Scott Weiss’ career in user experience has its origins in the late 1980s, when he served an internship at Apple in the days of System 6 and 7. He went on to write one of the reference books on mobile user experience, ‘Handheld Usability’. Today he leads product design for the language learning app Babel. He’s seen the evolution of experience-led design from a wide range of angles, including founding his own New York-based design agency, working client-side for successful start-ups like Swiftkey and managing the complexities of Symbian’s UI Council. He talks to MEX founder Marek Pawlowski about the interests which have driven his career, future skills for user experience designers and the lessons he continues to learn as he builds expanding design teams. Get in touch with feedback and questions @mexfeed on Twitter or email designtalk@mobileuserexperience.com.

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On this edition

• Marek Pawlowski, podcast host & founder, MEX (@marekpawlowski)
• Scott Weiss, Vice President of Product Design, Babbel (@sdweiss)

Links

• Our next MEX dining club events are in Barcelona on 26th February (alongside Mobile World Congress) and in London on 26th March. Get in touch if you’d like an invite – it’s a relaxed dinner talking about experience design with fellow pioneers.
• Schedule+, which evolved into Outlook 97, an example of the products Scott worked on at Microsoft in the early 90s.
• Apple System 6 and 7, which were the company’s major software platforms while Scott was working there as an intern.
• A 2010 interview in which Scott talks to All About Symbian regarding the Symbian Foundation’s UI Council. Bonus: a PDF we found sharing some of the details of how Symbian was evolving the UI framework.
• Swiftkey, the predictive keyboard Scott worked on, which was subsequently acquired by Microsoft in 2016
• Swiftkey poetry, as shown in this Reddit thread
• A MEX talk by Ben Medlock, co-founder of Swiftkey
• Handheld Usability, Scott’s 2002 book on mobile user experience

About MEX Design Talk & how to get in touch

The podcast for the MEX community, interviewing UX pioneers, exploring emerging technologies, user behaviour and how to design better digital experiences.

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Thanks

• Jukedeck, for the artificial intelligence engine which provided the music