The Rosenfeld Review Podcast
Lou Rosenfeld talks with a LOT of brilliant, interesting changemakers in the UX world and beyond. Subscribe to the Rosenfeld Review—or check out all 200+ episodes—wherever you get your podcasts:
Lou Rosenfeld talks with a LOT of brilliant, interesting changemakers in the UX world and beyond. Subscribe to the Rosenfeld Review—or check out all 200+ episodes—wherever you get your podcasts:
Featured Episodes
Destigmatizing Failure to Encourage Innovation with Dan Ward
Military technologist Dan Ward shares his innovation team’s unique approach to failure: celebrating it with “failure cake.” This ritual helps his team process setbacks, learn from them, and destigmatize failure in a supportive environment. He also emphasizes the importance of storytelling, arguing that even the best ideas are meaningless if they can’t be communicated clearly. The conversation highlights how embracing failure and sharing its lessons are essential for growth, whether in aviation, design, or technology.
A Designer Fighting Climate Change with Brandon Schauer
What keeps you up at night? For Brandon Schauer, it was climate change. In his conversation with Lou, they discuss his education and career path, highlighting his leadership role at Adaptive Path where the agency thrived by sharing knowledge and empowering new talent. Brandon also shares how his design background continues to influence his work at Rare, particularly in “behavior placement”—a method of subtly integrating eco-friendly choices into entertainment to normalize sustainable behaviors. He emphasizes the soft power designers hold, noting how they can integrate sustainability into their work, even if their roles aren’t explicitly focused on climate. By doing so, designers can influence corporate decisions and consumer behaviors, helping to create a shift toward more sustainable norms in everyday life.
Envisioning and Creating New York City’s Next Park with Rosa Chang
In this episode, Rosa Chang discusses the process of bringing her idea to the public, emphasizing the importance of listening to the community and allowing the vision to evolve through conversations. Rather than adhering to a rigid design from the start, she facilitates discussions with local stakeholders to ensure the park meets the needs of the people it serves. She highlights the significance of respecting the space’s history while meeting contemporary needs.
The Roots of Inclusion with Victor Udoewa
We hear a lot about diversity, equity, and inclusion, but you probably haven’t heard it like this. Nigerian-born Victor Udoewa, service design lead at the Centers for Disease Control’s Office of Public Health Data, Surveillance, and Technology, brings a beautiful perspective that challenges current research methodologies.
Victor introduces the notion of the pluriverse, emphasizing that people inhabit different worlds with unique ways of being and knowing. He draws attention to the diverse perspectives that shape people’s beliefs and understanding, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging and bridging these gaps.
This episode is just a taste of Victor’s talk at the upcoming in-person Advancing Research Conference, “Beyond Methods and Diversity: The Roots of Inclusion.”
The Evolution of User Research with Steve Portigal
Author, researcher, speaker, and frequent Rosenfeld Review guest Steve Portigal joins Lou for a chat on the state of the user research industry – where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re headed. If the field of research was once a lonely desert, today it’s a jungle. It was once a field where researchers could get lost and forgotten. Today, the field is teaming with life—so much so that you could get eaten alive.
Gleaning lessons from the past, Steve doesn’t want us to forget the desert. But he has no desire to return there.
In his chat with Lou, they look back, and they look ahead. They discuss shifts in community and networking, and how research agencies are being replaced by in-house research teams. Finally, the two discuss Steve’s role in the upcoming, in-person Advancing Research conference in Queens, New York.
The Beautiful Mess of Product Development with John Cutler
Today’s interview is just a taste of what you’ll learn at Rosenfeld’s upcoming Design in Product conference—featuring John Cutler’s closing keynote. John is the senior director of product management at Toast, a doodler, a former band member, a UX researcher, and business analyst. He’s also the prolific writer behind “The Beautiful Mess, a Substack newsletter with over 36,000 subscribers, where he writes about cross-functional product management—especially the messy parts.
As someone who likes “messy, creative endeavors” and building things with other people, John enjoys unpacking the complicated parts of collaboration, getting to the heart of messes, and finding a way forward involves much more than identifying patterns.
John finds that each person’s frame or perspective is only one of many. This is one reason the relationship between product and design is a complicated ecosystem, and the whole system—not just a part—needs to evolve together.
Listen now
Pain and Curiosity Precede Successful Design Systems Change with Dan Mall
While we’ve been developing design systems for years, we’re only just now learning how to create systems that are successful and sustainable. Dan Mall is the author of the soon-to-be released Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice, which explores the cultural elements that contribute to sustainable design systems.
Not surprisingly, it’s usually pain that motivates change. In fact, companies occupying the number one spot in their respective markets usually have the least incentive to change. As the saying goes, “Number two tries harder.” But even in the most-ready-for-change scenarios, design systems sit, at best, at a third level of priority. Dan asserts that the challenge is to approach design systems as a byproduct of the products and features that bring customers value. Otherwise, design systems will always be on the backburner.
Listen now
A Proactive Approach to Inclusive Design with Zariah Cameron
Zariah Cameron is Co-Director of Community + Research and the founder of AEI – Advocate, Educate, Innovate Black Design. She will be a speaker at October’s DesignOps Summit on streamlining an inclusive design practice.
Many companies and corporations have good intentions when it comes to inclusive design. But too often that’s where things both start and stop. Zariah helps companies operationalize their inclusive design principles and ideals by looking at design from all angles and instilling effective processes.
When exploring ideals of equity and inclusivity, many confuse inclusivity with accessibility. Accessibility is a fine place to start, but it’s just the beginning. Accessibility tends to be passive while inclusivity is active. Inclusive design proactively seeks out the marginalized, the underserved, and minority groups. It doesn’t make assumptions but seeks input, feedback, and follow-through.
Jenae Cohn on Designing for Learning
Jenae Cohn is executive director at the Center for Teaching and Learning at UC Berkeley and, along with Michael Greer, author of the new book Design for Learning: User Experience in Online Teaching and Learning. Jenae and Michael’s book helps designers create compelling educational content. Think of it as required reading for anyone designing an online course, webinar, training, or workshop.
As designers get started on creating online instructional material, Jenae reminds them to be kind to themselves. After all, designing for learners is an iterative learning process. Also, it’s critical to create checkpoints and opportunities along the way to garner feedback. With the aid of Jenae and Michael’s book, we can depart from the days of dull online courses and make them truly vibrant spaces of growth.
Boon Yew Chew on Systems Thinking as a Relational Tool
Boon Yew Chew is senior principal UX designer at Elsevier and an IxDA local leader and board alumn. He will be a speaker at the upcoming 2023 Enterprise UX Conference on June 6th and 7th, delivering a session on “Making Sense of Systems – and Using Systems to Make Sense of the Enterprise.”
Systems thinking can seem abstract and theoretical, but Boon reveals some unexpected ways that systems thinking can have a profound impact on individuals and relationships within organizations. Who knew that systems thinking could be an emotional intelligence tool?
Donna Lichaw on Leadership Superpowers and Kryptonite
Not too long ago, Donna Lichaw, author of The User’s Journey, was helping companies solve product problems by organizing the experience of a product or service into a narrative arc where the user is the hero.
Then she ran into a question that she couldn’t shake — a question that, once answered, would morph her business from product development to leadership development. The question unveiled a people problem rather than a product problem.
Ren Pope on Ontology in the Digital Age
Ren Pope has a passion for all things data, information, and knowledge, and he strives to make them more accessible, organized, and enduring. You may be surprised that this conversation about information architecture takes us back to classic Greek philosophy, specifically ontology, which is concerned with the nature of being—that is, what is real and not real.
What is inside a computer cannot be seen, yet it is real in the sense that it has value and can impact reality. And as a modern ontologist, Ren wants to make information accessible and useful. That often starts with assigning names to things—nouns and verbs to label the functions of an organization so that things can be indexed, searched, retrieved, crosslinked, and so that relationships can be defined through metadata.
Erica Jorgensen on Tools and Techniques for Testing your Content
Erica Jorgensen is one of Rosenfeld Media’s newest authors with the publication of her book, Strategic Content Design: Tools and Research Techniques for Better UX. With a background in journalism, her book draws on her experiences as a content designer with the likes of Chewy, Microsoft, Slack, Amazon, Starbucks, Nordstrom, and Expedia.
Erica’s book is a toolkit of research techniques for anyone struggling to create content that makes an impact. Not all companies have dedicated research budgets or teams, yet research can save us from redos and yield more targeted, effective content.
Lisanne Norman on Why She Left UX Research
Lisanne Norman entered the tech field as a UX researcher in 2015 and quickly advanced to lead researcher at Dell, then Visa. She founded Black UX Austin and was the UX lead researcher at Gusto.
And then she left in 2022. Because she had had enough. And because she wanted to make a difference.
