UX Podcast

This is an update to let you know that we have reached the end of Season 3. Have a great summer, and perhaps Per will see you at Camp Digital in Manchester, England, and perhaps James will see you at Web Summer Camp in Opatija, Croatia. 

A conversation with information architects Abby Covert and Andrew Hinton about dealing with digital change and how to make future changes better.

For years, accessibility was seen as the domain of the engineer. Fixing an accessibility would be about writing code. As a maturing industry, and as we understand people with different types of disabilities, we are starting to better understand and appreciate the role of design in accessibility. Accessibility legend Derek Featherstone joins us to talk...

Episode 252 is a linkshow. Per and James discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – We discuss a number of serious issues that the design industry faces plus we take a look at “Stories” and their abundance.

Designing for multiple forms of input and output is no easy task. The dramatic rise in the number of microphones in devices has pushed multimodal design to new levels of complexity. Cheryl Platz joins us to talk about designing in this multimodal world.

Anna and the Gapminder foundation work to promote a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand. They want to help all of us move away from a dramatic worldview that is stressful, wrong and contributes to poor decision-making. “We realised people thought they knew what the world was like around them, but they were usually wrong.”

How will your design be used in 10,000 years? When we produce designs and create technical systems we rarely think in such time-frames, yet many of today’s technology includes ideas decades old, even hundreds. Anthropologist Genevieve Bell joins us to talk about digital anthropology, cyber physical systems, and the new educational needs that have arisen.

“This is about people. It’s about communication”, says Ola. The ways in which organisations are structured and managed are still in many ways rooted in the history of the industrial revolution. To evolve away from this requires care, being human centred and probably a disruptive event on a social level.

Cyd Harrell has been working with civic tech for over a decade, and has accumulated a wealth of knowledge and experience during that time. She’s gathered that experience and knowledge and created a friendly guide for those of us who work, or want to work with technology in the public sector.

Episode 246 is a link show. James and Per discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – We discuss developer experience and even “internal” developer experience plus mobile interface testing and the challenges of multi-device, multi-browser testing generally.

We all have cognitive biases, flaws in our reasoning and judgement due to our personal beliefs and hidden pattens that we’ve subconsciously adopted over time. David Dylan Thomas joins us to discuss cognitive bias and how we can design for it and work with it.

In this topic show dedicated to icons Per and James look at what icons are, why we, as designers, make use of them and what we can do to make them more understandable and accessible.

Form and survey specialist and author Caroline Jarrett joins us on this classic episode of UX Podcast. Unsurprisingly we chat about surveys and forms beginning with the subject’s roots in data capture and motion studies.

What does it mean to understand something? How do we take information and create understanding? We talk to with Stephen Anderson and Karl Fast and do our best to Figure It Out.

Episode 241 is a link show. James and Per discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – this time the articles are about “privacy privilege” and the gulf between other professionals and web development plus how design systems haven’t perhaps delivered on the expectation to improve collaboration.

In this classic UX Podcast interview we talk to Lisa Welchman about our responsibility as designers and creators of digital products, services and information.

Everything is a story. Every product experience is a story. Anna Dahlström, author of Storytelling in design joins us to talk about how we can manage, choreograph and narrate that story.

Tim Kariotis talks to us about privacy. What is privacy? How do we go about embedding privacy into design and understanding the privacy and social norms around information?

Mar Murube joins us to talk about the experience of interviewing vulnerable people during the Covid-19 pandemic and what we can do to help ourselves and those being interviewed.

Episode 236 is a link show. James and Per discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – this time the articles cover why “designisms” are a problem and how to write user research insights.

What makes you anxious when using the internet? We talk to David Swallow about the ways in which websites can make us stressed, irritated and cause serious problems for people with panic and anxiety disorders.

Eva-Lotta Lamm joins us to talk about sketching, visualising and using visualisations for uncovering and exploring problems.

Richard Whitehand has been working hands on with usability testing for decades. He’s spent more hours than anyone we know in a usability lab testing with users. He joins us to talk about the benefits of usability testing, which are more than just discovering issues with your design.

Amy Bucher, author of Engaged – designing for behaviour change, joins us to talk about how psychology can influence the design of digital products.

Designing with words – writing is designing. We talk to Andy Welfle and Michael Metts about how you can go about applying a design methodology to your words.

What is growth marketing? We were curious so we asked Swedish digital marketing expert Sara Öhman to join us and explain what is it and share some of the methods and processes she has in her toolbox.

Six years have passed since Erika Hall published Just Enough Research. Recently she’s released an updated second edition. We took the opportunity to talk to her about her book and research.

Episode 228 is a link show. James and Per discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – this time the articles are: The Aesthetic-Accessibility Paradox and Three Principles for Designing Machine Learning-Powered Products.

In this classic interview from 2015, we talk to Lori Cavallucci and Amy Silvers to learn more about imposter syndrome – what is it and how it effects us. Why does our branch in particular seem to suffer from it? What can we do to deal with it and can it be a good thing...

How is improvisation, or improv as it’s known, be relevant to those of us working with UX? Mike Gorgone joins us for an entertaining look into how it’s useful and how you can practice it.

Nir Eyal joins us to discuss some of the ideas and topics covered in his two books, Hooked and Indistractable.

Jeanne Liedtka, author of multiple books around design thinking and organic growth, was visiting Stockholm and we had the opportunity to talk to her in person about design thinking and the business value of design.

Becki Hyde, Design Practice Lead at Pivotal, joins us to talk about how to make “Magic with Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration”. Collaborating by actually working together and creating a balanced team with design, product Management and developers.

Josh Seiden and Jeff Gothelf have together written the books Lean UX and Sense and Respond. We learn how they used their own methods to develop their second book based on the feedback from their first.

Kim Goodwin, three-time guest on UX Podcast and a person we have huge amounts of respect for joins us at From Business To Buttons to talk about decision systems – Design systems are often a good investment, but do they give the highest rate of return? No says Kim, changing how we make decisions gives...

Episode 220 is a link show. James and Per discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – this time the articles are: version 2 of the Lean UX Canvas, and how a positive user experience could increase conversions.

How do i facilitate someone’s discovery? Stephen Anderson has a passion for learning, teaching and facilitating and helps us in this episode think about how we can help both ourselves and others along their journey as a designer. 

The Feedback loop – it’s not just about giving, but also about asking, receiving and acting on the feedback you’ve been given. Claire Lew joins us to share how we can create a culture of feedback. 

Chris Noessel, UX veteran and many-time UX Podcast guest, joins us at From Business To Buttons to talk about randomness – a broad philosophical topic with a rich history and some interesting applications for creativity and design.

In this classic episode, Nathan Shedroff and Christopher Noessel, authors of Make It So, join us to talk about interaction design lessons from science fiction. For a number of years Nathan and Chris have been collecting and investigating interfaces seen and used in science fiction, that research has now made it into book form.

People worry that machines are going to get too smart. The bigger problem right now is that they aren’t smart enough. Daryl Weir, mathematician and data scientist joins us to talk about machine learning and AI.

Episode 214 is a link show. James and Per discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – this time they’re a research paper about a large scale accessment of dark patterns used on shopping websites, and the story of a health platform roll-out in Denmark.

Lindsey Aitchison, spacesuit designer at NASA, joins us at From Business To Buttons to talk about the challenges and process of designing the equipment astronauts need to wear in order to survive and work in space and other extra-terrestrial environments.

How can we stay up-to-date in a world constantly in flux? Kate Rutter, designer, teacher and co-host of What Is Wrong With UX joins us to talk about how to embrace continious learning and personal growth.

Laura Kalbag, author of Accessibility for Everyone, joins us at From Business To Buttons to talk about accessibility and also disruptive design patterns.

Marc Stickdorn, co-author of This Is Service Design and This Is Service Design doing, joins us at From Business To Buttons to talk about how to get service design truly embedded in organisations.

In April 2019 the Interaction Design Foundation tweeted an article from their archives about rapid prototyping. Attached to the tweet was a short video of someone demonstrating a paper prototype. The response, mainly to the video clip, divided the design world in two. It was either “waste of time!” or “fantastic!”.

Preparing for your next job is like saving for retirement says Jessica Ivins. Start putting yourself out there ahead of time, thinking about what you would like your next job to be and do a little bit to prepare on a regular basis.

We have high expectations for voice interfaces, after all we’ve been talking since birth. It’s natural and nuanced. Ben Sauer joins us to help us navigate the complex world of designing for voice.

The build trap is something many organisations fall into. Building features for the sake of building them. Melissa Perri, author of Escaping the build trap joins us to talk about what organisations and product managers can do to avoid it.