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

In this episode, I talk with Kyle Rankin, vice president of engineering operations at Final, a credit card startup. We discuss old versus new approaches to server hardening in light of the cloud, how institutional inertia thwarts change, and the new security-minded desktop OS Qubes.

Kyle Rankin on Modern Server Hardening for the Cloud

In this week’s Design Podcast, I sit down with David Farkas, associate director of user experience at EPAM and co-author of the forthcoming book "UX Research." We talk about his book, why everyone should learn to conduct research, and how to open up your mind to ask the right questions.

Farkas and his co-author Brad Nunnally also are teaching a series of online courses:

Learning UX Research: Understanding Methods and Techniques—May 8 or July 10, 2017.
Learning UX Research: Analyzing Data and Sharing Results—May 22 or July 24, 2017.

David Farkas on How to Approach User Research

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

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

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

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.

David Farkas on How to Approach User Research

O'Reilly Radar

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