Design

Intercom co-founder Des Traynor talks to Braden Kowitz about  Google Ventures work with startups, the process of design sprints, sketching and prototyping, and the future of product design.

Braden Kowitz, Design Partner at Google Ventures

Intercom content marketing manager Adam Risman talks with Riley Newman about the importance of early data investment for startups, making data accessible at scale, and why data is "the voice of the customer."

Riley Newman, Head Of Data Science At Airbnb

Poornima Vijayshanker is the founder of Femgineer, an education startup helping tech professionals advance their careers and build great product, while promoting inclusivity in the industry. 

In this episode, she chats with Intercom content marketing manager Adam Risman about the role of empathy in building product, what she learned in her transition from engineer to startup founder, and much more.

Poornima Vijayshanker, Founder At Femgineer

Intercom Director of Product Design Emmet Connolly chats with web and UI animation specialist Val Head. Val discusses designing animation for web vs mobile, the importance of establishing motion guidelines for your brand, where designers can get started with animation, and more.

Val Head, Interface Animation Designer

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

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

Daniel Burka has spent his career at the intersection of design and business leadership. He’s currently a design partner at GV (formerly Google Ventures) and spent the prior decade-plus helping technology companies with product design. Here, Daniel explains how design can solve business problems, the role of sprints in a healthy design culture, and much more.

Daniel Burka, Design Partner at GV

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

If your product is going to grow, new users need to find success with it, fast. Behance co-founder and Benchmark Capital venture partner Scott Belsky explains how to design your product’s first mile, and much more.

Scott Belsky, Venture Partner at Benchmark Capital

Mike Monteiro is the co-founder and design director of Mule Design and speaks frequently and passionately about both craft and business. In this conversation with Intercom's Stewart Scott-Curran, Mike explains the responsibilities designers have to their users and community, why the veil of ignorance is perhaps the greatest tool a designer can use, the issues he sees with design education today, and much more.

Mike Monteiro, co-founder at Mule Design

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

Computer algorithms now shape our world in profound and mostly invisible ways. They predict if we’ll be valuable customers and whether we’re likely to repay a loan. They filter what we see on social media, sort through resumes, and evaluate job performance. They inform prison sentences and monitor our health. Most of these algorithms have been created with good intentions. The goal is to replace subjective judgments with objective measurements. But it doesn’t always work out like that.
“I don’t think mathematical models are inherently evil — I think it’s the way they’re used that are evil,” says mathematician Cathy O’Neil, author of the book Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. She has studied number theory, worked as a data scientist at start-ups, and built predictive algorithms for various private enterprises. Through her work, she’s become critical about the influence of poorly-designed algorithms.

Design

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