O'reilly Design Podcast - O'reilly Media Podcast

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Product development, user research, and identifying blindspots.In this week’s Design Podcast episode, I sit down with Chrissie Brodigan, manager of user experience research at GitHub. Brodigan will be be speaking at OReilly’s inaugural Design Conference. In this episode, we talk about user research and product development at Github, and the blindspots in product development and organizational development.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Our internal philosophy around research is about when we make our design decisions, we come up with hypotheses about how that design change will impact behavior as well as user experience. We may need to add a particular control to the workflow, but if it has a negative consequence on the overall experience of our users, we may decide that that's not the right decision for us. Even if it's helpful in one area, it causes unhappiness in another. We measure impact with controlled experiments, whic

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Managing, mentoring, and recruiting designers.In this week’s Design Podcast episode, I sit down with Wesley Yun, director of user experience on the hardware side at GoPro. Yun will be be speaking at O’Reilly’s inaugural Design Conference. In this episode, we talk about managing and recruiting designers at GoPro, Designer Fund's Bridge Guild, and mentoring the next generation of designers.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Managing is humbling. My job isn't to tell my designers what to do. My job is to hire the best designers I know how to, or I can hire at the organization that's right for them and then create this space and the opportunity for them to do the best work of their life. That, to me, is what a good manager does. I very rarely tell my designers what to do. I help them frame problems. I help them sell ideas. I help streamline their thoughts. [When recruiting],

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Prototyping for digital and physical, IBM’s bet on design, and diversity in design.In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Kathryn McElroy, author of Prototyping for Designers and design lead on IBM's Watson team. McElroy will be be speaking at O’Reilly’s inaugural Design Conference in January. In this episode, we talk about prototyping for digital and physical, design and diversity, and what it’s like working at IBM.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: I see the shift from an engineering feature-based product design to a user-centered product design across a 380,000 person company to be the most challenging but most impactful place that I can work. On a day-to-day basis, how this comes through is how we interact with our teams. As designers coming into this ecosystem, a lot of these people haven't really heard about user-centered design until they come to our design boot camps here in Austin.That's when we bring all of our product teams toget

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Culture, competition, and design staffing.In this week’s Design Podcast episode, I sit down with Bob Baxley, who is keynoting at OReilly’s inaugural Design Conference. He compares cultures at Apple and Pinterest, talks about competition in the design playing field, and addresses the designer shortage.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: My observation is that although Apple really dominates the product culture of technology, certainly in Silicon Valley potentially globally, it’s really the Google culture that dominates how companies work. By that I mean, a culture of engineering-centric, ship fast, let’s fix stuff, intense incrementalism based on metrics and experimentation, which is very different from how Apple works, at least in the time I was there, where it was much more deterministic. I think the difference maybe has to do with the business models, where Apple is creating a product that they’re going to sell and somebody has

The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: The critical role of design in creating iconic products and brands.Our expectations for industrial design have risen immeasurably in the last decade. Think of any piece of consumer electronics from 2005—a BlackBerry, for instance—and you’ll think of something that was encased in plastic painted silver to imitate metal, with a too-light heft and a rattle when shaken.Now, nearly every successful piece of consumer hardware is the result of careful design and exquisite manufacturing. Apple deserves a great deal of credit for that shift by resetting the baseline with the iPhone in 2007, but new tools and processes have played an important role as well. Digital design has become easy and sophisticated, and contract manufacturers can do spectacular things with glass, aluminum, and semiconductors that were nearly impossible just a few years ago. Our guest on this week’s episode of the O’Reilly Hardware Podcast is Robert Brunner, a founder of this n

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Designing for hardware and software, and recruiting and building design teams.In this week's Design Podcast episode, I sit down with Vanessa Cho, head of UX and research for the software and services group at GoPro. Cho, along with her hardware colleague Wesley Yun, will be speaking at O'Reilly's inaugural Design Conference in January. We talk about designing for hardware and software, building design teams, and what she looks for in new recruits. Here are a few highlights from our conversation: I started at GoPro 18 months ago. I was one of the first designers, and in that time, we've grown to 18 designers — 18 designers in 18 months. We've spent a lot time recruiting and honing down on what is really important to us. At GoPro, we're building a hybrid model that allows us to harness specialized skills while delivering speed and scale. What we have is embedded UX generalists for each of the product teams who can champion the custom

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Mindsets, impostors, and self-awareness.In this week's Design Podcast episode, I sit down with Dan Brown, designer at Eightshapes and author of Designing Together and Communicating Design. Brown is speaking at OReilly's inaugural Design Conference, January 20-22, 2016, in San Francisco. We talk about managing fixed and growth mindsets, embracing impostor syndrome, and the most important skill for all designers (hint: it's not empathy).Here are a few highlights from our conversation: Carol Dweck wrote a book called Mindset, which talks about the studies that she'd been doing over the years about attitude, and specifically her attitude toward challenge.The studies show that if someone has been called 'smart' all their lives, they are actually more reluctant to take on a challenge because they believe that if they fail at the challenge, they will sort of undermine their own self-identity. This is what she calls the 'fixed mindset,' the sort of inherent belief that

The O'Reilly Design Podcast: Organization design, design critiques, and designing for good behavior.In this week's Design Podcast episode, I chat it up with Adam Connor, designer at MadPow and author of Discussing Design with Aaron Irizarry — Connor also is speaking at O'Reilly's inaugural Design Conference. We talk about company culture and organizational design, the design of codes of conduct, and advice on running productive design critiques.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: I think there's a misconception around what culture is. A lot of people approach me asking if I can help them with their culture as if it is this separate thing that if adjusted, everything else — their work, their processes, their people — will fall into place. But what culture really is, is the rules, the invisible rules, that we all have in our minds of how we're supposed to interact with each other or behave in certain situations. Sometimes it's the values that we have and sometimes it's more reac

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Katie Dill on designing for seven billion people, hiring good people, and the triforce.In this week’s Design Podcast episode, I chat it up with Katie Dill, head of experience design at Airbnb. Dill talks about Airbnb’s values; the relationship between design, engineering, and product management; and what Airbnb looks for when hiring. Dill also will be keynoting at O’Reilly’s inaugural Design Conference. Here are a few highlights from our conversation: We have a few different ways of looking at the values that are behind our work and the way we do our work, and the team behind it. For a starting point, our company has core values. There are six points, which are actually on our website, that drive the values of all the people that work here. Some of which are things like championing the mission or embracing the adventure and having an entrepreneurial spirit. Pretty much behind all the design work — and the thinking and processes of the

The O’Reilly Design Podcast: Pamela Pavliscak on designing for happiness.In this week’s Design Podcast episode, I sit down with design researcher and data scientist Pamela Pavliscak. Pavliscak is the author of Data-Informed Product Design, a free report from O’Reilly, and will be speaking at OReilly’s inaugural design conference. Pavliscak talks about the delicate relationship between data and design, and why it’s not an either or proposition, as well as why designing for happiness is good for business.Here are a few highlights from our conversation: We like to think in dichotomies for when it’s either data or intuition. I think of it more like archaeology. Archaeology is not always about finding the big celebrities or what the important heroes and personalities of history do. It's about learning more about the everyday practices of people. You have these clues, these traces left behind. Like archaeology, the science gets more sophisticated. Archaeologists have remote sensing and X-ray guns