The Design Critique podcast celebrates its tenth anniversary! While others have podfaded, we have persevered.
In this anniversary episode, show co-founder Tom Brinck returns to discuss the customer experience of Starbucks coffee shops with Tim Keirnan. Tom is the power user and Tim is the newbie. Two very different perspectives.
This anniversary episode’s album art features a cake with a Star Wars action figure on it, as befits any ten-year-old’s birthday cake. And you must admit it’s cool to have Palpatine himself with us, ready to slice, dice, and fry hypocritically corrupt Jedi. As they well deserved.
Thank-you for listening to us for ten years. And thanks to everyone who appeared on the show with us. Customer Experience research and design is more popular than ever, and if this show has helped you improve your products and services, or helped you acquire really good products that truly improved your life, we have accomplished our goal.
Best regards,
Tim and Tom

Hi everyone, this is a reminder that Internet User Experience is coming back to Ann Arbor, Michigan this June. Also, we have email falling out of the previous episode about the Beluga Razor design.

Visit the IUE2015 website at

http://www.iueconference.com/

Zac Wertz, inventor of the Beluga Razor, joins Tim Keirnan for an interview about the design of both the Beluga Razor prototype and the BelugaShave.com website. Across 80 minutes of uninterrupted, commercial-free conversation, Zac and Tim discuss hardware and digital designs, including
* Their mutual dissatisfaction with modern cartridge razor shave quality, its high cost, and environmental problems
* Their appreciation for traditional safety razor shaving
* Zac’s origin story for inventing the Beluga razor
* How Zac designs mechanical prototypes
* The design of the BelugaShave.com website to reinforce the Beluga brand
* Tim’s experience shaving with the prototype

The Beluga razor combines the advantage of the modern cartridge razor–a pivoting head–with the advantage of the traditional safety razor–its single, double-edged razor blade. Users thus have the low cost, superior effectiveness, and environmental advantages of traditional safety razor shaves without having to learn the fine motor skills needed for using a traditional safety razor.

P.S. You can listen to older shaving-themed episodes:
http://designcritique.net/dc85-critique-sustainable-shaving-tools
http://designcritique.net/dc48-shaving-razor-critiques

Jonathan Tilley, voiceover professional, joins Tim Keirnan for a discussion on how user experience professionals can find freelancing opportunities, either full or part time.

This episode is about designing one’s career instead of designing a digital or hardware experience, and closes with a discussion of how college students could use list building to find an internship or first job.

Jonathan’s websites are:
www.leagueoflistbuilders.com
and
www.jonathantilley.com

Audiophiles take note: As a professional voiceover artist, Jonathan already sounds good. His choice of the Neumann TLM 103 microphone is why his good voice sounds so amazing in this Skype recording with Tim. There is no additional processing on Jonathan’s voice. What you hear is his voice through the proximity effect of a magnificent and expensive-but-worth-it cardiod mic.
https://www.neumann.com/?lang=en&id=current_microphones&cid=tlm103_description

Melissa Smith returns for a special Human Factors News Desk episode that reports on the HFES 2014 annual meeting. If you missed the conference, or if you want to hear about sessions other than the ones you attended and the overal trends and themes she noticed, listen to this half hour with Melissa!

Link to HFES2014 twitter hashtag:https://twitter.com/hashtag/HFES2014

We also read email from listeners Costan (about GPS unit designs) and Reed (about interactive voice response systems).

Dr. Robert Youmans from George Mason University joins Tim Keirnan for a wordcast episode on verbal protocols. Why and how do we ask usability research participants to think aloud about their task performance, and what does using this method do to our data? Dr. Youmans covers four different methods of thinking aloud:
1. Concurrent Verbal Protocol
2. Retrospective Verbal Protocol
3. Interruptive Verbal Protocol
4. Prospective Verbal Protocol

The remainder of the episode covers research on how using concurrent verbal protocol can affect your data. People do not normally think aloud while doing tasks with products, and having them vocalize during user research can change their behavior, but the degree of change may not be a problem for the goals of our studies. Sometimes thinking aloud can improve their performance–which also affects your data. The result is not obvious and the literature is conflicted.