Show notes

How are designers tackling the idea of ethics? We start the episode with Alan using politics and democracy as a vehicle for highlighting the importance of ethics in our work as digital practitioners and the massive impact our work has on the world.

We are the creators of the channels of misinformation and we can do something about it.

We put two UX Podcast “heptascale” questions to Alan – and when we posed the second question to him how much designers should know about code, the flood gates opened and Alan gave us his perspective on this topic that regularly gets raised in our industry.

A Little warning: Alan uses some strong language at a few points during the show.

(Listening time: 28 minutes, transcript)

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4 comments on #155 Channels of misinformation with Alan Cooper

  1. Emile says:

    Love this interview! What a great guy.

  2. KevinD says:

    I’m a developer and a designer; it’s a good skillset to have if you prefer small software shops. There is no good reason why UX practitioners can’t be both. Just a few design principles will get you quite far, and you also have the perspective that you can convince more of the programmer-only types that seemingly pie-in-the-sky design ideas are eminently instantiable with just a bit of work. The programming side offers you a continuing refresher on what UI toolkits are currently available, and also keeps your use case and scenario development tight and crisp. I’m not sure why “hard” and “expensive” are dichotomized in the podcast — they usually amount to the same thing. Hard things take longer to do, thus more expensive. I think the real problem is that programmers need to be convinced that the “hard” thing isn’t as hard as it looks, they just need to break out of the only-what’s-in-the-API mindset and become a bit creative again.

    Minor quibble: please don’t type during the recording, it dominates twitchy attention spans such as mine ;).

    Thanks,
    Kevin

  3. UX Podcast says:

    Thanks for the comment Kevin. As for the minor quibble… We had a problem with Alan’s locally recorded audio, so we had to use our backup recording from Skype which unfortunately has keyboard sound from James typing mixed in with it. We normally try to avoid using the Skype audio for interviews, but we’re going to make a note to avoid keyboards in the future to make the backup audio better should we need to use it in the future!

  4. KevinD says:

    Ah. Much thx for the explanation! Understood.

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