About UX IRL
👋 Hello, friends!
We're Michelle and Mary Fran – two friends who met through UX and love to geek out about it. UX IRL is a podcast about what UX is like at work and in the world around us. We cover our favorite methods, UX wins/struggles, career, and other UX-y things out in the wild.
We record our podcast live on YouTube and Twitch, so we can chat with you in real time! We hope you can join us on the first Thursday of the month at 5pm PT/8pm ET! If you’re unable to make the livestream, you can always catch up on all major podcast platforms.
--Michelle & Mary Fran
About Mary Fran Goings
Mary Fran is a Senior UX and Product Designer based in Durham, NC with over 8 years of experience. She thrives on finding ways to leverage knowledge from both users and cross-functional teams to design transformative experiences. Facilitating workshops is one of her favorite ways to uncover that knowledge.
In her spare time, Mary Fran enjoys reading, drawing, ballroom dancing, and playing video games.
About Michelle Chin
Michelle is a DesignOps and design systems expert, who’s worn several hats throughout her UX career. Her diverse experiences have equipped her with a toolkit to adapt her design work to various contexts and challenges.
Outside of work, she offers career coaching—helping underrepresented and marginalized community members navigate their careers in tech. Michelle lives in Oakland, California, where she advocates for tree equity in the city.
Our story
We used to host events through our UX meetup - exploreUX. While we loved hosting the events, it was a lot of work. We took a break, but still longed for a way to contribute to and build a community. In 2021, after some thinking, Michelle moving to California, and the pandemic, we figured we'd try a podcast!
In true UX fashion, we’ve iterated our podcast approach and we’re excited to do live recordings so we can engage with our audience more.