I asked Apala about designing for low-income, low-literacy audiences.

Apala also talks about cultural differences between India and China, and between India and 'the West', about the dangers of being overly-polite, about why foreign insurance companies may not do well in India, and about the use of rasas for measuring emotion.

You can read more about Apala on the Human Factors International website (www.humanfactors.com/about/Apala.asp).

See Wikipedia's entry on Rasas (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasa_%28art%29).

(I referred to Paul Sherman's presentations at User Friendly 2006 in China - Paul's put them online, and there are pointers on his blog - www.usabilityblog.com/blog/archives/2006/11/my_user_friendl.php).

This episode is 20 minutes 43 seconds in duration. File size is 11.8MB.

I asked Alan Cooper (over a rather echoing connection) why he is outraged by bad software, and how he developed the concept of 'personas'.

I was interested to hear the 'father of Visual Basic' say 'What I need is a computer that doesn't make me feel bad and a cellphone that doesn't make me feel stupid'.

Alan's company is Cooper Consulting (www.cooper.com)

The two books of his that I mentioned are:

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity
(www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0672326140/informdesign)

About Face 2.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design
(www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0764526413/informdesign)

This episode is 19 minutes 44 seconds in duration. File size is 11.3MB.

Erin Smith is a Senior Voice User Interface Designer and Usability Specialist with Syntellect (www.syntellect.com).

Incidentally, people in the field use the word "vooey" - this is a pronunciation of VUI (Voice User Interface).

Erin mentioned two books:

"Voice User Interface Design" by Michael Cohen
(www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321185765
/informdesign).

"The Art and Business of Speech Recognition: Creating the Noble Voice" by Blade Kotelly (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321154924/informdesign).

Paul English's "get human" website is www.gethuman.com.

And here's a link to the episode in which I interviewed Donna Maurer on card sorting: http://uxpod.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=126130

Optimal Usability is the New Zealand-based usability firm mentioned (www.optimalusability.co.nz).

This episode is 16 minutes 36 seconds in duration. File size is 9.5MB.

Karen Loasby is the information architecture team leader for the BBC.

I spoke to her about metadata, taxonomy and related topics.

How do you manage metadata issues when you're dealing with millions of pages, and thousands of authors?

Karen referred to two sites during our discussion. The BBC Feed Factory is http://www.bbc.co.uk/feedfactory/ and Etsy is http://www.etsy.com

You might also want to check out Karen's article "Changing Approaches to Metadata at bbc.co.uk: From Chaos to Control and Then Letting Go Again" (http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct-06/loasby.html) and her presentation on "The Growing Pains of a Controlled Vocabulary" for the 2005 IA Summit http://iasummit.org/2005/finalpapers/66_Presentation.ppt (this is in PowerPoint and is around 260kB).

This episode is 18 minutes 20 seconds in duration. File size is 8.6MB.

This podcast contains four short interviews from User Friendly 2006, the UPA China conference in Hangzhou.

UPA is the Usability Professionals' Association.

I spoke to Jason Huang, Giles Colborne, Daniel Szuc and Paul Sherman.

UPA China 's website is www.upachina.org, and you can find links to the conference there.

Giles' company is cxpartners (www.cxpartners.co.uk)

Daniel's company is Apogee (www.apogeehk.com)

Paul maintains the Usability Blog (www.usabilityblog.com/blog/)

Flickr tag for photos from the conference is UF2006 (http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=UF2006).

Users of Hong Kong's public transport system will be familiar with the Octopus card, which I consider to be exemplary in terms of the user experience it offers.

In this brief episode, I talk about some of the things that make it so easy to use.

For information on the training mentioned at the end of the podcast, refer to the Information & Design website (http://www.infodesign.com.au/training/default.asp).

I spoke to Jared Braiterman, from jaredRESEARCH (www.jaredresearch.com). Jared has done ethnographic research many organisations.

I asked him what's meant by ethongraphic research, and how it's applied.

The Mobile China work Jared refers to is avaialble on his site (www.jaredresearch.com/mobilechina).

The book on user research that he mentions is Mike Kuniavsky's Observing the User Experience (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558609237/informdesign) - a book which I coincidentally described on my infodesign.com.au website as "the only 'must-read' book in the field published in 2003".

(References to books on this webiste are links to Amazon.com - we earn a small commission on any purchases you make on following such links).

Elizabeth Rosenweig is principal of Bubble Mountain Consulting (www.bubblemtn.com).

I spoke to her in her capacity as Director of World Usability Day (www.worldusabilityday.org).

Why do we need a World Usability Day, and will it make the world a better place? How can you get involved? Find out from Elizabeth!

I asked John Berenyi of Bergent Research (www.bergent.com.au) why usability people are sometimes disparaging of market researchers. John has some interesting thoughts about about good - and bad - market research.

The book John mentions is Vance Packard's "The Hidden Persuaders". (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0671531492/informdesign). John is correct in his statement that Vance Packard died (in 1996).

There's a reference to Paco Underhill in the podcast. His book "Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping" (www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0684849143/informdesign) is an interesting read.

(References to books on this webiste are links to Amazon.com - we earn a small commission on any purchases you make on following such links).

This short podcast considers the fact that we tend to get dazzled by the 'bling' of new technologies.