Design Critique: Products for People

This is our last episode for a while, but is well worth the wait! We have an interview with Viktor Rydal, industrial designer from Nomono, who talks with Tim about the Nomono Sound Capsule.

Visit the Nomono website about the SoundCapsule to see and hear their demonstrations. This truly innovative solution records conversations with its custom lapel mics into its Sound Capsule hub, and their cloud application removes bad room acoustics to create astoundingly good audio from rooms that did NOT sound good to begin with. It's an interviewer's dream come true. Whether used by user researchers, journalists, or conference organizers, the Nomono Sound Capsule achieves good clean audio recordings in everyday noisy environments. The Sound Capsule allows the interviewer to focus on the interview, not worry about the audio engineering and room acoustics.

For over an hour, Viktor and Tim talk about the story of the Sound Capsule's design and development.
Tim is enjoying his new job teaching at Michigan Technological University but needs to focus on the relocation and new job in its first year--so no more episodes for a while. Expect us...when you hear us. Thanks for listening since 2005 and we promise some more episodes in the future. Check www.designcritique.net for the occasional blog post in the mean time.

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

You can reach Dushyant at his LinkedIn page. His book's publisher is at this link:
https://bpbonline.com/products/ux-decoded?variant=41816075043016

Tim recommends everyone listen to this episode of Dushyant's excellent podcast, UX Banter, with Neal Ford discussing authenticity in branding:

https://www.uxbanter.com/e/importance-of-authenticity-in-branding-neal-foard-s1-episode-7/

Barry McBride joins Timothy Keirnan to discuss the history and content strategy of The Orange and Brown Report, an independent news and analysis business catering to Cleveland Browns football fans. The Orange and Brown Report offers both free and paid subscription tiers of news and interaction with its beat writers and analysts.
Across 80 minutes, Barry talks about:
* The origin of his Cleveland Browns fan advocacy and community-building in 1995, when Browns ownership and the NFL betrayed Browns fans by moving the team to Baltimore and the legacy media refused to cover all aspects of the story.
* HIs first website, Greedwatch.com
* His second website, BrownsTNG (The Next Generation)
* How legendary Browns former QB Bernie Kosar and his family helped Barry create Bernie's Insiders, a startup that professionalized Barry's concept with credentialed news reporters.
* The transition to The Orange and Brown Report and further maturation of the concept.
* Plans for the future of the OBR.

You can find the Orange and Brown Report at
www.theobr.com

Tim's book recommendations:
Managing by Values by Blanchard (https://bkconnection.com/books/title/managing-by-values)

Learning to Scramble by Kosar (https://clevelandlandmarkspress.com/book_details.php?bid=27#&panel1-1)

Almost Too Good: The Undefeated 1948 Cleveland Browns
(https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/just-too-good/)

Matt Ranta, head of practice at Nimble Gravity, joins Tim for a discussion on how companies can and should improve their digital interactions with customers, whether they are B2B or B2C. Whether it's in email messages or web pages, details matter.

03:47 The importance of proofreading marketing email messages.
08:03 Use new image formats like webp and AVIF to increase speed of a website and its SEO.
17:06 Test a website with browsers besides Chrome, which not everyone will use.
22:00 Competitive intelligence tools and keywords
25:30 The useful website evaluation optimization tool https://pagespeed.web.dev/
28:20 In 2023 people are still not labeling images with alt tags
30:20 Allowing content to be buried deep because of not using pagination properly on web pages
35:34 Disavowing bad back links from undesirable sites you may not want to be associated with, and/or a website that is a link farm
40:22 Do not hide the search bar on the home page or other pages.

Make sure to read Matt's excellent article 10 Opportunities for Improving Your Digital Performance.

Eric Penn joins Tim Keirnan and Ken Mayer to discuss the first customer experience phases of his new 2023 Subaru BRZ after a month of ownership.
The "Toyobaru Twins" (Toyota GR86 and Subaru BRZ) are the same car with some slight differences. This vehicle is one of the best examples of "user-centered design" we have ever encountered in a product, and Tim owned the first generation for four blissful years. Eric has purchased the long-awaited and much celebrated second generation, and we go into intense detail on our first four defined phases of the customer experience:
Encounter (02:44)
Decision (07:21)
Purchase (21:00)
Initial Use (43:00)

We will record an episode about Eric's longitudinal use in February of 2024 so that Eric has a full 12 months of ownership under his belt for that. On this podcast we are nothing if not thorough.

In summary, the 2023 BRZ (the second model year of the 2nd generation of the car) meets or exceeds almost every criterion for delighting Eric as customer/user. The car's designers and engineers improved on the few weaknesses from the first generation without compromising what made the first generation so terrific. From the seating position, to the razor sharp handling, to the improved human-machine interfaces in the cockpit, to the new, more powerful engine, everything about this car screams or subtly implies "made for driving enthusiasts of light weight, nimble sports cars." Neither Subaru nor Toyota invented us to be so positive about this vehicle. It is incredibly well-focused on delighting a well-defined customer target.

John Leavitt, Senior Industrial Designer atIntelligent Product Solutions, joins Timothy Keirnan for a conversation about industrial design, using two firefighting products as a starting point. Besides the two case studies, we talk about general design process and philosophies, methods, education recommendations, and our ambitions for a world in which UX includes respect for users' privacy and security as a selling point.

00:00 Introduction
03:30 Design Process
08:06 Self Contained Breathing Apparatus case study
19:45 Fire Truck Inventory Feature case study
36:45 How does John recommend people learn industrial design and nurture their careers
40:30 Our dream of UX for any product having a main feature of protecting the user's/customer's privacy and security by default
48:50 John's favorite design resources

Purism is one company that is making privacy and security of both software and hardware a primary selling point of their product designs.

John's employer is at https://intelligentproduct.solutions/

John's contact info is https://www.linkedin.com/in/jleavit/

David and Jo Lau discuss the five phases of customer experience with their 2022 Kia Niro EV (Encounter, Decision, Purchase, Initial use, and Longitudinal use). Vehicle purchases are often a negotiation of two or more people's preferences and needs in domestic situations, and we are delighted to have talked with the Lau family about their customer journey.
The human-machine interfaces (HMI) in the cockpit are the simple and effective designs we're used to seeing from Hyundai-Kia vehicles, and Tim was most impressed with the EV charging indicators on top of the dashboard that face through the windshield: three aqua blue lights convey charge status at a glance, without anyone having to pull out a smart phone. The driving features a tight suspension with enough torque to avoid trouble on the highways. David and Jo share their cost per mile with us as well, which is pleasantly low at current electric rates in their town. Range anxiety is a very real thing but for shorter distances, a BEV is suiting them fine.
The Laus are quite pleased with all customer experience phases except Purchase. Listen for an amusingly exasperating story about a tired old sales technique that was attempted on them, but they successfully resisted!

https://www.kia.com/us/en/niro-ev

Our Mazda Miata car club website is here if you would like to join us!
http://www.realitydistortionfield.com/mimiata/

Larry Rusinsky joins Tim Keirnan for a new kind of episode: critiquing the user experience of food. Because the UX of food is so very subjective based on genetics, culture experiences, individual preferences, and a potential inconsistency of "production" for a particular dish, frozen foods are at least somewhat consistent in their production.
Our critique is of Kroger's house brand Private Selection Artisan Stone Fired Pizza in the Cuban-Inspired Ham & Swiss flavor.
We also ate a "control pizza" to attempt to create a reference point to describe the test pizza and which listers can relate to. The "fixed variable" as our control is a Newman's Own Thin & Crispy Crust Supreme Pizza. This is a nationally distributed brand in the USA.
Larry and Tim found that Private Selection frozen pizza is a very fresh-tasting and interestingly flavored, at least in the Cuban-Inspired Ham & Swiss flavor. Larry says the other flavors are all worth trying. Both of us agreed that the value of these frozen pizzas is very good.
Tim concludes the episode with a brief history of the invention of frozen food.

This article explains the team that "designs" Kroger house brand items (including foods):
https://storebrands.com/crowning-kroger

This article lists some of the author's favorite Kroger house brand foods:
https://www.allrecipes.com/article/kroger-brands-review/

Yousef Hegazi joins the show to help Tim Keirnan critique Pine64's PineTab, a low-cost 10-inch tablet that uses Linux as its operating system instead of iOS, Android, or Windows.
Pine64 provides "system on a chip" computing devices that run free and open source software (FOSS) as their operating system and applications. The PineTab follows earlier projects such as the PineBook/PineBook Pro (a laptop), the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro (a smartphone), and the PineTime (a smart watch). Projects are shipped early to a community that can help with development and, at some point, the project will be ready for regular everyday users to buy and enjoy.
Unlike other tablets on the market such as the Apple iPad and the Amazon Fire, the PineTab is not a closed ecosystem that sends information back to its manufacturer about how customers use the device.

NOTE: PINE64's website for ordering the PineTab did mention that the operating system is "a work in progress". Our critique balances our impressions of the device's UX with that admission. At some point, though, the software needs to mature to be useful and usable for regular consumers.

Check out the upcoming PineNote.

Here is the article Tim mentioned that explains how the dominant tablet makers track users' activity on the devices and why. For those not comfortable with such an arrangement, a Linux tablet such as the PineTab may offer hope.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/31/21117217/amazon-kindle-tracking-page-turn-taps-e-reader-privacy-policy-security-whispersync

John Loss joins David Mettler and Tim Keirnan to talk about his book Not Always Homeless, created from ethnographic interviews with local people who were homeless in his area. Its subtitle is "The personal stories of 13 people who survived and escaped a life on the streets". After we discussed how he published his first book at age 80 based on interviews with homeless people in the Niagara Falls area of New York State, we talked about about the 501c3 charity he and some fellow concerned citizens created to help local people without homes build a more stable life for themselves, called Help and Hope for the Homeless. Why and how do people in America become homeless, and what kind of assistance is proven to work successfully long term? John presents compassionate, insightful research and personal anecdotes from helping people in his community.

Not Always Homeless... can be purchased on Amazon.

The Niagara Gazette published this article about John's book and charity.