Jon: Welcome to Episode 136 of The Digital Life, a show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I'm your host, Jon Follett, and with me is founder and co-host, Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Hello, Jon.

Jon: Dirk, are you ready for our last episode of the year?

Dirk: Of course.

Jon: In this episode we're going to talk about some of the big themes that we encountered on the podcast in 2015 as we wrap up the year and consider all of the great topics and guests that we got to experience. I wanted to start off with one of the big themes that I noticed. By the way, I went through all the episodes and all the guests and all the transcripts, and it was interesting because we don’t really … We start off the year with a general sense of where we're going, but we don’t have an editorial map that’s established out more than, say, a couple of weeks in advance. I actually learned a lot about what the things were that we were focusing on because some major themes emerged that I was aware of but just not cognizant of just how important they were. The first one we're going to start off with was 2015 enterprise UX became a bigger deal.

Dirk: Enterprise UX madness.

Jon: Yes. It became a bigger deal than it was. It's still not enough of a big deal, because enterprise UX has a long way to go and just there's so much enterprise software from having just one user to a thousand users to ten thousand users. There's so much specialty software that it will be a long time before enterprise UX approximates what we have on the consumer side. Nonetheless, that was a topic that we spoke of quite a bit.

In Episode 104, we had the pleasure of Kelly Goto joining us for that episode, and she was fresh from the Enterprise UX Conference put on by Rosenfeld Media. She talked a little bit about how she was incorporating user experience research into just working with the enterprise in general and about how that’s a culture shift for a lot of these big organizations that are focused on doing one thing very well, but usually that thing is not user experience.

That’s how we started out on this theme. Then a few episodes later in 113 we talked to your friend Suzanne Livingston who is over at IBM working with their social software division. She's a product manager there. IBM is really responding to the bring-your-own device trend and the consumerization of the enterprise. It's notable, when IBM is starting to pay attention to user experience and the consumerization of all this, you know that there's a lot of money to be made there. Then our third episode that falls under this theme was Episode 127 that I did recently with Uday Gajendar, who was —

Dirk: Ga-jen-dar.

Jon: Ga-jen-dar. I apologize, Uday. Anyway, we had a good chat about the wicked craft of designing for the enterprise. As you can see, there's three notable shows that were focused on different aspects, whether it's the research side of things, the social side of things, or, in Uday's case, designing the software specifically for enterprise users. Of course, Uday did some of that work here at Involution in previous years. I thought it was a great arc for the year. Listeners, incidentally, we'll be collecting each of these themes into a playlist on our SoundCloud instantiation, so you'll be able to see the main themes and revisit them with us if you care to. Dirk, you’ve been in enterprise user experience for a decade plus.

Dirk: Yeah.

Jon: Are you surprised that people are paying attention to this, that there are conferences now that people care about enterprise UX?

Dirk: As usual, Jon, I'm just surprised it took so long. Yeah, I've been working in enterprise UX for a quite a long time now, and it's critically important. You have people using enterprise software. A number of the softwares that I've worked on, they are software that certain operators are using eight hours a day every single day. When the interface is garbage, when it's hard to use,