I was part of this SpoolCast Crew podcast back in December, and it has finally gone live. In this episode, the crew talks about the joys and pangs of Facebook, who faces many challenges in trying to prove its value as it continues to take over the world.

For those of you unfamiliar with Jared Spool, the founder of User Interface Engineering, well, he’s basically a beacon of light in my profession. He has about 30 years of usability and design research under his belt and is very well respected in the interaction design community. It was an honor to be invited to join the panel.

Enjoy!

Jared offers his insights into getting the most from design deliverables.

Which gives me a good excuse to mention Design Description Documents again, for those not already using them.

Skitch, at first glance, appears even better than Jing. Thanks to Daniel for the tip.

Instead of always asking for donations, Obama’s Resource Library offers tons of useful information on how to take action. And if you’re unclear about his stand on the issues, Obama offers these issues flyers.

And finally, Smashing Magazine put Designing the Obvious in some very good company this week with their post on Usability and Interface Design Books. Thanks for the support, SM!

Design Interviews is an excellent resource for insights into how the interviewees think about design and how they work. Definitely worth a look.

And on that note, here’s my interview!

We talked about Miskeeto, some core tenets to design, key questions to ask to improve a design, why good design can fail, what it takes for a project to be a success, and much more. Thanks to Helen Walker for some great questions!

UIE discusses 8 design mistakes to avoid when creating account sign-in processes.

Then they follow it up with 8 more.

Lovely Charts offers a new way to create wireframes and diagrams online. (Finally, an alternative to Gliffy.)

And The Point offers up a simple way to band together and make change happen.

I’ve been reading Allison Fine’s wonderful book, Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age.

In one section, Fine talks about “the listening deficit” that cripples most organizations, positing that corporations and NPOs alike tend to continually push their own agendas and hope their customers will simply remain quiet and keep giving them money.

When they later realize this isn’t working, for whatever reason, they hire outsiders to figure out who their customers really are and what they need. Instead of listening to their customers, donors, volunteers, employees, fans, and so on in the first place, they pay someone else to do something they could and should have done themselves.

After pondering this rant for a moment, I thought about the User Experience profession. (I could stop there and many of you would probably get the joke, but I’ll finish the thought for those less familiar with the UX world.)

In the UX profession, firms such as Adaptive Path and Cooper are often hired purely to research an organization’s audience so the organization can more effectively design products that meet the audience’s needs. In fact, user research is one of the core tenets of most interaction designers, with few exceptions.

But since the web has given every one of these organization’s audience members an equal voice to praise, complain about, or question these organizations, and it’s the same web that everyone else uses, any organization should be able to hold a real conversation with its audience on its own, with practically no overhead, and yield positive results from it.

In other words, if companies were any good at listening, we wouldn’t need user researchers.

An open conversation changes everything. Instead of paying lip service to customer service, opening up a genuine 2-way conversation with your customers can eliminate the need to hire an outside firm to learn about it for you.

Instead of looking to Cooper to tell you who your customers are, consider checking your inbox. And your blog comments. And your customer complaint database. (I could go on, but I’m sure you have other things to do.)

It’s your company. You should know your customers better than anyone. Why pay someone else to talk to them for you when you can simply start listening to what’s already being said right to your face?