BY: MOTIVATE DESIGN
Over the last decade, podcasts have taken the world by storm, with new shows springing up seemingly every day. For people on the go, podcasts provide a great way to keep up to date on a wide variety of subjects or explore new topics they’d like to learn about but don’t have the time to research.
The conversation driven format of podcasts make them an ideal medium for exploring topics in UX research and design. For people outside the field, UX podcasts offer a highly accessible look into how designers are thinking about ways to make the world more accessible and engaging. And for these designers themselves, podcasts are a great resource for learning how people within the field are thinking about the problems they may be facing in their own work.
Here are 5 Awesome Podcasts That UX Designers Should be Looking to for Inspiration:
1: UX Podcast
Hosted by Swedish designers James Royal-Lawson and Per Axbom, UX Podcast is a biweekly podcast that focuses on a wide range of big picture topics in UX design. Each guest brings interesting perspectives from their own work to help highlight the way UX design is driving innovative new technology and redefining the world we live in. The show has good production values, and Royal-Lawson and Axbom are entertaining hosts with terrific chemistry. They do a great job of making their guests feel comfortable, giving the show a breezy, laid back style that leaves you wishing the episodes lasted just a bit longer (the usually average about 30 minutes).
2: UI Breakfast: UI/UX Design and Product Strategy
Hosted by Jane Portman, a freelance UI/UX consultant from Russia, UI Breakfast gets a little deeper into the design weeds than other podcasts. Most of her guests are experts on some specific aspect of UX research and design, and together they explore the various methods and strategies they use to deliver better experiences for users. Released weekly and featuring a backlog of well over 100 episodes, UI Breakfast is tremendously educational and interesting. While the interview format is a bit formal, the discussions are engaging and consistently informative.
3: UXpod—User Experience Podcast
Australian UX consultant Gerry Gaffney hosts this somewhat bare bones, but extremely interesting podcast that focuses on high concept topics about how UX principles can help us better understand our everyday lives and how we can better design the future. While UXpod is one of the longer running UX podcasts out there (with episodes dating back to the early days of podcasting in 2006), it has a fairly inconsistent release schedule, usually about one episode each month. The show doesn’t have much in the way of fancy production values and the audio quality can be a little poor at times, but the content itself is great.
4: Metric—The User Experience Design Podcast
Hosted by UX developer Michael Schofield, Metric is probably the hippest podcast on this list. With good production values and a breezy, friendly interview format, the show veers through a variety of topics. It hits on topical UX issues in the news, but unlike some of other shows on this list, it also dedicates some time to exploring how people enter and work in the profession. The release schedule can be a bit inconsistent, but usually averages out to about one 30 minute episode a month.
5: User Defenders Podcast: Inspiring Interviews with UX Superheroes
Of all the podcasts on this list, User Defenders has the best branding and conceptual framework. Hosted by UX developer Jason Ogle, it mimics the popular format of “thought leader”-type podcasts like The Tim Ferriss Show, each episode focuses on the work of individual designers and how their work solves important design problems for users. The episodes are long enough (usually a little over an hour) for guests to go into into some detail about their background and experiences in the field of UX. While the show has great production values and is very well executed, listeners may take an episode or two to get used to Ogle’s voice, which can sound like a deliberate, laconic affectation when you first hear it.
While there are a number of other great podcasts out there, this batch should give both existing UX designers and people who want to learn more about the industry plenty of listening material to get started. Podcasters tend to be a fairly interconnected community, so you’ll likely discover more shows when hosts share what they’ve been listening to or have special guests on for an episode.
