UX Podcast

Episode 294 is a linkshow. Per and James discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – we feature articles about designing the perfect button, and how sitemaps are an essential tool in web design.

We often find ourselves in stressful situations. Sometimes that’s expected, but sometimes it’s not.  The same can be said about the things we design. Sometimes we knowingly design for stressful situations, but sometimes our designs are used (unexpectedly to us) by people while under stress. Katie Swindler, Author of Life and Death Design joins us...

What is product management? And “product”? And product designers? We talk to Christian Crumlish, author of Product Management for UX People to learn more about how designers can collaboration and contribute in a product organisation.

Lifts and elevators are things that we love to talk about in UX circles. Every elevator panel is capable of being the starting point for a user experience conversation. In this classic UX Podcast interview, we talk to Reetta Ranne and Jussi Hiltunen who, at the time of recording, were senior UX design specialists at...

Web3 is a term that’s getting a lot of attention, along with associated concepts such as blockchain, crypto, NFTs. There are a lot of concepts and phrases to understand, some of them quite technical, before we can get to the question of what benefits they can deliver. Laura Kalbag joins us to help us gain...

Diagrams are everywhere and used by many people in many professions. But what is a diagram? When are they useful? And what makes a good one? Information architect and author of “How To Make Sense of Any Mess” Abby Covert joins us to talk about diagrams and diagramming – which is the topic of her...

Episode 288 is a linkshow. Per and James discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – we feature articles about the problems with, and the alternatives to, the term “users” plus the surprisingly complex world of emojis.

Joe’s first book “Ends”, back in 2017 was focused on why we don’t do endings, and how that links into consumerism. Joe’s second book, “Endineering” is about how to actively design endings, a ‘how-to’ book for improving how products, services and consumer relationships end.

We get a reintroduction to information architecture with Donna Spencer. Donna shares with us some of the methods and tools she teaches as part of her workshops as well as look at some of the challenges that information projects can throw at you.

Why don’t we just brainstorm that? Brainstorming as a tool for ideation has a number of drawbacks, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be useful. Design leader and leadership coach Christopher McCann joins us to discuss how we can improve our innovation processes, and hold better and more inclusive creative sessions.

Episode 284 is a linkshow. Per and James discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – we feature articles about additive bias and the current state of mobile UX.

Your own vital signs are your heart rate, temperature, breathing and blood pressure. These are used to help get an idea of your health, and give a “heads-up” that something is not as performing as it should be. Google has come up with its own set of web vitals to give you an idea of...

Carolyn Wilson-Nash together with Julie Tinson, both from Stirling University, published a research paper entitled ‘I am the master of my fate’: digital technology paradoxes and the coping strategies of older consumers. Carolyn joins us to talk more about her research and the impact technology has on older people’s lives.

We often think of trauma as something that individuals go through, but organisations can experience trauma too. Vivianne Castillo was part of producing a research-based report that reveals the ways that organisations respond to trauma. The report also puts forward a suggestion of how organisations can handling healing better.

Mass democratisation and access to AB test tooling has meant that hundreds of millions of experiments have been run on people, via digital products and services. Although we are not running pharmaceutical trials and tests, these experiments still raise numerous ethical issues that are shared with research or experiments in a medical scenarios. Craig Sullivan...

For a number of years Steve Portigal has been collecting user research war stories. The stories describe experiences researchers have had whilst doing fieldwork. Awkward, morally challenging, painful, unsuccessful.

Episode 278 is a linkshow. Per and James discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – we feature articles about the era of design system in Russia and a status report on the toxicity in digital design.

As the covid pandemic struck and upended her art school project, Nathalie Nahai showed tremendous foresight when reflecting on the societal upheaval and its implications for sustainable business practice. In her newly released book, Business Unusual, she collects and elucidates important wisdom about how to ready your work for the unavoidable changes in consumer values,...

We talk to Denise Jacobs about how to banish our inner critic and remove the mental blocks that get in the way of creative thinking. We also talked about how you can improve focus and get your brain into a state where you can access creative ideas best.

Virtual reality has had its big breakthrough in the gaming world, but what applications for this technology are there in helping the wellbeing of people who are ill? Almira Osmanovic Thunström is a Business Developer and Doctoral Researcher at Sahlgrenska University Hospital. She has spent years conducting research within the fields of AI and VR...

Episode 274 is a linkshow. Per and James discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – we feature articles about how designers should be aware of data privacy and laws, plus how causal loop diagrams are a useful tool for understanding.

“All humans are fully human, with many ways of being in the world”. Rather than study the process or solution, we should be studying humans. Indi Young, author of mental models and practical empathy, joins us to talk “purpose”.

We talk to Krystal Higgins, author of Better Onboarding, about what onboarding actually is, how to recognise it needs improvement, and what kind improvements might work.

Episode 271 is a slightly different linkshow based around a tweet and article by Stephen Anderson, and two related articles, discussing arcs, loops and terrain in the context of service design.

People will abuse our products and use them for harm. It’s not an “if”. People utilise the products we help make to hurt others, to control, abuse, and stalk people in their lives. Eva PenzeyMoog joins us to talk about how we can design for safety, prevent harm before it happens, and helping survivors of...

In this classic UX Podcast interview, we talk to Amber Case, author, researcher, designer and, at the time we talked to her, cyborg anthropologist. We chat about the ideas expressed in Amber’s popular TED talk “We are all cyborgs now” before turning our attention to the notion of calm technology.

Brad Frost joins us to talk about the nitty gritty of collaborating to create and manage design systems. We look back at the journey from responsive design to atomic design to design systems, and discuss the challenges with developing design systems and how important collaboration and culture are in order to succeed.

Are we all just putting on a show? A few years ago, Tanya Snook coined the phrase UX Theatre to describe when we are just acting like we’re doing user-centred design rather than actually doing it.

From this summer, target size is going to become something we hear much more about. In this topic show, we look into what it is, what it means, why we’re going to start hearing more about it, and how this will impact design work (and design discussions).

Back in 2015 we were lucky enough to meet up with Whitney Hess during her summer vacation in Sweden. In this classic episode we talk to Whitney about her journey from “producer of wireframes” to coaching UX-ers.

In the second part of our 10th anniversary interview with Don Norman, we discuss externalities, the environmental aspects of design, ethics, systems and changing design education.

In this 10th anniversary 2-part special, we are joined by Don Norman. We talk to Don about how design education needs to change so the designers of the future are better equipped to work at the crossroads of business, technology, people, society and culture.

We are joined by Kate Rutter, Kim Goodwin and Pamela Pavliscak to explore why tools, often software tools, are on everyone’s mind and how this may or may not preparing us for the demands of design in the future.

Scott Berkun joins us to talk about how design makes the world. Everything in your life has been designed by someone, and this insight is a powerful way to understand the world, and everything that happens in it.

Episode 260 is a linkshow. Per and James discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – we feature articles about information architecture and following the principles that our brains expect from physical experiences, plus smart questions you should ask during job interviews.

We are joined by Rishma Hansil to look at Japanese design culture and how this impacts digital design in Japan. Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Rishma has been living and working in Tokyo for the past 4 years.

We talk Closure experiences with Joe Macleod. The lack of endings was something that Joe kept noticing again and again. There are so many examples in the digital space where there wasn’t an end, or there was an expectation of controlled or ability to end – but the possibility of closure just doesn’t exist. The...

Old research can give new insights. Ben Kraal publishes a newsletter called “1992”. In it he takes research papers from 1992 and looks them from a modern-day perspective.

Episode 256 is a linkshow. Per and James discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – We discuss dealing with shared and public touch screens plus the trend of publishing content as newsletters.

Do you trust brands? What created that trust and how is it maintained? We look at designing for trust together with content strategist Margot Bloomstein, author of Trustworthy. How does brand personality impact the user experience and how it influences our design decisions and content strategies.

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.