Hotline Design

New episode from the vault - the co-hosts welcome a very special guest, a friend of industry, and a master of strategic career pivots - Mr. Phil Sayer! Episode highlights include: ✨ Pinpointing your purpose at work 🧠 Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivations 🎓 The value of continuous learning

This week, the co-hosts talk all about the exciting world of digital banks. We go back in time to talk about their fairly recent histories and breakdown their innovative mobile banking UIs to see what we can learn from these digital disrupters.

With the end of 2022 fast approaching (I know), we are also wrapping up the end of season 2 of Hotline Design Pod.  Tune in to hear about the ups and downs of season 2 and of course, everything we learnt from it as well. 

In this week's episode, we discuss what we've learnt from Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans - the phenomenal book that has shaped the lives of both design and non-design folks in significant ways. By applying core principles in design - re-framing, identifying pain points and prototyping - to your life, Bill and Dave believe that anyone can design a purposeful life in line with th...

The product and UX worlds are full of frameworks and methodologies designed to ensure we keep our users at the forefronts of our minds.  But sometimes who they are doesn't matter as much as what they use our product for. In this episode, we explore how each feature and product has is 'employed' by our users to do a job for us, and how this framework can help us design more useful products.&nb...

Its been a long time coming, so we could not be more excited to welcome this week’s guest and LunchClub legend, Adam Tillner-Smith! He talks the cohost’s through the bustling world of B2B FinTech and rocking it as a design team of 1.

This week, we're back with Part 2 of our user testing series - focussing on unmoderated user testing. Rejoice - because it triumphs moderated user testing in some ways when you don't have to "play calendar tetris", can launch tests on a weekend and get answers back quickly, and consequently can test with many more users! Keep listening to find out the team's best tips for tools to use and post-tes...

Depending on the organisation we're part of, designers either have the luxury of running user testing all the time, or the curse of having to convince our organisations the value it can bring.  Either way, this episode aims to offer a few tips and tricks, so you can confidently run moderated user testing sessions, in any environment. 

We could not be more excited to welcome this week’s guest and literal sister of the pod, Andrea Karrys. She's an experimental product manager, a blazered-up baddie and business school lassie. Andrea talks the cohosts through the fantastic world of NFTs and experimental product management, all while inspiring us to wear more sundresses in 2022!

This week, the cohosts discuss two cherished artefacts - personas and archetypes. We talk about the pros and cons of each form of user representation and unpack how can they help inform your designs. We also weigh in on the debate about which artefact reigns supreme!

Whilst it's almost the end of March, this episode was recorded mid-January when some of the 'New Year' chat was more appropriate. Regardless, it is not almost the start of Q2 of 2022, so hopefully these tips help you with your Q1 review and onwards planning.  In this week's episode, Lauren, YuXin and Lavinia chat about their goals, their approaches to setting them and some tips on how to make...

This week on Hotline Design, we have the pleasure of welcoming the phenomenal Rachita and Rebecca of Sisterhood School + Studio, whose mission is to bring design education to the 21st century by using creativity as the vehicle for social change to positively impact girls and their futures. They share their journey of starting Sisterhood, from bonding together at design school to testing...

And we're back with Part 2 of our user journeys series - this time with a focus on e-commerce checkout journeys. In this episode, the cohosts zero in on how to give users the best possible experiences in paying and ending the journey in a flash. The cohosts also draw on their own personal experiences of great (and less than great) checkout experiences. Healthy dose of boujee chat featured!

It's a new year and a new milestone, episode 30! This week, we're tackling onboarding journeys and ensuring they deliver value. We've all been there, clicking 'skip' on 10 modals or closing a boring video attempting to explain the product to us. In this episode, the cohosts are offering their experience and tips on how to make them successful. 

This week the co-hosts are joined by fantastic friend of the pod and design lead extraordinaire, Kelly Kornet Weber from Coeuraj in Canada! She's breaking down the collaborative design process and explaining the exciting world of participatory futurism, all while telling us how to spot the winning contestant on Survivor!

This week, the cohosts share the ups, downs and everything in-between of the day-to-day of being a designer in today’s workforce. We share top tips on structuring your day, writing a solid to-do list and why no agenda means no attenda.

The term designops has been floating around for a while now. Defined by the Nielsen Norman Group as the 'orchestration and optimisation of people, processes, and craft in order to amplify design’s value and impact at scale', the co-hosts discuss what this means for teams in terms of how they work together, how they accomplish the work they need to do, and how to amplify the impact of their work. P...

"Am I senior yet?" - a question just as philosophical as... "To be or not to be?". Jokes aside, the industry is rapidly changing and we don't yet have clear career structures between organisations. While they can be mapped against each other within tech giants, if you're working for a smaller company, a start-up, an agency or a consultancy, things can get confusing fast. In this week's episode, th...

Whiteboard design challenges - an exciting, and at times, intimidating staple in the UX interview. This week the cohosts break down the top tips for acing your take home or live whiteboard challenge, all while brining in with pearls of wisdom from Artiom Dashinsky’ fantastic book Solving Product Design Exercises. The cohosts are also bamboozled by the word 'vehemently', but will they endure? Tune...

This week we tackle Part 2 of how to articulating your design decisions, continuing with our discussion of how to communicate with your stakeholders, keep your sanity, and deliver the best possible user experiences! We focus on top tips for productive conversations with your team and how to follow up to reinforce your design decisions. Many thanks to Tom Greever for his book, Articulating Design D...

...And we’re back! We’ve had a heck of a summer and are ready to kickstart Season 2 of the Hotline Design Pod! Join us as we continue sharing our exciting experiences, top tips and pearls of wisdom. This season you can look forward to episodes about communicating design decisions, tackling whiteboarding challenges and generally navigating the fantastic worlds of UX and product design! Special than...

Join us this week in the studio for a very special episode - and the last of our first season - where we reflect on our learnings from 22 episodes of Hotline Design Pod so far on a live retrospective session. Thank you to all of our guests, first-time callers and long-time listeners - we’ll be back in the autumn! Special thanks to @matt_beadnall for the music and to Stephen Brown for all our inter...

Do you crave speed, collaboration, innovation and action? In this week's episode, the cohosts get off the treadmill and onto the mic to explore design sprints, the ultimate fast-paced, agile approach to product design.

Wisdom comes with age, but so can degeneration across the senses. Aging is an inevitable part of life, no matter how much botox we use. Given we’re all aging, how can we ensure we are making design decisions that are inclusive and accessible to older users? The trio shares their tips for gallant and glamorous geriatric design in this week’s episode. Special thanks to @matt_beadnall for the music a...

Join the cohosts this week as they talk to a long time friend and first time guest, Mr. Dan Foster. From the safety of corporate life to an exciting departure into freelancing and co-creating the fantastic immersive murder mystery experience start-up, Session Mysteries , Dan shares his experiences as an entrepreneur extraordinaire. Special thanks to @matt_beadnall for the music and too our Hotline...