What role should user experience play in your organization? The answer to this question depends very much on who and what you are. Say you’re a bootstrapped startup founded by experts in technical issues and sales. You should try to get free advice and help, or maybe trade some equity for UX design, or perhaps even rely on your own intuition until you can raise some capital. On the other hand, a large software company such as Oracle or Microsoft should make user experience a key focus and investment for every business unit, and have a strong advocate and visionary in the C-suite. Between these extremes lie many different models for deploying user experience appropriately.

In this episode of The Digital Life, we discuss a user experience maturity model and how it relates to the current industry trend of taking UX in house.

China is on the rise, not just in the manufacturing and production of physical goods, but also in the digital realm. If Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Q&A session with students at Tsinghua University in Beijing in Mandarin wasn’t a sign of the times, then certainly the largest tech IPO in history, with Chinese tech giant Alibaba raking in billions of dollars to further fuel the growth of the company, is indicative of the fact that that the digital is China’s fastest developing frontier. In this episode of The Digital Life, we discuss the rise of China, and the unexpected opportunities it may represent for product designers in the West.

Technology is not an end in and of itself. Our job as designers isn’t about the thing we’re creating, but rather about connecting people to themselves, other people, and the world around them in more meaningful ways. In this episode of the Digital Life, we discuss with Charlie Erdman the trends in digital impacting our sense of community and place. Are we really connecting less? Or just differently — broad, but not deep? How does this new understanding impact our work as digital designers? How does it impact consumers of digital products? Join us as we explore these questions, and consider the concept of making technology and our digital and physical spaces more humane.