Product design isn’t just about creating beautiful interfaces. It’s also about building a user experience. Behind every intuitive product design are countless hours of strategy, research, and iterative improvements.
As with anything creative, inspiration and collaboration go a long way. One source of inspiration can be your actual users—the feedback that users leave is invaluable at picking up on what’s working in your design and what should be tweaked. Yet another opportunity to inspire new and improved ideas is advice offered by fellow designers. To find this advice, podcasts are a fantastic learning resource. We put together a list of our favorite UX podcasts for you to listen to while you’re at work, on your commute, or just need a little inspiration.
1. User Defenders—Interviews with Top Design Experts
What you’ll learn from the podcast:
The User Defenders podcast, hosted by Jason Ogle, highlights user experience content and aims to tackle UX design questions through discussions with current UX design “superheroes” and their strategies for success. With a table of contents in each podcast stamping the time of each topic, it’s easy to find what you are looking for. If you like what you heard and want to learn more, there are links to articles, books, people, and studies that are referenced throughout the podcast.
There are also accessible transcripts that contain links and sometimes embedded content to direct you to further information, talks, and videos on the concepts and topics
presented throughout the podcast.
Top episodes we love:
- 054: UX Research on a Budget with Becca Kennedy: Guest speaker Becca Kennedy, Human Factors Psychologist and co-founder of Kennason, helps discuss collecting, analyzing, and applying user experience research under a budget. Learn strategies for designing quality UX without breaking the bank, techniques for putting the user first, and ways of building habits for ux success.
- 035: Minding the Product Gap with Samuel Hulick: Founder of UserOnboard.com, Samuel Hulick examines onboarding user flow teardowns of real life products to help others improve, replicate, and streamline their onboarding process for better engagement and retention.
2. Navigating the Customer Experience—Essential Tips for Customer Delight
What you’ll learn from the podcast:
Hosted by Yanique Grant, the Navigating the Customer Experience is a UX podcast that aims to instill unique, innovative strategies and techniques that listeners can integrate immediately into their own businesses, work culture, and workflows. Interviews with entrepreneurs, authors, and other experts in the UX field gives listeners real-life advice, tools, and insights that can be turned into practical applications for your business.
Top episodes we love:
- Episode 074: How To Achieve Fiercely Loyal Customers with Sandy Rogers: Learn how to not just drive engagement, but foster true customer loyalty by listening to your users and providing them what they want. Check out Rogers’ book, Leading Loyalty: Cracking the Code to Customer Devotion for more on gaining deep loyalty through UX design and development.
- Episode 031: Humanizing the Online Experience with Dan de Witte: Podcast guest Dan de Witte, a digital strategist and business coach, reminds us to humanize the user when thinking about online experiences in order to improve your UX design. Despite needing to dig deep into analytics, it’s important to remember that your content, service, or product is still aimed at a person. The better you’re able to connect with your users, the more they will connect with your product.
3. Creative Pep Talk—Motivational Talks on Design Strategy
What you’ll learn from the podcast:
Created and hosted by Andy J. Miller—aka Andy J. Pizza—freelance illustrator with a graphic design background, Creative Pep Talk captures Miller’s passion and energy for merging creativity with business. With analogies, personal stories, and artist interviews, Miller approaches UX design strategy from an artistic perspective, ensuring that each iteration of your product is eye-catching and engaging.
Top episodes we love:
- 229 – The 6 Step Process to Unlock Powerful Creative Business Momentum: If you’ve put in your 10,000 hours of practicing your craft and still don’t feel like you’ve caught the break you need, learn the six steps to help utilize your creativity and focus it towards business development and success.
- 183 – How to Relight Your Fire: When it comes to creative work, it’s easy to hit roadblocks that affect the quality and quantity of your output. Listen to this episode for advice on how to get back on track, learn to focus your attention and efforts, and develop strategies for getting through creative lulls.
4. High Resolution—Topics on Product and Design
What you’ll learn from the podcast:
Tackling product design and UX design thinking from leading minds, High Resolution features video interviews with leading industry experts. Hosted by Bobby Ghoshal and Jared Erondu, the user experience podcast teaches you how the best companies in the industry approach, communicate, and deploy design strategies. As a limited video series, the experience feels more focused, directed, and guided.
Top episodes we love:
- Rochelle King (Spotify): Former VP of Design at Spotify and current VP Creative Production at Netflix, Rochelle King talks about data awareness, positively debating ideas within your team, and listening to both your team and your users to improve your processes and your product. She believes in empowering the design process rather than strictly defining it. King suggests that you should give designers the tools to produce effectively and help channel their talents to integrate with the needs of the business.
- Katie Dill (Airbnb): Recent Director of Experience Design at Airbnb and current VP of Design at Lyft, Katie Dill explores the problems with UX being too focused on the look and style in the design rather than how the user interacts with the product. Listen to this podcast to develop a customer-centric mindset when designing your product’s UX.
5. The Hacking UI Podcast—Conversations on Design Thinking
What you’ll learn from the podcast:
Hosts Sagi Shrieber and David Tintener help designers and developers tap into their entrepreneurial spirit by discussing how to build products with top-notch UI. Key points and links from the show help you review and reinforce the main concepts discussed. Episode transcripts can also be downloaded if you prefer to read rather than listen.
Top episodes we love:
- Influencing an industry and building a personal brand with Khoi Vinh (Principal Designer, Adobe): Previous Design Director at The New York Times and current Principal Designer at Adobe, guest Khoi Vinh explores how storytelling helps you connect with customers and examines ways designers can stay creative as they produce continuous iterations.
- Have fun, create value and do it consistently (w/Noah Kagan, Sumo.com & AppSumo.com): A gifted entrepreneur working as a marketing specialist and business consultant, Noah Kagan is the founder of Sumo.com, AppSumo.com, and OkDork. Learn tips to help you build an online presence for a business or personal brand, how to build a successful team, and how to set manageable goals that will help your UI design process.
6. UI Breakfast Podcast—Expert Advice on UX/UI
What you’ll learn from the podcast:
Independent UI/UX consultant, co-founder of Userlist.io, and author of Your Productized Consulting Guide, Jane Portman runs this product design podcast to help SaaS companies build focused, profitable web applications. This UI podcast is all about making your user interface and user experience accessible.
Top episodes we love:
- Episode 137: Lean, Agile & Design Thinking with Jeff Gothelf: Author of Lean UX and Sense & Respond, Jeff Gothelf helps you look at everything you create—from content to policies—as a product with an intended outcome. You should always be considering how to leverage UX and UI for positive product impact.
- Episode 121: Managing Customer Feedback with Sofia Quintero: Guest speaker Sofia Quintero, founder and CEO of EnjoyHQ, joins the podcast to talk about her previous experiences and her current initiatives. She conveys the value of listening to your user feedback to improve your product UX and marketing.
7. UX and Growth Podcast—Exploring the Relationship Between Product Growth and User Experience
What you’ll learn from the podcast:
Co-hosted by Austin Knight and a new guest speaker each time, this is one of the best UX design podcasts. Featuring guest speakers leading their fields, this web design podcast helps bring practical, real-world experience into a discussion so others can learn and grow. In this podcast series, you’ll find actionable tips and strategies from experts.
Top episodes we love:
- Balancing Design & Conversion with Dr. David Darmanin (CEO of Hotjar): With the help of Dr. David Darmanin, learn where design and conversion intersect and attempt to tear down whether aesthetics of design can be quantified through data analytics. With the attitude that it’s designers’ responsibility to fine-tune and perfect the product, you’ll gain tips on how to mesh your design with retention and conversion objectives.
- Personas, Content, and Growth Marketing with Anum Hussain (Senior Growth Marketer at HubSpot): Guest speaker Anum Hussain, co-founder of acciyo and formerly at Snapchat and HubSpot, looks at how content, user personas, and other factors impact your growth. Listen to this episode to find ways to perfect your UX through data analytics and product adjustment.
Your users always come first. A strong user experience is the foundation of sustainable product growth and is directly linked to user retention and engagement. Designing a high-impact UX that users love isn’t easy though. It takes creativity, experimentation, and the ability to understand how to build something that users love. We hope you use this collection of the best ux podcasts, along with the best product manager books, to help you and your team put the user first at every step of product design.
For even more podcast inspiration, check out our complete list of product-related podcasts, from agile to analytics.
