UX & Growth Podcast

What is the best way to define churn and how should this affect your retention techniques? What are the right and the wrong ways to re-engage users? In this episode, we get serious about understanding what churn actually is, and determining the best tactics to bring users back into an app. Plus, an important announcement from your hosts. "You're always going to have a healthy number of users that churn, whether it be due to something completely unrelated to your product, or something related to your product, but not something that you should be paying attention to. You're not going to be able to please every user." — Austin at 15:25 Episode with Anum Hussain: https://soundcloud.com/ux-and-growth/personas-content-and-growth-marketing-with-anum-hussain-senior-growth-marketer-at-hubspot Email us: Hello@UXandGrowth.com Austin on Twitter: Twitter.com/ustinKnight Geoff on Twitter: Twitter.com/dailydaigle Matt on Twitter: Twitter.com/mattrheault

Is remote work possible in design? How can designers transition to remote work, and what are the pros and cons of doing so? In this episode, we cover the statistics around remote work, the potential pitfalls for companies and employees, the types of individuals that do best with remote work, and why it’s so important for companies to be open to this growing movement. "Aetna has 14,500 out of 35,000 employees that work remote. When they switched to this, they shed 2.7 million square feet of office space, which saved them around $78 million. American Express did the same thing and reported an annual savings of $15 million, just thanks to their remote worker options." — Austin at 24:31 Essay on remote work and creativity: https://austinknight.com/writing/want-better-designer-travel/ Email us: Hello@UXandGrowth.com Austin on Twitter: Twitter.com/ustinKnight Geoff on Twitter: Twitter.com/dailydaigle Matt on Twitter: Twitter.com/mattrheault

What is the relationship between design and conversion? Is one more important than the other? Is it possible to quantify the aesthetics of a design? In this episode, we sit down with Dr. David Darmanin (CEO of Hotjar) to discuss these difficult problems, and ultimately rethink everything we’ve ever known about them. “I think conversion is actually a bad thing to be good at if you want to be an entrepreneur. Because the thing is, an entrepreneur should never be an optimizer. It’s different with design though. I don’t think you can be a successful entrepreneur or build a successful organization without a true appreciation of design. And design, to me, is not pixel design. It’s having that mindset of, if the user has a problem, it’s always our fault.” — Dr. David Darmanin at 8:23 Get Hotjar: www.Hotjar.com Dr. Darmanin's CRO Action Plan: Hotjar.com/action-plan Dr. Darmanin on Twitter: Twitter.com/daviddarmanin Hotjar on Twitter: Twitter.com/hotjar Email us: Hello@UXandGrowth.com Austin on Twitter: Twitter.com/ustinKnight Geoff on Twitter: Twitter.com/dailydaigle Matt on Twitter: Twitter.com/mattrheault

What is delight, beyond the buzzword? How should it really be used and can it be measured? In this episode, we examine how delight fits into the hierarchy of user needs and where it should sit in a product roadmap. "The best way to delight your users is to deliver on the core value that you promised them. Why are they using your product in the first place? If you can't deliver on that in a functional and reliable way, then you aren't delighting them. And you loose every opportunity to delight them." — Matt at 2:25 Thoughts on delight: http://uxmastery.com/formula-delight/ Email us: Hello@UXandGrowth.com Austin on Twitter: Twitter.com/ustinKnight Geoff on Twitter: Twitter.com/dailydaigle Matt on Twitter: Twitter.com/mattrheault

What should you do if your experiments are regularly failing? How can you turn every experiment into a success and scale those benefits across all of your company? In this episode, we talk about the importance of paying less attention to quantitative results and more attention to core learnings, and how experiment results should be documented. "Let's say that you have a modal where you're going to test a newsletter subscription on a blog page. And let's say that adding the modal improves your subscription rate by 1%. Are you learning that adding this modal improves conversion rate by 1% or are you learning that 99% of people on that page don't want the modal?" — Matt at 9:15 Episode with Brian Balfour: http://www.uxandgrowth.com/startup-growth-tactics-w/-brian-balfour Email us: Hello@UXandGrowth.com Austin on Twitter: Twitter.com/ustinKnight Geoff on Twitter: Twitter.com/dailydaigle Matt on Twitter: Twitter.com/mattrheault

What are Technical Debt and Design Debt, and why they so important in the experimental process? What can we do to identify and combat them? In this episode, we discuss the critical experimentation downfall that they don’t mention in the A/B testing handbook. "Having a cohesive and consistent experience is really important in design. So, going through the process of recognizing when your design has gone through a lot of experiments and it's become a different version of itself, and taking those learnings and compiling them back together in a single and cohesive design, is the best way to approach that. But unfortunately, in the iterative mindset, a lot of the time we forget to do that last step." — Austin at 8:11 Design Debt essay: https://austinknight.com/writing/design-debt/ Email us: Hello@UXandGrowth.com Austin on Twitter: Twitter.com/ustinKnight Geoff on Twitter: Twitter.com/dailydaigle Matt on Twitter: Twitter.com/mattrheault

What does it mean to build a strong UX team and when should a company look to do that? With no formal education path, how should designers be cultivating their abilities? In this episode, Austin sits down with Aarron Walter (VP of Design Education at InVision) to discuss what it was like to build the UX Team at MailChimp and what his vision is for the future of education in design. "A lot of times, designers want to refine. They want to change the typeface, adjust the kerning, or tweak the button color. A lot of engineers will see that and think that's self-indulgent. That's another thing that designers really struggle with. And I'll be honest, designers kind of just suck at talking about the value of their work." — Aarron at 29:30 Aarron on Twitter: Twitter.com/aarron Aarron's Website: www.AarronWalter.com Check out InVision: www.InVisionApp.com Email us: Hello@UXandGrowth.com Austin on Twitter: Twitter.com/ustinKnight Geoff on Twitter: Twitter.com/dailydaigle Matt on Twitter: Twitter.com/mattrheault

With the dawn of VR, AR, and IoT, how will things change for designers? What opportunities could lie within these emerging technologies? In this episode, we speculate on the possibilities and implications that the changing technological landscape could bring. "I think that there are a lot of parallels or things that we're doing well in the digital space that aren't being solved in the physical space, with appliances or anything else. But what we're going to find with something like Augmented Reality or Virtual Reality is that we can start merging the two together." — Geoff at 40:36 Google Cardboard: https://vr.google.com/cardboard/index.html An Internet without screens: http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_uglow_an_internet_without_screens_might_look_like_this Virtual science lab: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_bodekaer_this_virtual_lab_will_revolutionize_science_class Email us: Hello@UXandGrowth.com Austin on Twitter: Twitter.com/ustinKnight Geoff on Twitter: Twitter.com/dailydaigle Matt on Twitter: Twitter.com/mattrheault

What are the important qualities that go into design leadership? What can design leaders do to help their teams collaborate and grow? In this episode, we sit down with Tim Merrill (Director of Product Design at HubSpot) to discuss the unexpected intricacies and challenges of leading a design team. "When you're doing design critiques, which are ultra important to growth as a designer, you have to have that kind of trust and understanding that you're both coming from a place of wanting to make things better. Not from a place of ego or trying to show that you know what you're talking about and somebody else doesn't." — Tim at 10:30 Tim on Twitter: Twitter.com/timeril Tim on LinkedIn: LnkedIn.com/in/timmerrill Email us: Hello@UXandGrowth.com Austin on Twitter: Twitter.com/ustinKnight Geoff on Twitter: Twitter.com/dailydaigle Matt on Twitter: Twitter.com/mattrheault

What is Accessibility and why should businesses care about it? How difficult is it to design for disabled audiences? In this episode, we discuss the myths and misconceptions around Accessibility, why it’s so important to incorporate it into products (and the unexpected benefits that come from doing so), and how designers can do that with ease. "When I first really started to work with Accessibility Standards, my initial reaction to it was 'I don't have time for this. Why would I try and add this extra bit of work into my workflow to serve a small demographic? Is it worth the time and energy to do it?'" — Matt at 1:35 Sim Daltonism: https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ Tota11y: http://khan.github.io/tota11y/ W3C Accessibility Evaluation Tools: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/ W3C Accessibility Guidelines: https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/ Section 508: http://section508.gov/ and http://www.usability.gov/ Accessibility Inspector for Mac: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Accessibility/Conceptual/AccessibilityMacOSX/OSXAXTestingApps.html aXe: http://www.deque.com/products/axe/ Web Accessibility Toolbar: https://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/wat/ Email us: Hello@UXandGrowth.com Austin on Twitter: Twitter.com/ustinKnight Geoff on Twitter: Twitter.com/dailydaigle Matt on Twitter: Twitter.com/mattrheault