UX Podcast

Cyd Harrell has done all kinds of user research. At the beginning of this episode Cyd tells us of the time she live streamed a user interview from a vehicle while the participant was using a mobile device whilst driving. There are times where a user researcher really does need to be fearless.

“Voting in American is hard. There are far more steps than people realise” said Dana Chisnell. We talk to Dana about democracy as a design problem. We look at how the design of civic engagement impacts on both registration and participation and how that impact varies for burdened and privileged voters.

Organisational culture – or values – is our design medium rather than pixels or code. Kim Goodwin joins us on the back of her UXLx 2018 talk “Values are the experience” to discuss how we can enable organisations to make the decisions that allow great UX to happen.

By and large our focus in recent times has been on websites and apps, but increasingly we are going to be asked to design things in physical contexts; terminals, IoT devices, lifts. We talk to Kevin Cannon about ergonomics and UX design – The meeting point of traditional UX and industrial design.

Episode 190 is a link show. James and Per discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention.

Namrata Mehta is a design researcher and innovation consultant, focused on bringing user-centered approaches to public service delivery in emerging economy contexts. We talk to Namrata about the challenges of working with UX within the context of a country with vast social inequality.

Lifts and elevators are things that we love to talk about in UX circles. Every lift seems able to become the starting point for a user experience conversation. To answer all the questions we have about elevators we talk to Reetta Ranne and Jussi Hiltunen who are senior UX design specialists at KONE in Finland.

Jobs to be done is a tool that comes up regularly in UX circles. But exactly what is it? We talk to Tony Ulwick, author of Jobs to be Done: Theory to practice. The framework helps to break down the job that customers want to get done into discrete steps, then help develop ways to...

In the summer of 2016, Boon Sheridan started noticing people gathering outside his home, staring at their phones. Pokemon Go had launched and Boon’s converted church was a Gym. This was Boon’s introduction to the game and how it made use of Augmented Reality.

Kellee Santiago said that when making Journey they wanted to “make a game that creates a renewed sense of faith in humanity”. They wanted to make a game that was inclusive and was appealing to people who perhaps didn’t normally play video games.

“If it sounds like I am saying that design is not a profession, then yes – that is exactly what I am saying. We are not. Without a code of ethics and a body to enforce it, we’re barely even a trade. Maybe less – most trades have accreditation or at least licensing.” Zoe Rose joins...

“When I first joined the workforce, I was unprepared for how much of my work would be dependent upon the success or failure within meetings”. Kevin Hoffman has been both fascinated and frustrated by meetings throughout his career. Meetings are part of your job, like it or not.

Episode 182 is a link show. James and Per discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention.

“Product strategy is a product of product vision” says Richard Banfield. In this show Richard shares his thoughts on product strategy, the sharing of language and culture within a team, the importance of psychological safe space, product team challenges, distributed teams, and the value of making mistakes.

What frustrates people when using mobile sites? Lina Hansson is a conversion specialist at Google. Recently Google has tested almost 500 websites in retail, travel and finance verticals across Europe, the Middle East and Africa on mobile. Lina talk to us about what they discovered and what we can do make mobile sites less frustrating...

“NPS is the KFC of satisfaction scores – it’s everywhere and not good for you”. Jared Spool isn’t a fan of Net Promoter Scores. They are a poor metric, weirdly calculated and easily gamed. Jared says we need to stop using NPS and pay attention, proper attention to our customers.

Game UX – doing research for video games. It’s a relatively young field, coming to the forefront of the gaming industry during the last 5-10 years. We talk to former psychologist Veronica Zammitto who is now the Director of UX research at gaming giant EA.

On May 25, 2018, GDPR comes into effect throughout the EU. Heather Burns joins us to help us understand the implications.

Episode 176 is a link show. James and Per discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention.

We are constantly simplifying the world around us and the people within it. This is a perfectly understandable reaction to the messy things we have to work with. But with every step back we are building a wall between the user and what it is to be human. We talk to Alastair about human centred...

UX Podcast Panel game. Inspired by the legendary panel game devised by Ian Messiter we bring you a UX Podcast Christmas Special. We try to speak uninterrupted for 60 seconds about a given UX related subject.

Alissa Briggs has mastered design leadership. We talked to her during EuroIA in Stockholm where she had held a presentation entitled Race to the Top: Building Skyscrapers & Design Teams that Soar. In this interview Alissa shares her experiences of – and processes for – running, building and managing a design team.

After over 6 years, UX Podcast is re-branding. Updating or changing your brand doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it impacts everything, including the user experience – but that impact is, in our experience, often overlooked or underplayed. We talk to Jon Bergsman, founder of WDW Creative who have been working with us and our new...

IA, IxD, SEO – all of these and more come under the canopy of UX. “I don’t think any of us can truly call ourselves UX designers, although that’s a very convenient title” said Eric Reiss towards the beginning of our conversation. The environment we work in and the way in which we communicate what...

We need to ask the big hard questions at the beginning of the process so we can make good design decisions later. We talk to Dan Brown about the discovery phase or perhaps as Dan suggests the discovery mindset.

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.

2 years since Tom’s book Articulating Design Decisions was released we catch up with him again and ask what he’s learnt – is there anything he would now do differently? What have readers of the book found challenging?

Episode 167 is a link show. James and Per discuss three articles that have grabbed their attention.

Per recently launched a service called DickPicLocator to highlight not only the bullying and abuse many people face through digital media, but also the amount of data that we are (often unwittingly) sharing.

Donna Lichaw returns to UX Podcast for another chat, this time we focus on how stories could be used when working with Enterprise UX. Donna is the author of The User’s Journey. In the book Donna explains the idea of storymapping. How, when, and why to use narrative structure in your design work.

Through his own tragic experience after the death of his young daughter Rebecca to cancer, Eric Meyer explains to us how the ideal outcome we design for isn’t the only outcome. We need to use our design skills to humanise the web.

Jina Anne joins us to talk design systems. Jina has for a number of years worked as the lead designer with the Lightning Design System at Salesforce and has been working with style guides since 2004. We dive right in and ask what a design system. How do you make sure people stick to the...

Katie Dill, Director of Experience Design at Airbnb, joined us in the Green Room at From Business To Buttons. A journey is both offline and online. It all comes together in the user experience – but what happens when you, as a UX designer, can’t control it all?

Susan and Guthrie Weinschenk work together as The Team W. They like to take behavioural economics, neuroscience and behavioural psychology; combine them, and apply them to design. We chatted to them after the Stockholm leg of their “How to get people to take action” workshop tour.

Episode 160 is a link show. James and Per discuss three articles that have grabbed their attention. Article one is Emojis: Tools for Emotions Communicating affect in text messages by Monica Riordan “Being unbound by linguistic rules, they engage a user in considering the vast potential emojis have in communication.” The second article we discuss is...

We locked Mike Monteiro in a room at From Business To Buttons here in Stockholm and had a chat. “So, do you want to talk about design or politics?” That was the question that Mike posed to the audience at the start of his presentation earlier in the day. So we asked Mike the same....

Jaime Levy, author of UX Strategy joined us in the green room at From Business To Buttons. We talked about Jaime’s Hyperloop study – the personal journey that led her there and why. Andy Warhol, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. We talk about the importance of having mentors and heroes no matter where you are on...

James, Per and Danwei were gathered in Studio Axbom to take questions from you, the listeners, in the 9th UX Podcast Listener phone-in. This is part 2 of the highlights we’ve extracted the 2-hour live session.

James, Per and Danwei were gathered in Studio Axbom to take questions from you, the listeners, in the 9th UX Podcast Listener phone-in. This is part 1 of the highlights we’ve extracted the 2-hour live session.

How are designers tackling the idea of ethics? We start the episode with Alan using politics and democracy as a vehicle for highlighting the importance of ethics in our work as digital practitioners and the massive impact our work has on the world. We are the creators of the channels of misinformation and we can...

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...

Episode 153 is a link show. James and Per discuss three articles that have grabbed their attention.

We take a deep dive into Keyboard shortcuts, or hotkeys in this topic show. We dig into how to decide and design what keyboard shortcuts to have in your web app. What are keyboard shortcuts? Are they the same thing as Accesskeys? What standards and conventions are there to follow? What are shortcut no-nos we...

Dave Gray wants to change the way you think. By changing the way you think you can achieve the change you want says Dave. His latest book Liminal Thinking gives you a set of principles and practices to follow. Liminal Thinking is “the art of creating change by understanding, shaping, and reframing beliefs”. We talk...

Harry Brignull joins us to talk about “dark patterns”. Harry coined the phrase back in 2010 to describe the design patterns used on websites to deliberately trick us into doing something.

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 148 is a link show. James and Per discuss three articles that have grabbed their attention. The first article is Decision Frames: How Cognitive Biases Affect UX Practitioners. Kathryn Whitenton explains how we are all vulnerable to cognitive biases and the way in which we frame our problems can bias our design decisions. Article...

This is part 2 of highlights from our 8th UX Podcast Listener phone-in. On a dark December afternoon James, Per and Danwei gathered in Studio Axbom to chat and take calls from you, the listeners for a 2-hour live show. We discuss living in a VR world, chatbots and suicide prevention, mentoring and getting into...

James, Per and Danwei open the video channels for the 8th UX Podcast Listener phone-in. On a dark December afternoon gathered in Studio Axbom to chat and take calls from you, the listeners. This is part 1 of the highlights we’ve extracted the 2-hour live session. We discuss sketching for unusual environments, working backwards, designing...

Jonas Söderström joins us to talk about complexity. We like to think that we have make the world better through digitalisation, but perhaps all of the productivity gains were actually in the very early days of computing. We hear of the Productivity paradox, the tendency for Feature creep and how we should be pulling down...