Michael Fienen and Aaron Hill are the hosts of the Drunken UX podcast, an “irreverent” show where they drink and talk about building and using things on the internet. After a recent Drunken UX feature on StrategyCar, this crossover episode gets to the core of what Drunken UX is all about.
Read Further
Drunken UX episode 10: “Little Red StrategyCar”
Transcript
[PRE-ROLL]
ALAINA WIENS: I’m recording. Are you recording?
AARON HILL: I’m recording.
MICHAEL FIENEN: I’m recording.
ALAINA: Everybody’s recording.
AARON: I’m recording!
MICHAEL: Is everybody recording?
AARON: I’m recording. [clapping]
MICHAEL: Is that how this works?
ALAINA: Yeah.
[THEME MUSIC]
ALAINA: This is StrategyCar, the show that’s a road trip to a better web. I’m Alaina Wiens and today we’re doing something a little bit different. We’re going to call this crossover episode with our friends at the Drunken UX podcast. Today we’ve got Michael Fienen and we’ve got Aaron Hill. Um, I’m going to tell you a little bit about who they are and then we’re going to get started the way that they usually get started and find out what everybody’s drinking. So we’ve got Michael Fienen who is a web developer who also majored in theater because why wouldn’t you. I wish I would have. He’s worked on small sites, big sites, and now he works on sites that help other web folks find jobs. He wrote a book on DotCMS. He speaks at events all over the world and he likes helping people be better at the web. Aaron Hill is a Ruby on Rails developer. He majored in chemistry, which he just added to the notes because we can’t talk about Fienen’s college without talking about Aaron’s college. He also was in higher ed webdev for about a decade. He’s a project lead at Ruby for Good and he’s given riveting presentations on internet memes at PSU Elements in 2017. That was like one of the first PSU events that I wasn’t at and I missed your presentation.
AARON: I’m sad that you missed.
ALAINA: I was really sad because I remember you talking about building it for so long. You’re going to have to like send me the notes on that one of these days.
AARON: Sure.
ALAINA: Um, another side note on Aaron Hill is that he’s really, really good at Secret Santa gifts.
[laughter]
AARON: That was such–that was so awesome. Your coworker was a saint in all of that. It was great.
MICHAEL: So, wait. Alaina and I have both gotten presents from Aaron?
AARON: Oh, that’s right, I sent you one too!
MICHAEL: Yeah. I got the art.
AARON: The um–I totally forgot about it. Yeah, art and the Nick Offerman book.
MICHAEL: Yeah.
AARON: Right on.
ALAINA: I got cookies. I think I win. But like–
AARON: But they weren’t, they weren’t just cookies, though.
ALAINA: No. No. So–
AARON: They were from your favorite cookie place.
ALAINA: Yeah, so when I worked on campus there, was a pizza place in like the food court that had these really good chocolate chip cookies. And if you got there the right time they were warm. And, I don’t know, I must have gone on about these worm cookies at some point because of course I did. And he not only got me the cookies, he got me an entire pizza box filled with the cookies, and they were delivered warm. I don’t even know how you do that from however many states away. I’m in Michigan.
AARON: I had to call them. I had to call them and pay over the phone and I got your coworker to go over and pick them up and deliver them.
ALAINA: Yeah, so–
AARON: It was great.
ALAINA: –A-plus to you.
[laughter]
ALAINA: OK, so what are you guys drinking?
MICHAEL: I’m a sipping on some Oban 14. It’s a Highland single malt scotch because that’s how we do.
ALAINA: That’s real fancy.
AARON: Fienen’s scotch selection is just an incredible.
MICHAEL: I am not unknown for the amount of scotch I have in my house and, yeah, I have a scotch for every night of the week and for every mood of the month.
AARON: I’ve got a–I’m celebrating the return of warm weather in Upstate New York with a Tanqueray and tonic. It’s a family drink. When my aunt passed away last year, her dying wish was for everyone at her wake to enjoy a gin and tonic. So here’s for you, Aunt Lou.
ALAINA: Yeah. Cheers to that.
MICHAEL: Alaina calls this a crossover episode, but what she doesn’t realize is we’re really just going to take over for half an hour.
ALAINA: I think that’s great. Less work for me. Before you take over my show I’ll let you know that I’m drinking another rosé because it’s also summer here and that’s all I do right now.
AARON: Is this from your, from your delivery thing?
ALAINA: No, this isn’t wine club. This is just a bottle that was on sale at the grocery store and I was fooled by clever marketing. It’s like on sale from a really expensive price. I don’t think it was ever that price. I just don’t think it’s really that good. It’s very acidic. And now that I’m looking in this glass I see little bits of dirt because I took it outside with me when I was pulling weeds.
AARON: Whoops.
ALAINA: Suburbia.
MICHAEL: That’s called–
AARON: Hashtag suburbia.
MICHAEL: That’s called fiber.
ALAINA: I’m going to go ahead and drink this anyway.
[TRANSITION MUSIC]
ALAINA: Alright, well since this is going to be your guys’ show, the first question I’ve got for you and I’m going to let you go is: What is the Drunken UX podcast, and like how did it become a thing? Also why did it become a thing?
AARON: I think, I think Michael should answer this one.
MICHAEL: The “why” on that is the question everybody has. So, I actually started Drunken UX several several years ago and it started with sort of a vague idea of doing a YouTube series where I would get drunk and do like a live-stream test of a site, mostly for my own amusement but hopefully for others. We got a preview episode out the door before I was like, the technology is just not there yet. Webcams weren’t very good yet. It was hard to record a screen and yourself and do all this. And also I didn’t want to kill myself. I realized for it to be funny I had to drink a lot and I didn’t want to drink that much that frequently. So, I kind of shelved the idea and I, but I had the account. I had a Twitter account for it I’d kind of set all that up. And every once in a while, like Drunken UX would be sort of the alternate persona of myself if I was sitting at a computer doing something and drinking. And so he would be the guy who comes out and rants and, you know, yells stuff. Towards the end of last year, we started talking and I was talking with some other folks about wanting to get back into something. I wrote at a website called dot eduGuru for several years where we talked about web marketing, web development in higher education. I love producing, I love creating things, and I have not had opportunity to do that lately. And so the idea sort of came out that was, you know, “why don’t you do just a podcast version of the YouTube deal?” And I thought about it and, like, well that doesn’t–you know, it’s neat, but it doesn’t translate real well because there’s a highly visual component to that. But, [I] could do just a podcast. And I got to talking to this guy on the other microphone here about it.
AARON: [whispering] That’s me.
MICHAEL: And this idea of, you know, Drunken UX is ultimately about our listeners’ experience with us. We are the drunk ones. We drink. We talk about web stuff. We have, you know, some fun doing it. It’s a very loose-format kind of show. There are a lot of folks like, you know, Syntax and ShopTalk and these guys that, you know, they’re all doing great shows that are very highbrow in terms of, like, what they, what they tackle and the technology stuff and the tools. That, that’s filled. Like that area I think is well-covered. We’re more like just the general talk-show version. Not quite Jerry Springer, but definitely a little Maury Povich.
ALAINA: You might be close.
AARON: [laughs]
MICHAEL: So, that’s that’s–
AARON: We have the test results. Your website: bad UX.
MICHAEL: We started, we started in January. We launched the show. We’ve got two segments now, the main Drunken UX podcast segment and then I do a weekly realtime overview segment that’s just a news roundup kind of thing it takes 10 minutes. It’s just a quick little thing. We’re also talking about a couple other possibilities that may get mixed in there soon.
AARON: Should we mentioned it?
MICHAEL: I’m not going to mention it ’til I actually have an episode done and know that it’s going to happen.
AARON: Okay.
MICHAEL: But there are a couple ideas that we are going to maybe be adding to that, so…
AARON: The one we talked about is going to happen. I talked with the person.
MICHAEL: Okay. Yeah. And I think that one’s a definite. There’s–I think we are definitely good on one of the ideas, so…
AARON: Yeah.
ALAINA: This feels really vague, but exciting? Question mark?
AARON: [laughs]
MICHAEL: It’s, it’s designed to keep people listening.
AARON: [laughing] It should be pretty cool. I don’t want–I’m with Michael. I don’t want to talk about the thing before we have it so…
MICHAEL: I think you’ll see–
AARON: Just dangle that that out there.
MICHAEL: You should–we’ll probably have an announcement about it probably next month.
AARON: Yeah.
ALAINA: Okay, well, in the meantime, if we’re going to still talk about the show as it exists, Aaron, what…? What…? I’m trying not to say, “What were you thinking?” but what, what were you thinking in a good way when you got approached about this idea? Like what’s in it for you? Why do you do what you do?
AARON: Oh I, I–It combines two of my favorite things, like, being snarky and drinking, like that’s–[laughs] Oh, and I guess technology, too.
ALAINA: I was going to say, “like the internet?”
AARON: Yeah. No. Michael and I have, we’ve never actually met in person, but we’ve known each other for almost seven years now. And, uh–
MICHAEL: Twitter.
AARON: –And he was, yeah, Twitter and Facebook. Miraculous. But he was floating that idea and I was like, “Oh that sounds like fun. Like I would be down with that.” I think the biggest challenge we’ve had so far is keeping up with transcripts. The first like four or five episodes, like, you know, we would each grind out a day of like listening to the podcast and then fixing the machine-transcribed version. But we’ve gotten very behind on that. So, apologies.
ALAINA: It’s, it’s really hard.
AARON: And coming up with topics is, is tricky, too. Sometimes they just kind of like pop out. But Other times they’re trickier.
ALAINA: But overall, it’s UX, right? Like assessing UX, talking about UX, like…?
AARON: I think that, well, I mean UX is sort of at the core of everything that where a user is going to interact with. We don’t talk about, we haven’t, at least, talked specifically about things where the user is not an element, you know, like deep dives into server stuff or anything. We tend to focus on stuff where users are interacting with things and so the UX is always going to be a component of that.
MICHAEL: I will admit–
ALAINA: So can you talk to me a little bit…? I was just going to say–say what you’re going to say, but also, like, tell me what UX means to you. Because for whoever’s listening they might not know.
MICHAEL: What I’ll throw out there is I admit readily that our nomenclature for the show is a little misleading because we aren’t strictly a UX podcast.
AARON: In our defense, though, we’re drunk.
MICHAEL: We are drunk, and people have an experience with us. So that’s kind of where, where I go with that and I admit that I’m kind of crowbar-ing, you know, that idea a little bit into something that I already had because I like the name I think the moniker worked well and I wanted to run with it. And we’ll cover, you know, we have a scratch pad of ideas and it’s going to run the list from, you know, talking about how you implement Google Tag Manager to, you know, what the future of GDPR compliance looks like to web security and things like that. And we’ve got several interviews that are stacking up well into July at this point that, you know, those conversations will take on their own shape. But the user, I think, is always central to these discussions because whether that user is the developer who is using those build tools or the user of a website, you know, we–if you go back and listen to some of our prior episodes like the restaurant episode and things like that–
AARON: I would suggest that one. That was a good one.
MICHAEL: –Yeah, you know it is very central to making designers and developers think about the things that users expect from these tools and stepping back and stepping away. You know, my career has been built behind a screen, but I would not be where I am and be as good at what I do if I didn’t understand how important the people are, whether that’s the people I work with, the people that I serve, or the people that use the things I build. And so user experience is a thing. It is a thing we have, and we get that. And it’s grown out of, you know, other user-centered design concepts that aren’t digital. You know, when you look at, like, Alan Cooper’s books and things like that. That idea is it’s a philosophy, really. I mean that’s what it comes down to and that’s, that’s kind of how we approach it. We aren’t trying–I’m not a UX expert. I don’t claim to be, and I don’t want people to think I am. Aaron doesn’t look like a UX expert.
AARON: I don’t.
MICHAEL: So, you know, I do think–
AARON: Wait, what does a UX expert look like?
MICHAEL: Um, you need more beard and less hair. I’m getting there. But–
AARON: Okay, okay.
MICHAEL: I still have a little too much hair on top.
AARON: Yeah, I don’t–I have the opposite of that.
MICHAEL: But we, as an industry, you know, we’ve kind of, we’ve started defining these areas–UI, UX–and subcategories within those things and that’s great. But it’s okay to look at this very broadly and just sort of acknowledge that users are a thing and that’s kind of where we float. Like I say, very–you know, our approach is very casual. And I think there are a lot of web developers that benefit from not having that sort of hyper-focused look at the field.
AARON: Yeah, I don’t know if you’re looking for, like, an academic discussion of UX topics. Like that’s not what our podcast is.
ALAINA: No, not at all. Really, I wanted to know what it means to you. Because, I mean, it can be so many things and the way that it goes with the other segments of what the web is… I mean, it’s all–All the lines are blurring.
AARON: Well, I think that we offer good value in the content that we produce whether or not it’s by the book, so to speak.
MICHAEL: Well, I want to–I think I want to encourage people, too, to think about: One thing that I get really tired of, and I see this with developers a lot, but I’m starting to see it in other parts of our field, particularly in the user experience realm. If you follow, you know, enough of, like, UIE and Jared Spool and those guys, Don Norman, his stuff, and many of the other, you know, the firms and people out there that are trying to make names for themselves. There’s a growing amount of infighting. And there’s a lot of argument happening, not discussion, but just argument happening over, you know, base components of user experience and what user experience means and what users want and expect or what a persona is supposed to look like or what, you know, what a conversion should be measured as. And people seem to think that there are absolute rights and wrongs to these questions and there just aren’t. There are only users and experiences and this understanding that what may work for you doesn’t work for other places. And it has to do with how you implement stuff, how you build stuff, who you talk to, how you self-select. There are a million factors that come into play with that stuff and it’s not about getting something right or wrong. It’s about do you learn things, and do you adjust accordingly based on that? And do you learn those things absent as much prejudice and bias as you can? Don’t hold people’s hands towards a goal. Let them figure it out and then draw, you know, your hypothesis out of that. And that’s something I think, you know–and we’ve already done it. It’s okay for people to make a mistake or to say something wrong. That’s not a big deal.
AARON: I think that’s something we’ve covered in a bunch of the episodes including the restaurants one and that’s that, you know, whatever–or the e-commerce one, too, or rather being a topic there, whatever. There’s no absolutes here. Well, I mean, maybe there are a couple of absolutes, but broadly speaking, though, the correct UX decision is the one that’s correct for your audience, for your website or web application, or mobile app or whatever, you know, storefront. It’s whatever–if you have all, if your audience is all older people, for example, like elderly people, maybe signing up for something that elderly people like… I don’t know. [laughs]
MICHAEL: I don’t know, pencils and doilies?
AARON: Sure. [laughs] But if it’s all, if it’s a specific demographic then the traditional, like the broad spectrum UX principles may–they may do okay, but they’re not going to be as good as something that’s more targeted for that demographic specifically. And the only way to know that it’s working is to do audience research and then to do like metrics that you can measure and then actually see what works. And I think the process of finding a suitable UX for your audience is doing good UX and I don’t think it’s necessarily like a bullet-list of like, “I did all these things, I have a good UX.” Like I don’t think it’s that simple. I think you really have to do the legwork and have a good process.
ALAINA: So with all of that said, if you’re looking at it as more of a philosophy and there’s not like a one right-way to do it, do you think there’s anything consistently that people should keep in mind as they’re approaching these kinds of decisions and design choices and projects? Like how do you approach a new project or approach a new product wanting to do your best to make sure that the UX is what it should be? Are there questions you should keep in mind or things that you should consider?
AARON: Well, I think that the right–I don’t think that it’s not that there’s one right way to do it. I think that the right way to do it is to research your audience and then build it, like, with empathy for their experience. But I would say that what that is, there’s no one right way for that. Because audiences are different, and you should know who yours is.
MICHAEL: And you should always be talking to these people and testing them even if you’re at, you know, a small organization or maybe you’re the only web person, you know, working at a company of 20 people or something like that. If you can sit down, you know, even once or twice a year with, you know, five or 10 people and just talk to them, you know, talk through them, you don’t need a whole user experience testing lab and eye tracking and all of this stuff to do usability testing. A usability test can be as simple as sitting down with a box of pizza and asking how folks feel about your website. What was the last thing you tried to do? What, you know, frustrated you? What would you like to see us doing better or more of or things like that? You know, this stuff scales really well and the outcomes– you know, you’re not striving for perfection you’re just striving for better. And whether that means, you know, whether you make clay pipes or sell movie tickets or whatever the case may be. I just, I tweeted earlier today as a matter of fact at Hilton. I was scheduling a hotel room for a conference and I had to walk away and come back.
AARON: Oh, I saw that.
MICHAEL: And my thing expired because, you know, room availability changes so they expired after so long but it forces me as the user to go all the way back through the whole process as opposed to saying, “Here’s what you searched for. Would you like to update that search? Click the button…” And so I tweeted at them and said, “Hey, this kind of sucks. You might think about it.” And they sent a thing back and they’re like, “Yeah, we’re going, we’ll send this on to our brand managers or something they called them.
AARON: [laughing] Nice.
MICHAEL: It didn’t feel like the right people, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. But you know the tools are easy. You know Google Analytics is free, just learn how to use it. Measure. Adjust. Be looking for ways to improve because nothing stays still. Tools change, people change. You know, we think about, we do a redesign and the site is new and fresh and hip and cool and now people know how to use everything and it all works well. But when you do a redesign, the experience is designed for people seeing it for the first time, not the people seeing it a year from now who are now used to it. And so the experience changes as a result. And so you need to be talking to those people throughout that process so that as your users mature, as your design matures, you’re making small little adjustments to adapt to the way that people are changing on how they use your site. So there’s, you know, there’s a lot of this stuff in play but you don’t need to be big, you don’t have to have expensive tools or any of that, you can just start with that basic question of, “What works? What doesn’t work?”
AARON: Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” is a reference that we mentioned frequently on our show and I think that if you haven’t had a chance to read that book it’s a really easy read and it’s great and it covers a lot of the fundamentals. And he has a whole chapter about doing UX testing on a shoestring budget, like literally tens of dollars instead of, you know, thousands. And you can get–what’d he say?–like 85 percent or something of the issues addressed with like five people if you can get five people to do usability testing with your site, you can get like 80 or 85 percent of the issues. And he has data to back this up. I don’t have it handy, but I highly recommend that book for anyone who works with anything that that a user interacts with. It’s just, it’s good, good stuff.
MICHAEL: I’ll namedrop one particular tool just so folks are aware of it because it is relatively new. Google Optimize is out now. That gives you AB testing free. Drop it on your site and start changing stuff and you can measure. You tie the measurement of tests to events or goals in your Google Analytics and let it do the work for you. So do you think one word works better than another word? Do a 50/50 AB test, let it run for a week. See what happens.
AARON: What was that–You mentioned, it was in the e-commerce episode, it was that the one button. And how much money did it make the company? They changed the button text or something?
MICHAEL: Like the 3-million-dollar button?
AARON: Yeah, that’s what it was.
ALAINA: I want one of those.
[laughter]
AARON: It’s like the easy button, but it makes you money.
ALAINA: Want.
MICHAEL: Or, I’m sorry, it was the 300-million-dollar button.
AARON: Yes.
ALAINA: I’ll take one of those, too.
MICHAEL: Yeah, that was that article, UIE put it out. I don’t think they named the company that this was for, but I have to imagine it was Amazon or Walmart. I mean 300 million dollars is a ton of revenue and there’s only a few folks that are pushing that. But yeah, they made, it was, like it was a change to the language on the button. They changed the wording on the button and were able to increase–it was incredibly modest, like sub 1 percent or something conversion-rate bump, but I mean it’s one of those things. It’s that–
AARON: At that scale, though.
MICHAEL: –Yeah, it’s the economies of scale type thing. It’s like that JavaScript argument that, was it BuzzFeed brought up, when they found out that 13 million users didn’t have JavaScript running. Super tiny percentage of their overall traffic., but it’s still 13 million users so…
AARON: Yeah.
MICHAEL: Yeah, scale is a funny thing in the web.
ALAINA: So, what have you learned since you started this show?
AARON: Transcripts take forever.
MICHAEL: He’s not wrong. Good ones especially. You know I’ve learned–I’ve forgotten, I’ve got a background in radio and I’ve done audio production for a while and it’s been a long time, though. And it’s one thing, if anybody is thinking about doing a podcast just as a, in a general sense, it does take a lot of time. It takes a crap-ton of time and effort to market it and get it in front of people and do it well. But I think, on a more basic sense, like it’s–this show has made me a better developer because I’m constantly now thinking about, you know, whether it’s the topics that we’re working on for shows or even the Real-time Overview has increased how much attention I pay to web news tenfold.
AARON: Yeah.
MICHAEL: I’m constantly now just in conversation with my co-workers dropping articles that turn out to be relevant to something that we’re talking about because I’m going through all of these articles to see which ones we’re going to feature for Real-time Overview. And it reminds me, I’ve slipped a little. I don’t read as much as I used to and that’s, you know, not to my benefit. But I enjoy the hell out of that. And there’s so much to learn that doesn’t take a lot of time. And I think that’s really incredibly important. I think it’s one reason why Real-time Overview, when we launched that segment, short 10-minute segment, takes me 30 minutes to put it together, that is–that immediately spiked our listeners and we get really consistent good numbers especially like on launch day for it. And I think there is a lot of interest in that sort of–give us just some information real fast and let us, you know, bite down on it and we’ll go, you know, click through on the link if we want to. And, you know, that teaching aspect and keeping folks in the loop, you know it’s important. It’s important to talk to the peers and folks that you work with and folks that look up to you to make sure– You know, we, I share some really basic articles on that, about like how to write CSS better. And I know that, you know, nobody that I know that I work with would benefit from that. But I want them to hear that and then share that with, you know, an 18-year-old cousin that’s looking at getting into college and wants to do graphic design because those people still need that information. They still need to learn that.
AARON: I think that–We did a whole episode about, you know, how we got started and then how also other new people could get into the biz. And I really think that in this community specifically, like mentorship is a really awesome thing. And it happens a lot. And I think it can always happen more.
ALAINA: The next question I have for you is: What’s next for you guys? But based on the earlier conversation you feel like you’re not going to tell me.
[laughter]
AARON: We have a couple ideas.
MICHAEL: Yeah, we’ve got a couple ideas. We’ve mentioned we have one segment that is almost definite that people can look for next, but we’ll do an announcement about it and all that. There’s a second segment that’s kind of getting kicked around, it’s in a much less-baked state. So I don’t know, you know, how soon that may be coming or if it will land. We are looking, though, at doing–I’ve got, I will be at the Web Accessibility Summit airing, well, next week from when we’re recording this. I don’t know, by the time this airs, this probably will have come and gone, but I’ll be at Web Accessibility Summit and then I’ll be at the An Event Apart in Boston this June. And so we’ll be recording remotely at both of those locations, talking to folks, maybe do a live show. So that will be, I think, real neat. I’ve got a whole kit. I’ve put together a kit for it.
AARON: Oh, he’s got this amazing little recorder. It’s like James Bond technology. It’s in the palm of your hand, but it does like digital recording 4- track. It’s awesome. I want one. [laughs]
MICHAEL: That’s the hope, though. You know, I certainly want more listeners. I think I want more feedback and want more, more everything. I don’t expect to make a living on it, but I’m sure as hell having fun doing it. So I want other people to have fun with us.
AARON: I had a boss at IU East, John Dalton. He used to say content is a hungry beast, and I think that for this show, like, just constantly looking for new ways to generate content and, you know, new formats, new topics, whatever.
ALAINA: Like crossover episodes.
MICHAEL: Crossover episodes, yeah.
AARON: Yeah. [laughs] Having guests on the show has been awesome. That’s been a delightful experience.
MICHAEL: That has been kind of a new thing for us. Jeff Chandler was our first guest and that was, I mean, that was last month. So I mean, we’re not talking about, you know, recently here. Or no. We are, I mean we are talking about recently here. But, you know, that we’ve kind of gone to this idea of let’s have–We do two shows a month. Let’s have one of those shows include a guest and it very much changes the dynamic of the show a little bit and gives us, you know. another brain. Because as, you know, as we’ve stated, you know, we know what we know, but we are by no means authoritative across the board or anything like that. So this, you know, being able to pull in these other folks who will come in and talk with us is great fun, especially when they come on and drink with us. Folks like you.
AARON: Yeah. That’s great. [laughs]
ALAINA: So, If people want to find you, Where do they find you? I’m going to interject first and say if they’re going to start listening to your show for the first time, they should start with episode… 10?
MICHAEL: Yep, episode 10.
AARON: Episode 10 was our best episode ever.
ALAINA? What was the name of that episode?
AARON: We had this awesome guest.
MICHAEL: That’s “Little Red StrategyCar.” I don’t, I have no idea why but I’ve done this thing where I’m doing like music puns as our titles.
ALAINA: It made me so happy and I didn’t even realize it was a music current first. It just–Once in a while I’ll use that little red emoji car.
MICHAEL: Ha ha.
AARON: [laughs] Oh! Right.
ALAINA: And I was like, “They knew about the emoji that I’ve called my own.
AARON: We could pretend it was that.
MICHAEL: I mean, yes. Yes, that’s exactly–
AARON: That’s exactly what it was.
MICHEAL: Totally–
AARON: That was what we picked for it.
MICHAEL: Totally planned it out.
ALAINA: Did you know that on Instagram now you can use emojis in hashtags?
MICHAEL: I barely understand Instagram. I have an account now so I’m figuring it out.
ALAINA: I was messing around yesterday, and I did “hashtag” and I made a little goat. And it came up with the other results! You can click it!
AARON: I think I heard you can use emoji in domain names now, can’t you?
ALAINA: No, I don’t want that to be true.
MICHAEL: I don’t–
AARON: I know you can use them. Aaron Patterson, at a Rails conf, he demo’d you can use emoji in Rails routes. He showed one with the heart emoji.
ALAINA: How do you feel about that?
AARON: Uh. Eh.
ALAINA: Meh.
AARON: Eh.
MICHAEL: Your scientists did–or what’s that’s the line? Your scientists were so interested in if they could they didn’t stop to think if they should
ALAINA: If they should.
AARON: Yeah, that’s about right.
MICHAEL: No, folks can jump into the podcast anywhere, though. You know everything is episodic, nothing is serialized or anything like that. Well I shouldn’t say that. We do have a higher ed, a two-part higher ed episode, but that’s–
AARON: We do. We do a lot of callbacks, too, but that should just incentivize you to listen to the other episodes. [laughs]
MICHAEL: Real-time Overview’s every, every week. Drunken UX is every other Monday. So, if you’re just looking for us, you can run by our website, DrunkenUX.com. We’re on Facebook and Twitter, same thing, Drunken UX.
AARON: Oh, and Slack.
MICHAEL: Slack, yeah, if you go to DrunkenUX.com/slack we’re there. We’re on Google Play, iTunes. I think we’re on Spotify.
AARON: Are we?
MICHAEL: I think we’re on Podcastr or whatever it’s called. Podcast Hub. We’re a lot of places. There’s an RSS feed. There’s, you know, whatever you need there, so yeah. Definitely swing by and click the little buttons and–
AARON: I miss RSS.
ALAINA: You miss it? Did it go away?
AARON: It’s not as nearly as popular as it used to be, or widely used or widely consumed.
MICHAEL: I still use it.
ALAINA: Sorry I didn’t mean to derail.
ALAINA: You can still use it if you want to.
AARON: [sighs]
[TRANSITION MUSIC]
ALAINA: Alright guys, well that’s all I’ve got for you. Do you have anything else for me?
MICHAEL: Um, thanks.
ALAINA: Thank you!
MICHAEL: We appreciate you taking the time to have us on and letting us chit chat with you and shamelessly plug our own show a little bit and–
AARON: [whispers] Shameless.
MICHAEL: –It’s a good time. Have fun, everybody. We hope you enjoyed it. Let us know. Tweet us @DrunkenUX.
ALAINA: @DrunkenUX.
AARON: And hashtag StrategyCar.
MICHAEL: Oh, yeah.
ALAINA: Yeah. This has been StrategyCar. Well, you can get future episodes of StrategyCar wherever you get your podcasts. And in the meantime, you can add to the conversation any time at StrategyCar.com.
ALAINA: Boom.
MICHAEL: Ding.
[OUTRO MUSIC]
[POST-ROLL]
ALAINA: Okay, I’m going to like do an intro thing. If it ends up sounding not great I’ll re-record it later, but we’ll like do the general thing.
[growling sound]
ALAINA: And Fienen will make a noise like that? Was that Fienen?
[growling sound]
MICHAEL: That’s all Aaron. Don’t look at me. I really.
AARON: [laughs]
ALAINA: I didn’t have your video on! [laughs]
AARON: [growling]
ALAINA: We’ll do that stuff. Yup. And then–[laughing] Here, I’m going to pull this in a separate window so I can see your faces because now I don’t trust you.
AARON: Faces.