In this episode of The UX Consultants Lounge, Kyle talks with Lisa Dance, a UX researcher, consultant, author, and community advocate based in Richmond, Virginia. Lisa is the founder of ServiceEase, creator of the UX Census RVA, author of Today Is the Perfect Day to Improve Customer Experiences, and a regular UX voice on Richmond’s business radio scene.

Lisa brings a thoughtful, refreshing perspective on what it means to practice UX in a complex and shifting industry. She has built her career around improving hard to use systems, elevating customer experience, and helping her local community understand what UX actually is and why it matters.

What you will learn in this episode

• How ServiceEase came to life:
  Lisa describes starting her consultancy in 2011 and moving between in-house and freelance work, highlighting flexibility as the key to her career path.
• Improving customer experiences through storytelling:
  Lisa shares that her book grew out of everyday frustrations with overly complicated tasks and uses illustrated stories to show how widespread bad customer experiences are, especially when technology makes them worse.
• Sharing UX with the broader public:
  Through UX Happens in RVA, Lisa explains UX to business audiences in plain language. She talks about pitching the segment and using news stories, including the Amazon FTC case, to help non-tech listeners understand UX.
• The future of UX and the rise of AI:
  Kyle and Lisa explore concerns about AI and how companies use it to hide deeper problems. They also reflect on industry layoffs, declining focus on user needs in big tech, and the continued importance of UX in smaller mission driven organizations.
• Marketing yourself as a consultant:
  Lisa reflects on the difficulty of staying visible as a shy solopreneur and shares a key insight: the real competition is not other consultants, but companies that take no action at all.
• Specializing or staying generalist:
  Lisa and Kyle discuss how to approach specialization, what it means to be T shaped, and why consultants need to help clients see that UX skills translate across industries.

Connect with Us:

• Host: Kyle Soucy | Usable Interface | Linkedin
• Guest: Lisa Dance | ServiceEase | Linkedin

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Links and Resources Mentioned:

• Today is the Perfect Day to Improve Customer Experiences! by Lisa Dance
• UX Happens in RVA
• UX Census (RVA)
• The Product Picnic (Pavel Samsonov’s Newsletter)

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I can’t wait to have you back in the lounge for our next episode!