Understanding Users: The UX Podcast

"Although it's understandable that this technology brings all sorts of concerns and anxieties and worries with it, and I share those, by the way, as well. It's not all excitement. I really think this is going to transform the entire tech industry...And honestly, I'm really hoping that what AI brings is, it finally brings to fruition what technology was always supposed to do, but didn't. I've alway...

'From an internal perspective we're using AI everywhere from marketing to writing code..' 'I think because everybody is trying to get in the AI game you're just throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks..' 'There's a good portion of my job that could be automated, so I'm just trying to get a little bit ahead of the curve..' 'My concern is that AI is going to be used not as an accelerator bu...

"What we're aiming to do is answer the question, what do UX practitioners need to know about AI? I want to reduce people's anxiety in the same way that my anxiety has been reduced by confronting the the subject...I'd really like people to leave the conference feeling less anxious about [AI] than they felt coming in." Danny Hope , Curator of the UX Brighton conference, talks to me about Artificial...

Join me chatting with author and cultural expert Chui Chui Tan around researching and designing products for international markets. What do design teams need to consider to ensure the best cultural fit and customer uptake for what they're building? How can they better understand local market differences? What potential pitfalls should they watch out for?  You can find out more about Chui Chui's mo...

"The only reason I sometimes shy away from the words 'qual' and 'quant' is I think they present this dichotomy that is not the full truth, right? I think people then start to think 'qual' means talking to people about fuzzy feelings and doing personas, whereas 'quant' means you sit on billions of data points and you put graphs and fancy charts out and you speak in ways that normal people don't und...

Tina Lickova is an independent researcher and service designer. She is also host of the excellent UX Research Geeks podcast.  In this honest and candid episode, Tina talks with me from personal experience about professional burnout working as a researcher: what it is, how to acknowledge it, what the warning signs are and how to take action. We also discuss some positive strategies to adopt to mini...

Steve Portigal is an experienced user researcher who helps organisations to build more mature user research practices. He is principal of Portigal Consulting , and the author of two books: Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries and Interviewing Users , the second edition of which is now out. He’s also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast.  In this episode, Steve and I discuss the latest editio...

Julian Della Mattia is a UX Researcher specialised in Research Operations. He helps companies of all sizes build their user research practices from scratch. In this episode he explains the ResearchOps function, when and how it can add value to product teams, and he shares his experiences of advising and working with organisations across Europe to elevate how they gather and action insights from th...

This time I'm chatting with some of the attendees at UX Brighton 2023, themed around Creativity and Innovation. They share with me why they came to this year's event and what they have taken away from it.  I hope you enjoy the episode and find something thought-provoking here to consider in your own work. Thanks for listening.  Mike Green

"I think because of the gravitas of what AI can bring to the world in terms of social impact leaders have to be extremely humble...As a leader in this space, you have to kind of understand that you're going to have to hire people who aren't the typical employee. The other thing too - it's very important to the leadership team to hire a diverse group of people and I really mean diverse, because if...

“If I think about five years from now, I would say that UX as we know it today will be radically changed....Things that deal with rote tasks are definitely going to be something of the domain of AI in the future.... [but] I think the space that we [as designers] work in is around intuition, empathy, emotion, and that's much much harder for AI. You know, it's a scary time for everyone, right? Every...

“Design is really going to be the practice of ethics in AI...Designers bring into reality these esoteric concepts, and so while an ethicist sitting next to you is helpful in the sense that they can help you think about these things, the designer's role is actually going to be how you implement those things..  We will also start to build UX AI tools that will help us iterate at a much larger scale....

“I think the biggest thing is that with AI, you are definitely going to create net new roles in the in the team that you had never thought of before. And there's not going to be a playbook for that, and the HR person and the recruiter is not going to know how to help you with that and you're gonna have to figure those things out together as a team…Design will be less about UI in the future and mor...

"Something that's colliding is definitely that sense of artificial intelligence and particularly generative AI, and what that means for creativity... I'm much more in the kind of William Morris view of the world, I think we need more thinkers and crafts people. And my positive view of AI is that it will get rid of some of the drudge work we do and it will free up time for people to be more imagina...

"Speak to your users directly and ask them specifically what their challenges are. That was that was probably the biggest takeaway [from today] for me.... I think, certainly in my [small business] sector we tend to assume rather than ask, and I think asking directly what users have feedback about, or reviewing how they how they use services or how they don't use services specifically, is really [i...

Danny Hope is a Product Strategy Consultant and Founder of UX Brighton , a long-running annual one-day UX conference on the south coast of the UK.  The theme of this year's event is Creativity and Innovation, and in this episode I chat with Danny about the kinds of talks attendees can expect and what learnings they can hope to take away to try out in their own work.  "I've seen time and again the...

"AI has existed for a long time. It's built into so many design tools that we use these days...It's just a case of exploring it, seeing what works for you and what doesn't - and obviously, getting a good understanding of, is this helping me or is it hindering me?" "In terms of AI, I don't know (and I don't want to know) how AI is going to affect people who write about funerals. Because you cannot...

Andy Curry is Managing Director of product and design agency Lion+Mason . L+M are returning this year to the Leeds Digital Festival , an open, collaborative celebration of digital culture in all its forms held across the city. In association with Leeds Building Society , L+M are hosting an informal in-person event to hear from leading specialists discussing some of the key digital challenges facin...

"We're not going to be replaced by AI, but we might be replaced by humans who know how to use AI." This is the final part in a series of bite-sized conversations with UX design and research leaders, recorded live at the UXDX conference in New York in May 2023. In this episode Chrissy Fleming , an independent product management consultant and Erin Eisinger , Founder and CEO of design studio Four By...

Claire White is Product Design Lead @ Exscientia , an AI-based Pharmatech research company.  She shares with me her experiences of moving into the rapidly-evolving world of AI-powered Pharmatech, her views on the importance of rapid, ongoing prototyping when designing products, and why User-Centred Design is not just UX Design.  Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy the episode.  Mike Green

"This is an arms race and no one's taking their foot off the gas..." This is the sixth in a series of bite-sized conversations with UX design and research leaders discussing a range of topics, recorded live at the UXDX conference in New York in May 2023. In this episode John Crouch of Entropik shares his views on how a new generation of AI-based tooling can help us powerfully rethink, democratise...

“What would I say is, first of all, be kind to yourself because that stuff is hard...It’s not a case of just going in and dialling it in every day...You require a deeper set of resilient skills to be able to survive in those kinds of places, especially if you've come from a place where design is accepted, that could be from university or academia, whatever it is...You have to really figure out whe...

Ian Mulvany is Chief Technology Officer at the British Medical Journal (BMJ ). Join me for a fascinating conversation with a seasoned technology leader building innovative and empowering healthcare products.  "Technology as it is configured today....we are still at the foothills of understanding [how] this is going to drive our future economies... There are still hundreds of millions of people to...

This is the fifth in a series of bite-sized conversations with UX design and research leaders discussing a range of topics, recorded at the UXDX conference in New York in May 2023. In this episode Megan Mathews , UX Research Lead at Docusign , discusses the challenges of deploying realistic and usable personas across organisations as part of the design process. We also - inevitably - discuss AI, a...

This is the fourth in a series of bite-sized conversations with UX design and research leaders discussing a range of topics, recorded at the UXDX conference in New York in May 2023. In this episode author, speaker and Design Lead Kent Eisenhuth of Google shares his views on the importance of building diverse teams when designing and testing data visualisations, the potential for data 'sonification...