UX Cake – Details, episodes & analysis

Do you want your career to be sustainable and aligned with what truly matters to you?

Designing a holistic career that embraces every part of who we are can be a complex and meaningful challenge. This week Leigh and guest Jason Mesut have a captivating discussion about the significance of aligning personal values with work and finding meaning in one's career. Jason is an experienced design strategist and leader, who conducts workshops on and has written extensively about shaping one’s future in design.

Jason sheds light on the limitations of traditional career labels and role descriptions, advocating for a more holistic approach. He shares his own path of creating visual frameworks and facilitating workshops that empower individuals and teams to delve into their unique qualities, values, and skills.

Join Leigh and Jason in this episode as they discuss the common challenges that people bring to coaching sessions, from navigating the job market to making critical decisions about leadership roles, reigniting passions, or even contemplating a career change. Tune in to discover practical tools and strategies that can propel you toward shaping a more aligned career.

🎤About Our Guest:

Jason Mesut helps people and organizations navigate their uncertain futures. He does this through executive coaching, community leadership, strategic consulting, futures design and shaping workshops.

📚Additional Resources

Jason’s DesignOps 2019 talk “Shaping Design, Designers and Teams”

Jason’s Medium article series on Shaping Designers and Design Teams

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Connect with Jason

Website | LinkedIn | Linktr.ee

Connect with UX Cake!

uxcake.co | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube

Connect with Leigh

Strategic UX Leader Coaching and Workshops

Follow on LinkedIn

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In this episode, we chat with Sheryl Cababa, Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial and author of "Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers." She introduces the concept of systems thinking, which is a way to consider the broader implications of design decisions. 

By examining the entire problem and understanding the interconnections between various components, designers can anticipate and address potential issues and create more holistic and impactful solutions.

🎤About Our Guest:

Sheryl Cababa is the Chief Strategy Officer at Substantial, and the Author of “Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers”, which was just published by Rosenfeld Media. Sheryl is a seasoned design & strategy leader who’s worked with consultancies including Frog and Adaptive Path.

📚Interested in purchasing Sheryl’s new book?

Rosenfeld Media is offering a 15% discount to UX Cake listeners. Just use the promo code: cababa-cake at when purchasing directly from Rosenfeld Media’s website (expires July 1st, 2023).

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Connect with Sheryl

Twitter | LinkedIn

Connect with UX Cake!

uxcake.co | Instagram | LinkedIn | YouTube

Connect with Leigh

Strategic UX Leader Coaching and Workshops

Follow on LinkedIn

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/uxcake.

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A business can only grow as much as its people. That is why it is important to build teams with the knowledge that each of them is a key member who will eventually become a senior as you grow. In this episode, Leigh Allen-Arredondo interviews Anjali Deswandikar, the Design Director at Terralogic, Inc. and Design Team Lead at Lollypop Design, about building design teams that scale. Anjali talks about the process it took to build her teams across the globe, seeing as they grew from a handful to over 250. She takes us through the structures in place as well as how she ensures that teams are both values-driven and function with high performance. As design leaders, you don't have to bear all the weight alone. You have your team with you who can help, so build them well through this conversation.

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Accessibility needs to be the gold standard for everything. If you have the power to make things more accessible and inclusive, strive for that. You are actually leaving money on the table if you don't design with accessibility in mind. There are billions of persons with disabilities, and companies need to consult them. If you're a small company, then it's okay to start small. Start with what you can control and change first.

Join Leigh Allen-Arredondo as she talks to product designer Chimmy Kalu about the importance of designing with accessibility. Chimmy is the Chief Design Officer of Lovable Studio. She also does workshops and talks about product design. Learn Chimmy's process when designing something that's accessible. Discover how you can spread accessibility. If everyone does a little bit, then everyone collectively becomes more accessible.

Related: Listen to UX Cake Episode #25 with Liz Jackson, "Changing the Design Narrative"

LINKS

Chimmy's Website

Follow Chimmy on Twitter

Follow Chimmy on LinkedIn

Chimmy's Design Courses & Workshops:

Sketch Essentials

How to design anything

Advanced Figma

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UX Cake Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Linked In | YouTube

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Great digital products don't just happen. They're the result of a strong designer-developer relationship. That is because the two groups bring different but complementary skill sets. By understanding and respecting each other's strengths, the designer and developer can work together to create user-friendly and technically sound products. In this episode, Abhishek Nayak talks about how their company, Appsmith, addresses some of the common issues in the designer-developer relationship and how they have set up both sides for success. Abhishek is the CEO and Co-founder of Appsmith, an open-source low-code tool that helps developers build dashboards and admin panels very quickly.

Abhishek also shared with us Appsmith's design system in a bonus video, and showed us how the designers and developers collaborate on files, and get feedback on work-in-progress from customer in real time: View video on our Youtube channel

Links

• Appsmith
• UX Cake – YouTube
• Abhishek Nayak – Twitter
• https://www.Linkedin.com/in/AbhishekNayak/
• https://GitHub.com/AppsmithOrg/Appsmith

If you enjoy this podcast, there are some really simple ways you can help us: 

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Connect with UX Cake!

UX Cake Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Linked In | Email - we love feedback!

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Level up with UX Strategy

In this episode of UX Cake Podcast, we discuss how you can create a UX strategy for better outcomes for your users, and the products or services you help create.

There are many different perceptions about what UX Strategy actually is. My guest Jaime Levy - who wrote the book "UX Strategy" - defines as the intersection between business strategy and UX design, with a key component being early and continuous validation of the value proposition with customers. It’s a high-level plan of how your product or feature is going to achieve the business goals.

Jaime Levy is a UX/product strategist, author, and public speaker based in Los Angeles and Berlin. Her passion is to help business leaders and internal teams transform their product visions into innovative digital solutions that customers want. Jaime also offers public/private workshops, and online masterclasses, and speaks at design and innovation conferences worldwide. Her best-selling O’Reilly Media book is called UX Strategy: Product Strategy Techniques for Devising Innovative Digital Solutions. The book presents a solid framework for the practice, which lies at the intersection of UX design and business strategy.

Resources

Jamie Levy

Website

Linked In

Medium

Twitter

UX Strategy: How to Devise Innovative Digital Products that People Want

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If you enjoy this podcast, there are some really simple ways you can help us: 

• follow us on twitter - like and reshare our posts
• subscribe to the newsletter for updates and bonus content
• share this episode, or any of our episodes, with a friend. 
• rate & review us on Apple Podcast or iTunes on desktop!

Connect with UX Cake!

 leigharredondo.com | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Linked In

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/uxcake.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Scaling user research, means doing more, doing more research, and doing more with user research, through democratization, or enablement.

Democratization in UX, is a topic of controversy, yet this episode is a conversation and not My an argument debate. I think partially because the term democratization and the concept of democratization really has some baggage.

Instead of having to spend your time evangelizing the importance of research, which takes up a lot of a lot of time, you are able to spend your time enabling research through systems, infrastructure and tooling. After a long and winding career journey (from eLearning designer, to product manager, to UXer), Roberta now leads the User Research team at User Interviews, where she conducts strategic research projects and creates scalable systems and resources for democratization.

She’s researched and designed experiences for communities of learners, educators, and enterprise clients at companies like Year Up, edX, Pluralsight, The Predictive Index, and more.

At her core, she’s an infectiously curious and adaptive leader who loves bringing teammates closer to customer insights. She values learning and community and derives the most joy from mentoring, coaching, and enabling others.

In her free time, she’s a Career & Wellness Coach at Learn Mindfully and enjoys gardening, storytelling, and cooking. She’s based in Boston, MA with her partner and two cats.

Links

Article - Scaling Research / Democratization 2.0

User Interviews intro promo - get 3 free participants

Roberta Dombrowski

Website

Linked In

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If you enjoy this podcast, there are some really simple ways you can help us: 

• follow us on twitter - like and reshare our posts
• subscribe to the newsletter for updates and bonus content
• share this episode, or any of our episodes, with a friend. 
• rate & review us on Apple Podcast or iTunes on desktop!

Connect with UX Cake!

UX Cake Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Linked In

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/uxcake.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of the UX Cake podcast, we’re bringing you lots of great information about UX writing as a specialty within UX. In this special Ask Me Anything format we cover some of the most useful soft skills for a career in UX writing, hard skills that are transferable from other industries, ideas on how to upskill your UX writing, finding a mentor, and career trajectories for UX writers.

My guest is Laura Costantino (they/them), a senior UX writer at Google. For the past 10 years, Laura has worked at the intersection of editorial marketing and strategy. They fully transitioned into UX content about three years ago and now, as someone who went through a career change, Laura is dedicated to helping other people of all backgrounds transition into UX while also being committed to developing content design and strategy as pivotal parts of the UX discipline.

Resources

Strategic Writing for UX, Torrey Podmajersky

Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson

Content Strategy Toolkit, Meghan Casey

Working in Content

Content + UX slack

Mentoring platforms

ADP List

UX Coffee Hours

Design Buddies

Hexagon Mentorship program

Connect with Laura Costantino

Linkedin

Website

Twitter

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If you enjoy this podcast, there are some really simple ways you can help us: 

• follow us on twitter - like and reshare our posts
• subscribe to the newsletter for updates and bonus content
• share this episode, or any of our episodes, with a friend. 
• rate & review us on Apple Podcast or iTunes on desktop!

Connect with UX Cake!

•  leigharredondo.com | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Linked In

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/uxcake.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is all about creating meaning from data, and making it easy for your audience to understand by making it visual. We can apply the same principles we use to design dashboards to presentations - whether you’re communicating design concepts (and the data-driven decisions behind your design) or user research findings. I had such a great time talking with my guest Thomas Watkins about how to show meaning using data, I know the term ‘data visualization’ sounds a little overwhelming to some people in UX, if you aren’t designing dashboards. But it doesn’t need to be. I think we did a pretty good job of making data visualization accessible for any level of data interest in the episode.

Everyone in UX should be using data - whether you’re in design or research or PM or developer or marketing - and using data in a visual way to communicate important information to the person reading it. If you create presentations, for your design or for your research, if you have any opportunity to use data to explain your design or research recommendations… this episode has great information for you. Whether you are data-curious or data-shy or you lean in the data geek direction like me. I learned some great guidelines about making data visual in more effective ways, and I’ll bet you will too, even if your eyes glaze over at terms like “magnitude comparison” or “scatter plot.” I love how Thomas talks about explaining the context of the numbers, and not just ‘decorating’ numbers with meaningless donut graphs, one of my pet peeves!

Thomas Watkins is the founder of 3 Leaf consulting, a design collective that combines psychology and design principles to create usable products and services. Thomas is a thought leader, speaker and industry practitioner in Houston TX. The scope of his work has included interface design for mobile, SaaS system architecture, usability research, and data visualization.

LINKS

https://www.3leaf.consulting/

https://www.instagram.com/3leafmethod

https://www.linkedin.com/in/watkinsthomas/

Show Link - Graph Selection Matrix

https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/misc/Graph_Selection_Matrix.pdf

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Listen Apple | Spotify | Google | Website

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Increasing our influence also increases the impact our work can have. This is especially important in user experience design and research… when not everyone we work with may have the same user obsession as we do, so it sometimes takes extra effort to see the impact we want. Often the UX folks are not the ultimate authority in the room, or on a project. And then add to that the fact that others’ bias can also undermine your authority - biasis about gender, race, age, disability… 

I had a chance to talk about all of this with 3 other UX experts, Hana Nagel, Real Canty, and Ashby Hayes. We covered a lot of ground. And, because we recorded in front of a live audience, you’ll also get a chance to hear the very powerful Q & A session which is the last half of this longer-than usual episode. This episode was originally published in 2019, and it remains one of UX Cake’s top-downloaded episodes, episode 31. There is also an unedited video of the panel on our UX Cake YouTube channel.

Hana Nagel is UX Manager @ Deloitte Digital, Real Canty is Sr User researcher @ Google, Ashby Hayes is SVP of product & design at Potato, a digital product agency.

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If you enjoy this podcast, there are some really simple ways you can help us: 

• follow us on twitter - like and reshare our posts
• subscribe to the newsletter for updates and bonus content
• share this episode, or any of our episodes, with a friend. 
• rate & review us on Apple Podcast or iTunes on desktop!

Listen Apple | Spotify | Google | Website

Connect with UX Cake!

 leigharredondo.com | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Linked In

Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/uxcake.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.