in the '90s, and now runs Rosenfeld Media, publishers of some of the industry's best books on UX. We go deep into the history of the discipline, and how it's playing out in a new generation of designers today.

Episode 21 Highlights: - Lou’s background, the beginning of the internet and how UX/IA all started - The stories behind Lou meeting Tim Berners Lee and Larry Page - How Lou started Rosenfeld Media, the UX book publishing company - The story of the blind men and the elephant and how it applies to building a great user experience - DesignOps, ResearchOps and how Lou began major conferences around those topics - Lou’s advice for those of us working in large organizations doing UX design

Lou joins us to talk about his history with information architecture, conferences, and general UX funtimes.

At first glance, the emerging field of DesignOps doesn’t have much in common with creating video games. Erin Hoffman-John, CEO of Sense of Wonder and Assistant Professor of Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center in Silicon Valley, talks with Lou Rosenfeld about how game designers have a more direct connection to their users, and what that means for UX practitioners. Erin is one of our speakers at this year’s DesignOps Summit! Stay tuned for details about next year’s conference. Follow Erin Hoffman-John on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gryphoness Follow Rosenfeld Media: https://twitter.com/rosenfeldmedia

Christopher Schmitt is out, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the time Nicole Sullivan talked about how she read W3C specs for fun, Lou Rosenfeld trying not to start a war between IA vs. UX, and how Jessica Hische became a success.

Christopher Schmitt is out, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the time Nicole Sullivan talked about how she read W3C specs for fun, Lou Rosenfeld trying not to start a war between IA vs. UX, and how Jessica Hische became a success.

Christopher Schmitt is out, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the time Nicole Sullivan talked about how she read W3C specs for fun, Lou Rosenfeld trying not to start a war between IA vs. UX, and how Jessica Hische became a success.

In this episode, Tricia Wang, the founder of Constellate Data, turns the tables on our host Lou Rosenfeld. Lou tells Tricia his own war story of a failed client project with Borders Books. They discuss the dangers of silence, the value of speaking up, and when walking away from an impossible situation can be the best thing you can do for your career. Follow Tricia Wang on Twitter: https://twitter.com/triciawang Follow Rosenfeld Media: https://twitter.com/rosenfeldmedia

The enduring timeliness of information architecture.

The enduring timeliness of information architecture.

Lou Rosenfeld is in the ideas business. He's a writer himself, and a speaker and trainer, and now with Rosenfeld Media he's created a distinctive approach to publishing that's based around ideas - and the community engaged with them - rather than books per se.  His company supports the 'three-legged stool' of the ideas business, which Lou himself discovered as an author: 'I found that I really couldn't succeed with writing if I wasn't presenting, and I couldn't succeed with presenting if I wasn't teaching, and couldn't succeed with teaching if I wasn't writing so it's a virtuous circle.'  So the publishing company he created is format-agnostic, and devotes an extraordinary amount of time and energy to supporting its authors as a co-collaborator and focus for the community. 'I still think we're reinventing publishing,' he says. 'I'm not even sure the word publish means anything like it did 10 or 15 years ago. It shouldn't really. I felt like the traditional publishing model, which to my mind emphasised quantity over quantity, is really broken. It's not anything I really want to be affiliated with so we've very studiously avoided that approach and taken a very different one.' Find out more, including his advice to authors, in this fascinating interview.

What's the difference between Customer Experience and User Experience? Are they working together to create a consistent experience with users of your products? Sarah Bloomer, former Director of Customer Experience and Insights at Forrester Research, talks to Lou Rosenfeld about what companies can do to build bridges between their Customer Experience and User Experience teams. Follow Sarah Bloomer on Twitter: https://twitter.com/boolie Follow Rosenfeld Media: https://twitter.com/rosenfeldmedia

The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen has revolutionized the way start-ups get their products to market. But what if you don't work in a startup? Dan reveals to Lou Rosenfeld how the lean philosophy can be applied to companies of all shapes and sizes–even enterprises. Learn what the common challenges and solutions are to bringing the lean philosophy into an established company. Follow Dan Olsen on Twitter: https://twitter.com/danolsen Follow Rosenfeld Media: https://twitter.com/rosenfeldmedia

We don’t generally have a problem considering objects from the past. Speculating about what they are and how they might have been used. We could look at artefacts from the future in a similar manner. We talk to Leo Frishberg about presumptive design and how you can use that as a provocative design research tool.

We talk to Lou Rosenfeld about the 4th edition of Information Architecture (“The Polar Bear book”) and how the fields of IA and UX have evolved over the years since the book first came out. We also talk about going beyond user research and the importance of combining your research with other data points.

Well-crafted UX depends on having a company culture that’s set up to design well. Can you influence the culture of your company? Yes. Marc and Lou discuss three unique approaches to culture change happening in corporations like IBM and Citrix today. This is a preview into a panel Marc will lead on Designing Organizational Culture at Enterprise UX in San Antonio (May 13-15). Get tickets at www.enterpriseux.net or follow along on Twitter at @enterpriseUX.

Four years ago GE discovered it was one of the largest software companies in the world--but not building software very well. Hear how Greg Pettroff, as GE’s Chief Experience Officer, slowly built a community inside the company to evangelize the importance of design in a developer-focused culture. Greg will give the opening keynote at the Enterprise UX 2015 conference in San Antonio this May 13-15. Get tickets at www.enterpriseux.net or follow along on Twitter at @enterpriseUX.

Lou Rosenfeld and Steve Sanderson break down ways designers can use experimentation as a tool for innovation in enterprises. Steve also gives a preview to hot topics to be covered around innovating in big business at Enterprise UX, San Antonio, TX, May 13-15. @stevesanderson www.stevesanderson.com @enterpriseux www.enterpriseUX.net

What does quality and craft look like in the Enterprise UX world? Kendra and Lou take on the unique challenges of designing software to meet the needs of a constantly changing world. Craft Amid Complexity is a key theme at the upcoming Enterprise UX 2015 conference, where Kendra will deep dive into the topic along with fellow experts David Cronin, Uday Gajendar and Peter Morville. @kshimmell http://www.cooper.com/people/kendra_shimmell @enterpriseUX www.enterpriseux.net

When you sit in the middle of an organization, it's easy to believe you can't change things. Dave and Lou talk about how we can tap our powers of liminal thinking to shed light on why people act the way they do and create safe spaces that foster better collaboration. Buy Dave’s Liminal Thinking book: http://twowavesbooks.com/book/liminal-thinking/ Follow Dave on Twitter: https://twitter.com/davegray Follow Rosenfeld Media: https://twitter.com/rosenfeldmedia

Steve and Lou dig into the challenges of learning about people who engage with enterprises—how to gather data, and how to synthesize that data to get to something like true insight. Insight at Scale is a major theme at the upcoming Enterprise UX 2015 conference (San Antonio, May 13-15), where Steve will dig deeper into the subject along with Kelly Goto, Christian Rohrer, and Chris Chapo.

Jason Scott takes a break from saving the Internet to talk with Lou Rosenfeld by The Rosenfeld Review Podcast (Rosenfeld Media)

This podcast is a special insider view of Louis Rosenfeld, IA consultant and owner of Rosenfeld Media shares insight about his publishing experience. Lou is the co-founder of Argus Associates, founder of the IA Summit and co-author of the well-known "Polar Bear Book," called Information Architecture for the World Wide Web.

Chris Avore and Lou Rosenfeld talk about their upcoming conferences: Pro/Design in New York City on January 30 (hosted by Nasdaq) and Enterprise UX in San Antonio on May 13-15(hosted by Rosenfeld Media and Rackspace). Pro/Design will be held on Friday, January 30, 2015. There are currently no more tickets available. However, Nasdaq will be releasing live stream information on Monday, January 26. http://prodesignconf.com/ Stay updated about Pro/Design here: @PROdesignconf and #prodesignconf Follow Chris on Twitter here: @erova Follow Chris and his team at Nasdaq here: @NasdaqDesign Enterprise UX will be held on March 13-15, 2015. For more about Enterprise UX: www.enterpriseux.net @EnterpriseUX @RosenfeldMedia

Recorded July 25, 2014 Brett Helquist @BHelquist www.bretthelquist.com/ Deb Gelman @dgelman rosenfeldmedia.com/experts/debra-gelman/ Design for Kids rosenfeldmedia.com/books/design-for-kids/ Lemony Snicket www.lemonysnicket.com/

Recorded March 28, 2014 at the IA Summit, San Diego Donna Lichaw @dlichaw http://www.greatnorthelectric.com/ Eduardo Ortiz @eduardoortiz http://about.me/efortiz Designing for Villains http://2014.iasummit.org/designing-for-villians/ Mary Gaitskill/Secretary http://marygaitskill.com/ http://www.secretarythemovie.co.uk/html/home.html Sanky Panky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanky-panky

Lou is an independent information architecture consultant, and founder and publisher of Rosenfeld Media, a publishing house focused on user experience books. He has been instrumental in helping establish the fields of information architecture and user experience, and in articulating the role and value of librarianship within those fields.

The goal of any site is for the right audience to find the right information. But beyond your actual content there are many things that can cause findability issues. These tend to be unanswered questions about your primary audience and whether or not you’re satisfying the need of that audience. Good information architecture can help guide your design decisions so that your users can effectively engage with your content.

Speaker: Louis Rosenfeld As user research becomes firmly established in organizations around the world, it's tempting to congratulate ourselves and retreat to our shiny new labs. But our work is nowhere near complete. As currently practiced, user research remains narrow in focus, often limited to the qualitative methods that reflect our own educational biases, and the tools that fit within our own comfort zones. Other research practices, such as web analytics, business analytics, and market research, are equally powerful ways of learning about users' wants and needs. More importantly, they're often complementary with what we do. When our organizations combine methods that tell what is going on are combined with methods that tell why, only then will they truly realize the value of all user research. In his keynote, Lou Rosenfeld will explore the complementary aspects of the different research perspectives, argue for breaking down the silos that divide them, and suggest a framework for developing products and services that are better analyzed, better designed, and, ultimately, better performing.

UX professionals have made a lot of progress in large organizations. Companies realize the importance of connecting with their users more and more. User research is becoming firmly rooted in many organizations as companies try to produce better products and services for their users. But user research itself can be narrow in focus and full of biases. Lou Rosenfeld of Rosenfeld Media, suggests that by breaking down the silos that exist between other research practices, we can create a complementary research experience. This will produce even better analysis and therefore, better products as a whole.

Even the best design teams, methods, architecture and tools are no match for a project beset with political infighting, divided priorities or unfocused goals. To truly make an impact, product teams need to have business buy-in and a shared understanding of the project’s direction. Often, it’s up to designers to smooth the way and facilitate this consensus. By greasing the tracks in the early stages of a project, designers can gain the much-needed support of business stakeholders, avoid wasted effort, increase their influence (within their teams and the company at large), and make a more meaningful difference with their work. The key is to bridge competing viewpoints, develop a common vision and break through project roadblocks. And it all starts with the right combination of tools and techniques. In this session, you will: * Discover how to bridge competing viewpoints, develop a common vision and eliminate roadblocks on your next project. * Explore the ways in which your existing design skill-sets can be expanded to improve communication within your team and throughout you company. * Learn facilitation techniques to help engage business stakeholders and manage the conflicting priorities and lack of direction that so often derail a project. About Jess McMullin Since 1997, Jess has focused his career on understanding and developing positive user experiences for his clients and their customers. Drawing on sources ranging from social sciences and behavioral research to gaming, market analysis and future trends, Jess generates client insights that drive innovation and create better customer experiences. Jess often speaks at conferences focusing on user experience, design thinking and innovation, topics he also writes about on a regular basis. His ideas have been featured in several user-experience books, including Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, 2nd Ed. and Jesse James Garrett’s The Elements of User Experience. In 2003, Jess founded nForm User Experience, a boutique consultancy that counts Comcast, Ancestry.com and the Canadian Patient Safety Institute as clients. Jess also organizes CanUX, the annual Canadian User Experience Workshop in Banff, Alberta, and he is the cofounder of the international Information Architecture Institute. For Jess’s latest thoughts on business, design and innovation, visit his blog, bplusd (business + design).