UX Podcast

In this classic UX Podcast interview, we talk to Amber Case, author, researcher, designer and, at the time we talked to her, cyborg anthropologist. We chat about the ideas expressed in Amber’s popular TED talk “We are all cyborgs now” before turning our attention to the notion of calm technology.

Brad Frost joins us to talk about the nitty gritty of collaborating to create and manage design systems. We look back at the journey from responsive design to atomic design to design systems, and discuss the challenges with developing design systems and how important collaboration and culture are in order to succeed.

Are we all just putting on a show? A few years ago, Tanya Snook coined the phrase UX Theatre to describe when we are just acting like we’re doing user-centred design rather than actually doing it. 

From this summer, target size is going to become something we hear much more about. In this topic show, we look into what it is, what it means, why we’re going to start hearing more about it, and how this will impact design work (and design discussions). 

Back in 2015 we were lucky enough to meet up with Whitney Hess during her summer vacation in Sweden. In this classic episode we talk to Whitney about her journey from “producer of wireframes” to coaching UX-ers.

In the second part of our 10th anniversary interview with Don Norman, we discuss externalities, the environmental aspects of design, ethics, systems and changing design education.

In this 10th anniversary 2-part special, we are joined by Don Norman. We talk to Don about how design education needs to change so the designers of the future are better equipped to work at the crossroads of business, technology, people, society and culture.

We are joined by Kate Rutter, Kim Goodwin and Pamela Pavliscak to explore why tools, often software tools, are on everyone’s mind and how this may or may not preparing us for the demands of design in the future.

Scott Berkun joins us to talk about how design makes the world. Everything in your life has been designed by someone, and this insight is a powerful way to understand the world, and everything that happens in it.

Episode 260 is a linkshow. Per and James discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – we feature articles about information architecture and following the principles that our brains expect from physical experiences, plus smart questions you should ask during job interviews.

We are joined by Rishma Hansil to look at Japanese design culture and how this impacts digital design in Japan. Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Rishma has been living and working in Tokyo for the past 4 years.

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...

Old research can give new insights. Ben Kraal publishes a newsletter called “1992”. In it he takes research papers from 1992 and looks them from a modern-day perspective.

Episode 256 is a linkshow. Per and James discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – We discuss dealing with shared and public touch screens plus the trend of publishing content as newsletters.

Do you trust brands? What created that trust and how is it maintained? We look at designing for trust together with content strategist Margot Bloomstein, author of Trustworthy. How does brand personality impact the user experience and how it influences our design decisions and content strategies.

A conversation with information architects Abby Covert and Andrew Hinton about dealing with digital change and how to make future changes better.

For years, accessibility was seen as the domain of the engineer. Fixing an accessibility would be about writing code. As a maturing industry, and as we understand people with different types of disabilities, we are starting to better understand and appreciate the role of design in accessibility. Accessibility legend Derek Featherstone joins us to talk...

Episode 252 is a linkshow. Per and James discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – We discuss a number of serious issues that the design industry faces plus we take a look at “Stories” and their abundance.

Designing for multiple forms of input and output is no easy task. The dramatic rise in the number of microphones in devices has pushed multimodal design to new levels of complexity. Cheryl Platz joins us to talk about designing in this multimodal world.

Anna and the Gapminder foundation work to promote a fact-based worldview that everyone can understand. They want to help all of us move away from a dramatic worldview that is stressful, wrong and contributes to poor decision-making. “We realised people thought they knew what the world was like around them, but they were usually wrong.”

How will your design be used in 10,000 years? When we produce designs and create technical systems we rarely think in such time-frames, yet many of today’s technology includes ideas decades old, even hundreds. Anthropologist Genevieve Bell joins us to talk about digital anthropology, cyber physical systems, and the new educational needs that have arisen.

“This is about people. It’s about communication”, says Ola. The ways in which organisations are structured and managed are still in many ways rooted in the history of the industrial revolution. To evolve away from this requires care, being human centred and probably a disruptive event on a social level.

Cyd Harrell has been working with civic tech for over a decade, and has accumulated a wealth of knowledge and experience during that time. She’s gathered that experience and knowledge and created a friendly guide for those of us who work, or want to work with technology in the public sector.

Episode 246 is a link show. James and Per discuss two articles that have grabbed their attention – We discuss developer experience and even “internal” developer experience plus mobile interface testing and the challenges of multi-device, multi-browser testing generally.

We all have cognitive biases, flaws in our reasoning and judgement due to our personal beliefs and hidden pattens that we’ve subconsciously adopted over time. David Dylan Thomas joins us to discuss cognitive bias and how we can design for it and work with it.