We believe in transparency. Whitney Hess has inspired us many times over the years. When we saw her 2020 Annual Report, we realised that we had to do something similar for UX Podcast.

In January 2017 we took the decision to stop accepting sponsors. This allows us to keep full editorial control. We have though continued our partnerships with specific events. These are non-financial partnerships and give us great opportunities for creating podcast content.

In 2019 we opened up the possibility for listeners to make financial contributions to help support the podcast. Not long after we started encouraging listeners to contribute with their time by volunteering to help us. We have volunteers that help us with both transcripts and publishing. Both forms of support are hugely valuable.

No-one will have missed that 2020 was a far from normal year. We, like so many others, have missed meeting fellow designers and podcast guests in person – but the podcast goes on!

We continued our “podstreak” of publishing an episode every other Friday. This is something we started with Episode 33 and have maintained to this day. That’s a continious publishing run of over 400 weeks. We also passed the milestone of 1.5m downloads.

Content

• 26 episodes.
• 3 “classic” episodes (repeats)
• 5 linkshows
• 1 topic show
• 17 interviews
• 10 American guests (including classic shows)
• 12 guests from the rest of the world
• 13 female guests

Due to the pandemic, we attended no conferences during 2020.

In 2020 we made an active effort to have a more globally diverse range of guests, and to reduce the number of American guests. We have also for a number of years tried to highlight female voices.

Listening figures

• 14,234 unique listeners on Spotify and 48,863 streams
• 2270 plays on Google Podcasts
• 366,971 downloads as measured through Blubrry (our podcast hosting provider)

We also were one of the top 100 technology podcasts in the USA on Spotify.

Episode 229 with Erika Hall the most downloaded and listened to podcast. It also had the most listeners during the first 30 and first 90 days of being released (Spotify data)

Episodes 239 (Storytelling with Anna Dalhström), 245 (Cognitive bias with David Thomas) and 232 (Design psychology with Amy Bucher) were also amongst the most listened to.

The repeat of our imposter syndrome interview from 2015 as episode 227 was also very popular.

Costs