O'reilly Design Podcast - O'reilly Media Podcast

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Design investment, the importance of mindset, and creating the right environment.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Kristin Skinner, managing director at Adaptive Path, head of design management at Capital One, and co-author of Org Design for Design Orgs.  We talk about managing design teams, scaling design, and what we can learn from the Golden State Warriors.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Helping companies realize their design investment There’s the famous Mark Andreessen quote about software eating the world. Back in 2004, Tim Brown was on the cover of Businessweek Magazine declaring that design can help shape business. That trend has been happening over time, but it’s really been over the last 10, probably even five, years where design teams are really starting to scale. We recognize the generative qualities for design can help to realize new business value, and that the old methods of management around development, specifi

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: The CEO button, an IDEAL framework, and converting likes into works.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Tom Greever, UX director at Bitovi and author of Articulating Design Decisions. We talk about how to effectively explain your design decisions, avoiding the CEO button, and how saying 'yes' is a facilitation superpower.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: The CEO button The CEO button is an unusual, or otherwise an unexpected, request from an executive to add a feature that completely destroys the balance of a project and causes designers to cry themselves to sleep. You hear this referred to in other areas as the 'Swooping poop,' or as the 'Hippo,' which refers to the highest paid person in the room. It's this very common sentiment that there is someone who doesn't know anything about design, they are in charge of us and our projects, and our destiny, and they're paying our bills, and they get to

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Connecting humans at scale, bot philosophy, and failed attempts to defy the laws of physics.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Paul Adams, VP of product at Intercom. Before joining Intercom, Adams had stints at Dyson, Google, and Facebook. We talk about his career path, building design teams, and Intercom’s goal to connect humans at scale.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Human connection at scale We are building a customer communication platform. The backstory here is really simple, to be honest. When you think of business—how businesses run in the real world, like offline, without the Internet—if you go back 20 years, before the Internet was commonplace, it was all personal. It was typically face-to-face, marketplaces and stores, and so on. People knew who they were buying from. There was a bit of a relationship there. There was trust and loyalty. The problem with that was that there was no scale. A local store could only se

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Design education, design thinking, and the need for more wisdom.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Kristian Simsarian, founder and chair of the undergraduate design program at California College of the Arts. We talk about design education, design thinking, and the need for more wisdom.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: On giving back I asked Kristian to comment on his colleague Ian Coats MacColl’s post, an open letter to Jony Ive: There was something, and it was probably taken partially out of context, that Jony Ive had dismissed design education in some way or another. A lot of where that's coming from is that demand outstrips supply. There just aren't enough designers on the market, and companies like Apple and Google and Facebook and all the other ones are feeling it acutely. In fact, when we have our internship nights, we have far more suitors than we do students, which we like. In fact, we have the compa

The O’Reilly Design Podcast:  Designing women, avoiding the buzzword curse, and the F word. In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with former president of Frog, Doreen Lorenzo. Lorenzo is currently the director for the Center of Integrated Design at the University of Texas at Austin. We talk about the design in education, women in design, and failing fast versus learning fast. Here are a few highlights from our conversation: On being a female designer I can tell you that I think I went through the first 20 years of my career not even thinking about it. Putting my head down, doing the work that needed to get done. Working really closely with all my employees. Creating a great environment. Leading an organization. Making a business successful and profitable. I think I just did all those things. I never really thought about being a woman. I thought at one point, "Well, we've come far." Then I put my head up as we sometimes do in life ... and said, "Wow, we haven't come that far."

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: AI, understanding algorithms, and design diversity.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Giles Colborne, designer, author, and managing director of cxpartners. We talk about how AI is reinventing design and the roles of designers; the balance of creating something that is different but familiar; and how, at its most basic level, AI is shortcutting user input.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Artificial intelligence The trouble is, there's a dirty little secret there, which is mobile; it's the platform that people want to use. If you give them a choice, they'll reach for their smartphone every single time. It won't work very well. You look at eCommerce sites, the average conversion rate on an eCommerce site is something like 4-4.5% average globally. On a mobile site, it's less than 2%. Although the conversion rates are rising, they're rising at the same pace. Usability of desktop is getting better, but at the same pace as mobile.

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Collective alignment, shared value, and design thinking.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Jim Kalbach, designer, instructor, and author of Mapping Experiences. We talk about the relationship between design and design thinking, how to get started with mapping experiences, and the notion of shared value as a strategic competitive advantage.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Mapping experiences: The great aligner The strategic function of the activity of mapping experience that I focus on in my book, is about helping organizations to really see the world differently through the eyes of the customer to the degree possible. That's just one tool that helps us do that. It's not a silver bullet, and there's other things that people do, like personas and other types of research, and other types of activity, so I think it fits in with a range of things that we're doing to help us understand the complexity of end-to-end experiences.

The O'Reilly Design Podcast: Designing for IoT, service design, and predictive analytics.This week's episode of the Design Podcast features a conversation I had with Mike Kuniavsky last fall. Kuniavsky is a user experience designer, researcher, and author currently working at Parc. He's also a speaker at the upcoming O'Reilly online conference "Designing for the Internet of Things," September 15, 2016. In our chat, Kuniavsky talks about designing for the IoT, service design, and the mindshift needed to design for ecosystems.Here are some highlights: Every new medium is the old medium I was reading this book that was published by Philips Design on their Ambient Intelligence project. They actually thought through the entire Internet of Things thing about 15 years ago, and then they couldn't make any money on it, and all those people went away. Now it's actually a real thing. They left some really good documentation. I was reading the Philips Design book, and they had a very interesti

The O'Reilly Design Podcast: Designing for the IoT, design's responsibility, and the importance of team dynamics.This week's episode of the Design Podcast features a conversation I had with Martin Charlier last fall. These days, Charlier is a freelance design consultant and co-founder at Rain Cloud. He's also a contributing author to Designing Connected Products and a speaker at the upcoming O'Reilly online conference "Designing for the Internet of Things," September 15, 2016. In our chat, Charlier talks about designing for the IoT, design's responsibility, and the importance of team dynamics.Here are some highlights from our chat: Holistic IoT design How I got into the Internet of Things is an interesting question. My degree from Ravensbourne [College of Design and Communication] was in a very progressive design course that looked at product interaction and service design as one course. For us, it was pretty natural to think of products or services in a very open way. Whe

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Designing conversational experiences.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with designer Chris Maury. Maury is the founder of Conversant Labs, working on projects intended to help improve the lives of the blind. We talk about designing for the blind (as he loses his sight), how chatbots might just make us better listeners, and principles for designing the best conversational UIs. Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Designing for voice I found out that I was going blind. I was diagnosed with a genetic disorder called Stargardt macular degeneration—I was going to lose my central vision and currently was losing my central vision over the course of 10 years or so. That was about four years ago. Throughout this entire process, I started looking at the tools and the technologies that were available to the blind community to use, or the tools that I would be using to maintain my standard of living and keep being productive,

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: The future of wearables, hiring designers, and understanding the value of design.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Max Burton, founder of Matter. Before starting his own firm, Burton spent the last two decades at places like Frog, Nike, and Smart Design. We talk about the future of wearables, what he looks for when hiring designers, and what tech companies can learn from Nike’s and Disney's approach to product design.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Design at Nike and what tech can learn from their approach When I was at Nike, the designers were instrumental in defining what products they were going to work on. We actually would write the briefs to our own products, and it was the designers who often came up with some of the most innovative products and product ideas. It didn't come from a separate marketing group, it didn't come from a strategy group, it often came from the designers. The executives at Nike understood and v

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: Autodesk’s CEO talks about the future of design.In this episode of the Hardware podcast, we talk with Carl Bass, president and CEO of Autodesk. He’s an articulate thinker on algorithmic design, collaborative tools, and the nature of craft, and we talked for nearly two hours when we visited him to record this episode.Discussion points: Bass tells us how Autodesk’s Fusion 360 used GitHub as a model for file management and online collaboration. Fusion 360 lives partially in the cloud and will be accessible through a browser in the near future. “The big thing we tried to do was get rid of this idea that you need 12 pieces of software and 12 plug-ins,” he says. Autodesk’s Project Dreamcatcher illustrates the role that artificial intelligence will play in design. “In the places in which design can be easily quantified, I think you’ll see a lot of machine learning being applied,” Bass says. “When it gets to more aesthetic considerations, that’s sti

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Design sprints, Lean UX, Agile, and design leadership skills.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with C Todd Lombardo, chief design strategist at Fresh Tilled Soil and adjunct professor at IE Business. Lombardo is co-author of the recently released book Design Sprint. We talk about the relationship between design sprints, Lean UX, and Agile, and the skills needed to move from designing to managing designers. Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Design sprints, Lean UX, and Agile Design sprints are really a mix of scientific method, design process and agile philosophy—and agile is really a philosophy. There's 12 principles of working collaboratively together to solve problems, to ship software to customers that satisfies and delights them. That's really the agile approach; it's a philosophy. In Lean UX, sometimes ‘Lean’ is overused, but Lean in a sense means reduction of waste. You want to be as lean as you possibly can so you

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Build measure learn, the One Metric That Matters, and balancing hubris and humility.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Ben Yoskovitz, investor, entrepreneur, and former VP of product at VarageSale and at GoInstant. We talk about using metrics in product development and why anyone building anything new needs to have both hubris and intellectual honesty. Yoskovitz is co-author of Lean Analytics, and is teaching a live online course, Product Strategy for Designers, on June 9, 2016. Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Hubris and humility: A winning combination We're all liars. I say that almost every single time I present. I think as an entrepreneur, you have to be a bit of a liar. There's a number of reasons for that. One is, you're creating something that doesn't yet exist. You're selling it, whether you're actually selling it or not, but you have to convince others that your vision is real and important. That might be f

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Staying relevant, design as a problem-solving process, and a creative coding approach for designers.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Scott Murray, designer, creative coder, and artist who writes software to create data visualizations. Murray is the author of Interactive Data Visualization for the Web and the forthcoming book Creative Coding and Data Visualization with p5.js: Drawing on the Web with JavaScript. Murray is teaching an online course, Programming for Designers on May 11-12, 2016. We talk about why coding is a great skill for designers to learn (and it’s not just about earning more money); data visualization; and why design, at it’s core, is problem solving.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Design and data visualization We're swimming in infographics, and we have open government data, open data, API's data—data, data everything. You can't avoid data. It's a critical part of the modern world. The way I see it, to s

The O'Reilly Design Podcast: Figma, measuring success, and meta debugging.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Dylan Field, founder of Figma and former Thiel Fellow. We talk about the problem Figma aims to solve for designers and how they’re measuring success. Field also talks about how they debugged Figma in its early days: by mandating their own designers use it to design the tool.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: The beginnings of Figma Designers are increasingly at the center of their organizations. They're not just working alone in a corner; they're actually working collaboratively with other designers, they're working with engineers, they're working with product management, with executives. They're extremely connected inside the organization, but their tools, in contrast, are still offline and disconnected. We decided we wanted to build the first online collaborative tool for interface design. Design at Figma We'

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Design as a science, designing for behavior change, and getting your first design gig.In this week’s Design Podcast episode, I sit down with Joel Marsh, designer and author of UX for Beginners. We talk about design as a scientific way of thinking, what happens when you try to cash a check in Sweden, combining behavioral economics and design, and why learning design is like learning to play the piano.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Design as a science When people think of science, they often think that it's not very creative. That's wrong. There are two types of creativity. One is creative expression, which is what feels really good to you as the designer, and we usually call that art. Then there's creative problem solving. Creative expression is all about possibilities and creative problem solving is all about restrictions. You have to work within the rules or within the requirement or whatever. There isn't really a lot of un

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Team dynamics and culture at IDEO, design education, and design’s next big challenge.In this week's Design Podcast episode, I sit down with Simon King, director of Carnegie Mellon University's Design Center. King is the author of Understanding Industrial Design. We talk about team dynamics and culture at IDEO, extending design education to non-designers, and design's next big challenge. Here are a few highlights from our conversation: CMU's Design Center and the designer shortage The idea is behind the Design Center is to bring design to more students across the whole campus and to create new kinds of research opportunities to work with organizations from outside of the university as well. There's really two levels to think about the designer shortage, and one is what I'm trying to do with the Design Center: increasing the overlap with design that many people might have, where there's this idea that you're able to hire someone who's

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Design at Tinder, Awkward UI, and the UI Stack.In this week's Design Podcast episode, I sit down with Scott Hurff, product manager and lead designer at Tinder, Inc. Hurff is the author of Designing Products People Love. In this episode, we talk about how Tinder approaches design, avoiding awkward UI, and why customer research is the most important skill for future designers.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Questions of structure At Tinder, the product team is about five people, six people. What's interesting is that we're trying to grow really quickly. There's a give and take on how we divide up product design responsibilities and product management responsibilities. There is a lot of engineering talent here, and they need a lot of product to work on. It's a matter of, how do we structure ourselves so we can give them thought-through, packaged-up, ready-to-go ideas and concepts while still hammering out the details in time.

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Moving from GUI to VUIs.In this week’s Design Podcast episode, I sit down with Tanya Kraljic, UX manager and principal designer at Nuance Communications. Kraljic recently spoke at OReilly’s inaugural Design Conference (you can find the complete video compilation of the event here). In this episode, we talk about the challenges of moving from graphical to voice interfaces, the voice tools ecosystem, and where she finds inspiration.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: We’re seeing a renewed emphasis on design at Nuance—actually, much like in the technology industry as a whole. We’ve always had great engineers who are building this very complex, very cutting-edge technology. Now, we’re augmenting that with a human-centered approach to product strategy and development, which I think we’re already seeing as accelerating innovation in our own company and, hopefully, it will also help create better and more usable solutions as voice becomes available in all