Patent Agent Michael Levine joins Timothy Keirnan to discuss the process by which inventors obtain patent protection for their ideas in the United States. What is a patent? How do inventors research to learn whether their idea is truly novel? What are the steps and costs associated with researching and filing for a patent? What about international patent protection? In this 68 minute episode, we’ll learn answers to those questions and hear some anecdotes about fascinating patents Michael has seen in his career as a patent agent.

Michael’s website is
https://www.enterprisepatent.com/

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.

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
* 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)

Just Too Good: The Undefeated 1948 Cleveland Browns by Webster
(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 your marketing email messages or your 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 cases of “user-centered design” we have ever encountered, and Tim owned the first generation. Eric has purchased the long-awaited and much celebrated second generation, and we go into intense detail on these phases of the customer experience:
Encounter (02:44)
Decision (07:21)
Purchase (21:00)
Initial Use (43:00)

We will record a Part 2 episode about Eric’s longitudinal use in February of 2024 so that Eric has a full 12 months of ownership to discuss. 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. 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 subtle 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 at Intelligent 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 means 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 including 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 over the past 12 months.

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 pleasantly taught suspension with enough torque to avoid trouble on the highways. David and Jo share their cost per mile with us as well, which is impressively low at current electric rates in their town. Range anxiety is a very real thing but for shorter distances in-state, this 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!

Finally, as tangentially mentioned during the episode, visit our Michigan Mazda Miata car club website if you would like to join us at a dinner meeting or driving event. 🙂

Larry Rusinsky joins Tim Keirnan for a new kind of Products for People episode: critiquing the user experience of a food. The UX of food is extremely subjective based on genetics, cultural background, individual preferences, age, and a potential inconsistency of “production” of a particular food. To make this episode applicable to more than just the two of us, we critiqued a frozen food because that is at least somewhat consistent in its mass production.
Our critique is of the Kroger house brand Private Selection’s Artisan Stone Fired Pizza in the Cuban-Inspired Ham & Swiss flavor. (Note: this podcast does not use affiliate links to earn money).
We also tasted a “reference pizza” to create a reference point to describe the test pizza and which you listeners can buy if your area has these. For this critique, the “experimental control” is a Newman’s Own Thin & Crispy Crust Supreme Pizza. Newman’s Own is a nationally distributed brand in the USA, not exclusive to the Kroger grocery chain.
We both found that the Private Selection frozen pizza is fresh-tasting and delicious, although the crust was unremarkable. Larry says the other Private Selection flavors are similarly excellent. The value of this frozen pizza (its taste and amount relative to its cost) is also impressive.
We conclude the episode with a brief discussion of the invention of frozen food. In our profession, the word “innovation” is dramatically over-used, but frozen food truly was innovative, and continues to be in our opinion.

We did not discuss the relative environmental impacts, positive or negative, of frozen food, which would require balancing nutrition and time savings against resources used for making and transporting it versus cooking it from scratch at home or buying fresh at a local restaurant. We’ll do that in a future frozen food critique when we’re better prepared not to embarrass ourselves.

This article explains the team that “designs” Kroger house brand items including foods.

This article lists some of its author’s favorite Kroger house brand foods, with Private Selection frozen pizzas making an appearance twice with highly positive opinions.