Brave UX with Brendan Jarvis 🇺🇦

Matthew Holloway shares what it was like to lead SAP’s design thinking transformation, why designers need to get their house in order first, and the importance of purposeful rest. Highlights include: ⭐ What was it like working with Don Norman at Apple? ⭐ Does design maturity start with designers’ maturity? ⭐ Why can’t you impose design culture over night? ⭐ How can design leaders get a seat at...

Bill Albert reflects on what it takes to run effective UX research, why evaluating more than usability is important, and how UX leaders can unlock better budgets. Highlights include: ⭐ Are UX leaders who aren’t quantifying UX derelict in their duties? ⭐ Why is UX sometimes the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff? ⭐ How can UX leaders secure enough budget to enable UX research? ⭐ Should UX res...

Daniel Rosenberg speaks frankly about executive design leadership, why he’s trying to take the field back to first principles, and how the sun is setting on design as we know it. Highlights include: ⭐ Which Jedi would Don Norman say is most like you? ⭐ How did your first presentation to Larry Ellison at Oracle go? ⭐ Why is design education being overly intuitive a problem? ⭐ What is Semantic I...

Jason Buhle discusses what’s important when moving from academia to industry, UX research as a career path, and why usability research matters. Highlights include: ⭐ Why is Neil Gaiman’s Sandman your LinkedIn banner image? ⭐ What did you learn when you moved from academic research to UX research? ⭐ Have you hired someone for a UXR role from a UX bootcamp background? ⭐ Why is there less rigorou...

Becky Priebe shares what it’s like to design at the edges of technology, the role of systems thinking in design, and design’s relationship with engineering. Highlights include: ⭐ What drew you to practice design at the edges of technology? ⭐ Are we getting better or worse at shaping technology for humans? ⭐ What does giving equal value to design and engineering look like? ⭐ Why is it important...

Aditi Sharma openly discusses being woman of colour in banking, how she’s building a diverse and inclusive design culture, and why she’s used design to dismantle injustices. Highlights include: ⭐ Do you carry the weight of patriarchally imposed stigma on your shoulders? ⭐ Was it personally risky to help bring female condoms to women in India? ⭐ Is it fair to characterise the banking industry as...

Christian Crumlish blows up some myths that product and UX people believe about each other and shares his insight into how designers can find themselves ‘at the table’ more often.  Highlights include: ⭐ Do you consider yourself to be UX person or a product person? ⭐ Are UXers simply clueless when it comes to product management? ⭐ Are product managers just beancounters in disguise?  ⭐ Where doe...

Susan Weinschenk shares a deeply personal account of why she’s a behavioural scientist, the role of ethics in design, and how deciding her self-story helped her while battling cancer. Highlights include: ⭐ How critical is skepticism for making effective design decisions? ⭐ Why hasn’t ethics always been part of the big tech design conversation? ⭐ How do you help people to become comfortable with...

Michaela Mora discusses the challenges of categorising race, why homogenous leadership is bad for businesses, and what UX researchers could learn from market research. Highlights include: ⭐ Why do we care about and continue to categorise race? ⭐ How does knowing things like race and gender lead to better products? ⭐ What is the most important decision a researcher can make?  ⭐ How does the hom...

Katie Swindler shares her insights into designing for the human stress response, agency vs. in-house work-life balance, and how the NASA space suits came to be. Highlights include: ⭐ How has your experience in theatre management served you in design? ⭐ What does good design feedback look like? ⭐ What is the story of the design of the NASA space suits? ⭐ Why is it important for our products to...

Sarah Doody gives her assessment of UX education, shares how she’s helping UXers to have brave career conversations, and what it’s really like being a creative entrepreneur. Highlights include: ⭐ Is the lack of standards in UX education a good thing? ⭐ How do you help people to have brave career conversations? ⭐ Does having a strong vision blind you from our customers’ needs? ⭐ How do we help...

David Dylan Thomas shares practical ways of making design more inclusive, reassures us that other people can’t read our minds, and suggests a fresh approach to tackling systemic harms. Highlights include: ⭐ What is the Illusion of Transparency? ⭐ How do we rise above our biases in design? ⭐ What is an assumption audit and how does it work? ⭐ How do we change bad behaviour without cancelling pe...

Janelle Estes shares the importance of executive leadership staying connected to customers, and what the best design leaders are doing to successfully scale design research. Highlights include: ⭐ What do UX researchers need to let go of? ⭐ How can researchers navigate pushback against qualitative research? ⭐ What are the best companies doing to run UX research at scale? ⭐ How important is it f...

Benny Zuffolini bravely breaks down how she's navigating enterprise as a neurodiverse design leader, and shares a formative realisation from facilitating her first design sprint.  Highlights include: ⭐ Should people treat you differently when they find out that you’re autistic? ⭐ Why don’t you wish you were diagnosed as being neurodiverse earlier? ⭐ How important is it for people to tell each o...

Amy Jiménez Márquez shares her story from designer to design leader, what it was like to design Alexa’s personality, and what’s important when leading people in tough times.  Highlights include: ⭐ How did you navigate the move into design management?  ⭐ Can leaders afford to be outwardly less than their best during hard times? ⭐ What was it like meeting Captain Jean Luke Picard (Sir Patrick Ste...

Amy Bucher and Geoff Alday unpack how they’re integrating their behavioural and product design practices, the ethical considerations of applying behavioural design to AI, and how designers can apply the COM-B model to change user behaviour. Highlights include: ⭐ How is designing for behaviour change different to other forms of design? ⭐ What are the ethics governing your AI-infused product desig...

Debbie Levitt pulls no punches as she dismantles bizarre UX job descriptions, over-promising UX boot camps, and UX practices that she believes are unknowingly sabotaging the discipline. Highlights include: ⭐ Is the practice of UX at odds with the process of Agile? ⭐ How do you grow appreciation for UX without evangelising? ⭐ What important things are students not getting from most UX bootcamps?...

Natalie Hanson encourages design leaders to play the long-game, challenges designers to be less myopic, and shares the struggle of stepping back from work to focus on her health. Highlights include: ⭐ Why is it important for design leaders to be patient and persistent? ⭐ How do you tell someone they’re not ready for what they’ve asked for? ⭐ Should other people in our organisations care about u...

This is a special archived episode of Brave UX. Lada Gorlenko speaks about high-stress research environments, how to effectively engage wth senior executives, and where great enterprise UXers come from. Highlights include: ⭐️ How do you help your team to let go of perfectionism? ⭐️ Is enterprise UX boring compared to consumer UX? ⭐️ What did you learn studying murderers and drug offenders? ⭐️...

Sam Ladner explores the tension inherent in mixed methods research, why people get so emotional about identity, and the importance of interpretive flexibility in tech.  Highlights include: ⭐ How do the statues on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) illustrate other ways of knowing? ⭐ What two philosophical positions are at odds in mixed-methods research? ⭐ How can researchers become more comfortable engag...

Laura Kalbag calls on businesses using people’s data for profit to examine the ethics of that model, and talks practical inclusive design and digital accessibility. Highlights include: ⭐ How are accessibility and inclusive design different? ⭐ What does the inaccessible state of the web say about technologists? ⭐ What’s wrong with companies profiting from our behavioural data? ⭐ Why have you go...

Surya Vanka brings his hallmark energy to this conversation about the power of design, the challenges the field faces, and how he’s using Design Swarms to ignite creativity. Highlights include: ⭐ Why is your mission, “to unleash the design thinker in every person”? ⭐ How is the democratisation of design helping and hurting the field? ⭐ What can seasoned designers learn from design’s growth? ⭐...

Trip O’Dell discusses the secret advantages of neurodiversity in design teams, and why it’s an essential ingredient for healthy, effective, and progressive design cultures. Highlights include: ⭐ Why do you feel connected to Captain Kirk? ⭐ What do we lose when we pressure our children to conform? ⭐ How important is language in normalising neurodiversity? ⭐ What role did accessibility play in A...

William Ntim shares the story of his journey from Ghana to America, why he’s so focused on mastering time, and what he believes is holding designers back. Highlights include: ⭐ What can we learn from Ernest Hemingway’s approach to life? ⭐ Why do people find soft skills so hard to master? ⭐ How did losing your job change your professional mindset? ⭐ Is it important for designers to love what th...

Darren Hood challenges us to learn the history of UX, to beware of snake-oil when assessing training options, and to revisit our thinking on imposter syndrome. Highlights include: ⭐ How are UX bootcamps and courses impacting the field? ⭐ Why is it important to know the history of UX? ⭐ What’s driving people to declare imposter syndrome? ⭐ Is the popularisation of UX enabling better design prac...