The O'Reilly Design Podcast explores how experience design -- and experience designers -- are shaping business, the Internet of Things, and other domains.

O'Reilly Design Podcast

Design

O'Reilly

DESIGN

design

O'REILLY

Nutrition Facts, Mark Bittman’s food rating system, colon cancer screening, Time Well Spent, Peter Arno, Flat File

Episode 35: Mind-Body Problems

Onboarding isn't a metric, it's an outcome – successful users. And it's crucial to your product's survival. UserOnboard founder Samuel Hulick explains how to set users up for success, why your onboarding is always evolving, where to find inspiration outside of the software world, and much more.

Samuel Hulick, Founder, UserOnboard

Intercom's Content Strategy Lead Elizabeth McGuane talks to Des Traynor about the importance of words in product building. Elizabeth's role is all about using language, tone and mental models to create better experiences for our customers.

Elizabeth McGuane, Content Strategy Lead At Intercom

Barry Nalebuff teaches at the Yale School of Management. His specialty is game theory and its application to business strategy.

S1E4: Barry Nalebuff

Through a combination of passive and active acoustics, architects and acousticians can control the sounds of spaces to fit any kind of need. With sound-proofing and selective-amplification, we can add reverb or take it away. We can make churches sound like clubs and clubs sound like opera houses. This degree of acoustic control, however, is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Up until the early 1900s, designers and engineers knew very little about the effects of architecture on sound. Architectural acoustics were pretty much a roll of the dice in any given project. 

Until Wallace Sabine.

236- Reverb

Aarron Walter knows plenty about scaling a design team and culture. Before joining InVision as VP of Design Education, he started the experience design team at MailChimp. In this episode, Aarron chats with Intercom's Adam Risman about hiring for soft skills, the benefits of cross-functional teams, how to design for empathy, and more.

Aarron Walter, VP of Design Education at InVision

Danny Meyer is the founder of Shake Shack. Paula Scher designed its graphic identity.

S1E10: Danny Meyer + Paula Scher

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I look back at 2016, a big year for bots that saw important developments in platforms, tools, and underlying AI.

2016 Bots Year in Review

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Brad Abrams, group product manager of Google Assistant, the company’s new AI-driven bot that lives in many different contexts, including the Pixel phone, the Allo messaging app, and the Google Home voice-controlled speaker.

Brad Abrams on Google Assistant

From pinpointing the Job-to-be-Done to creating successful users and knowing when it's time to rebuild a product, we look back at our favorite lessons and insights from past episodes. Guests include Julie Zhuo, Jason Fried, Matt Hodges, Michael Pryor, Sarah Hatter, Bob Moesta and Samuel Hulick.

Lessons in product: Julie Zhuo, Jason Fried, Michael Pryor and more

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I speak with Amir Shevat, head of developer relations at Slack and the author of the forthcoming O’Reilly book "Designing Bots: Creating Conversational Experiences."

Amir Shevat on Enterprise Workplace Communication

#trypod, Dan Brown cover contest, Design in Tech, writing for designers, The Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened, Wes Anderson’s Bar Luce

Episode 53: On Writing Well

Michael Rock is founding partner and creative director of 2x4, a global design consultancy. He has worked with brands including Nike, Prada, Target, and Kanye West.

S2E6: Michael Rock

This week, I sit down with Travis Lowdermilk senior UX designer at Microsoft, and Jessica Rich, UX researcher at Microsoft; Lowdermilk and Rich are also co-authors of the "Customer Driven Playbook." We talk about why failing fast is not always a good approach, sensemaking, and never losing track of the customer’s voice.

Travis Lowdermilk and Jessica Rich on Building a Customer-Driven Culture at Microsoft

In this episode of the O’Reilly Bots Podcast, Pete Skomoroch and I talk to Jason Laska and Michael Akilian of Clara Labs, creator of a virtual assistant—Clara—that schedules meetings and interacts in natural language through email.

E-mail is, to me, a highly promising (and somewhat underrated) venue for bots. Messaging is growing quickly, but e-mail is still the standard way to communicate within businesses and especially between businesses. E-mail conventions are somewhat standardized, and much of it is highly routinized—automatically generated reports, receipts, etc.—so it’s ripe for automation.

Laska, who leads the machine learning efforts at Clara Labs, and Akilian, the company’s co-founder and CTO, talk about the reality of developing an AI-driven product, and explain Clara’s human-in-the-loop system. “People are still there to do some of the most challenging aspects of this work, and that’s exactly what you want to use people for,” says Laska.

Jason Laska and Michael Akilian on Scheduling Bots

How do you better help new users understand what actions to take within your product? Amy Thibodeau, Content Strategy Lead at Shopify, explains how interface content done well can nudge users to success – and when crafted poorly can lead to frustrating, unintended actions. She also takes us inside Polaris, Shopify's new, publicly available design system, and more.

Amy Thibodeau, Content Strategy Lead at Shopify

This week, I sit down with Cynthia Savard Saucier, director of design at Shopify and author of Tragic Design. Saucier also is keynoting at Velocity in New York, October 1-4, 2017. We talk about moving from working in design to leading designers, the real and sometimes negative impact that design decisions can have on users, and how design is organized at Shopify.

Cynthia Savard Saucier on Design at Shopify

In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Cheryl Platz, senior designer at Microsoft for the Azure Portal and Marketplaces. We talk about the challenges of working on a top-secret design project, the research behind Amazon's Echo Look, the skills you need to start designing for voice, and how studying improv can make you a better designer.

Cheryl Platz on Designing the Amazon Echo Look

Ein Interview mit Erik Spiekermann kurz vor seinem Vortrag auf der TYPO Berlin 2017. Erik spricht mit Jenny über selbst fahrende Autos, Vortragen auf Deutsch und handgemachte Schuhe.

Interview mit Erik Spiekermann auf der TYPO 17

In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with John Whalen, chief experience officer at 10 Pearls, a digital development company focused on mobile and web apps, enterprise solutions, cyber security, big data, IoT,  and cloud and dev ops. We talk about the “six minds” that underlie each human experience, why it’s important for designers to understand brain science, and what people really look for in a voice assistant.

John Whalen on Using Brain Science in Design

In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with Julie Stanford, founder and principal of user experience agency Sliced Bread Design. We talk about how to get in the rapid experimentation mindset, the design thinking process, and how to get started with rapid experimentation at your company. Hint: start small.

Julie Stanford on Vetting Designs Through Rapid Experimentation

<p>As perhaps the only UX researcher on staff at a VC fund, Michael Margolis is parachuting into startups year-round to help them better understand their users. In this chat with Intercom Director of Research Sian Townsend, Michael walks us through his "start at the end" research framework, the ways in which he quickly develops rapport with new product teams, how to conduct research faster, and much more.</p>

Michael Margolis, UX Research Partner at GV

Following an eight-year run at Google, where he designed Google Flights and co-founded Android Wear, Emmet Connolly joined Intercom as Director of Product Design in October 2014. In this chat with Intercom's John Collins, Emmet shares how he's evolved the way his team works as its grown, the importance of our design system in that process, how that system serves the product team as a whole, and much more.

Emmet Connolly, Director of Product Design at Intercom

For a special edition of the podcast, themed around Cannes Lion CR’s Eliza Williams speaks to adam&eveDDB’s Richard Brim and Leo Burnett’s Chaka Sobhani about the best ads of the year

The CR podcast episode 6: Richard Brim and Chaka Sobhani discuss Cannes Lions 2018

Jon Bruner and Mike Loukides talk about the classical music publishing industry and how it's being disrupted by projects like the Petrucci Music Library (http://imslp.org/) that make public-domain scores available online.

The future of classical music

Jim Stogdill, Edd Dumbill and Roger Magoulas have a conversation about in-memory databases and the impact on real time analysis. Leave questions and comments for us at http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/05/talking-about-in-memory.html

Talking about in-memory

Jon Bruner, Mike Loukides and Jim Stogdill from O'Reilly Radar muse on the return of software to the physical world.

Software and the physical world

Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, and Roger Magoulas talk about anthropology in big data, advances in JavaScript, searching for ancient civilizations, the importance of context, and good sites for checking the weather.

Related blog post: http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/06/radar-podcast-anthropology-big-data-and-the-importance-of-context.html

Anthropology, big data, and the importance of context

Jon Bruner, Jim Stogdill, and Roger Magoulas talk about what's been on their minds this week: the NSA's surveillance programs, what defense contractors will do with their technology as defense budgets dry up, and a Californian who isn't doing what you think he's doing with hydroponics.

For more on these topics, and links to the things we talked about, see http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/06/radar-podcast-the-internet-of-things-prism-and-defense-technology-that-goes-civilian.html.

The Internet of Things, PRISM, and defense technology that goes civilian

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.