Rosenfeld Review Podcast

Dan Hill is the director of the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne, and author of Dark Matter and Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary and Designing Missions. And he’s the opening speaker at the inaugural Designing with AI conference, where he’ll be presenting “Designing for the Infrastructures of Everyday Life”.  Like it or not, AI is a growing part of our infrastru...

Jodi Forlizzi has taken an unusual path to get where she is today. With an art degree from the University of Arts in Philadelphia, she began working as a technical illustrator at the University of Pennsylvania. Transitioning into UX design as the internet expanded, she pursued a Master's in Interaction Design at Carnegie Mellon University where she is now a professor. Jodi's work focuses on respon...

In the latest episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Lou sits down with social scientist Tricia Wang, coiner of the term “thick data,” and formerly a partner at  Sudden Compass . Tricia is passionate about research and AI. She envisions massively improved research outcomes and opportunities for researchers, but only if researchers take the lead in incorporating AI into their work. Rather than seeing the...

In the latest episode of the Rosenfeld Review, Lou sits down with Neil Barrie, the co-founder and CEO of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, to delve into the intriguing intersection of brand building, culture, and user experience research. Neil, an outsider in the realm of user research, brings a fresh perspective from the world of brand research; you can hear more from him at the Advancing Research 2024 co...

Author, researcher, speaker, and frequent Rosenfeld Review guest Steve Portigal joins Lou for a chat on the state of the user research industry – where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re headed. If the field of research was once a lonely desert, today it’s a jungle. It was once a field where researchers could get lost and forgotten. Today, the field is teaming with life—so much so that you...

We hear a lot about diversity, equity, and inclusion, but you probably haven’t heard it like this. Nigerian-born Victor Udoewa, service design lead at the Centers for Disease Control's Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology, brings a beautiful perspective that challenges current research methodologies.  Victor introduces the notion of the pluriverse, emphasizing that people inh...

Harry Max is an executive coach, consultant, and hands-on product design and development leader. He’s also the author of the forthcoming Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions. For individuals, teams, and organizations, from managing things, people, places, rules, activities, and projects, Harry’s new book Managing Priorities gets to the heart of how we prioriti...

Jorge Arango is an Information architect, author, and educator, and he’s written a new book, Duly Noted, about the age-old practice of notetaking.  If you’re like me, you’ve been taking notes since your school days. Back then, we used notebooks, a Trapper Keeper, and sticky notes – anything that could help us ace a test, remember important tidbits, and consolidate ideas. Notes are an extension of...

Have you ever felt like the product people want to move too fast? You realize that speed is important, but the quality of the product is going to suffer and the results are going to disappoint. Or have you ever wished you had a seat at the table during the initial strategy sessions of a new project, rather than being brought in mid-stream? Do you feel intimidated when talking to the folks on the b...

Today’s interview is just a taste of what you’ll learn at Rosenfeld’s upcoming Design in Product conference—featuring John Cutler’s closing keynote. John is the senior director of product management at Toast, a doodler, a former band member, a UX researcher, and business analyst. He’s also the prolific writer behind “The Beautiful Mess, a Substack newsletter with over 36,000 subscribers, where he...

While we’ve been developing design systems for years, we’re only just now learning how to create systems that are successful and sustainable. Dan Mall is the author of the soon-to-be released Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice, which explores the cultural elements that contribute to sustainable design systems.   Not surprisingly, it’s usually pain that motivates chan...

Believe it or not, Steve Portigal’s UX research classic Interviewing Users came out ten years ago, back in 2013. A few things about user research have changed since then, to put it mildly, so we at Rosenfeld did two things: we convinced Steve to write a second edition (coming out October 17), and to join us on the Rosenfeld Review to discuss all the things that have changed. In addition to being a...

Sahibzada Mayed and Lauren Lin will be speakers at the upcoming DesignOps Summit on October 2-4, 2023. Their talk, “Cultivating Design Ecologies of Care, Community, and Collaboration,” will showcase the intersection of care-centeredness and design operations.  Lauren has wanted to be a designer since she was in third grade. What kind of designer? An “everything” designer! From a young age, she emb...

Zariah Cameron is Co-Director of Community + Research and the founder of AEI – Advocate, Educate, Innovate Black Design. She will be a speaker at October’s DesignOps Summit on streamlining an inclusive design practice.  Many companies and corporations have good intentions when it comes to inclusive design. But too often that’s where things both start and stop. Zariah helps companies operationalize...

Jay Bustamante has always been about conserving time and resources by building tight processes to create efficiencies in his life and work. In all the jobs and positions he’s held, he would notice gaps, consult with stakeholders, find solutions, and fill those gaps. Eventually he learned there is a name for this type of work: DesignOps. Today Jay is a DesignOps leader and an experienced strategist...

Jenae Cohn is executive director at the Center for Teaching and Learning at UC Berkeley and, along with Michael Greer, author of the new book Design for Learning: User Experience in Online Teaching and Learning. Jenae and Michael’s book helps designers create compelling educational content. Think of it as required reading for anyone designing an online course, webinar, training, or workshop.  Desi...

Not too long ago, Donna Lichaw, author of The User’s Journey, was helping companies solve product problems by organizing the experience of a product or service into a narrative arc where the user is the hero.  Then she ran into a question that she couldn’t shake — a question that, once answered, would morph her business from product development to leadership development. The question unveiled a pe...

Boon Yew Chew is senior principal UX designer at Elsevier and an IxDA local leader and board alumn. He will be a speaker at the upcoming 2023 Enterprise UX  Conference on June 6th and 7th, delivering a session on “Making Sense of Systems – and Using Systems to Make Sense of the Enterprise.” Systems thinking can seem abstract and theoretical, but Boon reveals some unexpected ways that systems think...

Ren Pope has a passion for all things data, information, and knowledge, and he strives to make them more accessible, organized, and enduring. You may be surprised that this conversation about information architecture takes us back to classic Greek philosophy, specifically ontology, which is concerned with the nature of being—that is, what is real and not real.  What is inside a computer cannot be...

Erica Jorgensen is one of Rosenfeld Media’s newest authors with the publication of her book, Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX. With a background in journalism, her book draws on her experiences as a content designer with  the likes of Chewy, Microsoft, Slack, Amazon, Starbucks, Nordstrom, and Expedia.  Erica’s book is a toolkit of research techniques for anyone...

Lisanne Norman  entered the tech field as a UX researcher in 2015 and quickly advanced to lead researcher at Dell, then Visa. She founded Black UX Austin and was the UX lead researcher at Gusto.  And then she left in 2022. Because she had had enough. And because she wanted to make a difference. She is now co-director of DEI at the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. In today’s interview, Lisanne shar...

Jill has been listening to customers and clients for over 20 years. She has worked for organizations like Etsy and Blue Apron, and has since started Field Notes Consulting, a research and strategic planning practice serving both public and private sectors. She is method-agnostic, harnesses full-stack research, and interrogates all data to get to the real data or the root cause. While hard data and...

Prayag Narula is the founder and CEO of Marvin, a tool for qualitative researchers. Prayag will also be a speaker at the Advancing Research Conference where he’ll share the stage with Rida Qadri, a research scientist at Google.   Humans have been doing quantitative research for thousands of years – well, for as long as math has been around. Qualitative research, on the other hand, is fairly new to...

Sheryl is the author of the soon-to-be-released Closing the Loop: Systems Thinking for Designers. With a background in journalism and political science, and having worked at or with Adaptive Path, Substantial, Frog, Ikea, Microsoft, and the Gates Foundation, Sheryl has an interest in the big picture of systems thinking and how it applies to designers. Working on projects of enormous scale that cou...

Authors Maria Giudice & Christopher Ireland join Lou to discuss their new book, Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World, which comes out on January 17. Get a taste of what they cover in the book, from systems thinking to navigating change, and how to look broadly at patterns to understand the context in which you are establishing change. The authors explain the...