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Top 10 The Funsize Show Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best The Funsize Show episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to The Funsize Show for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite The Funsize Show episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
09/14/20 • 49 min
Braden Kowitz is a former design partner at Google Ventures, where he had the opportunity to work with startups like ClassPass, Gusto, Slack, Medium, Flatiron Health, TuneIn, BlueBottle Coffee, 23andMe, One Medical Group, HubSpot, RetailMeNot, Nest and more. He is the co-author of NY Times Best Seller, Sprint, and the co-founder of Range, a tool that keeps teams connected and productive. We're extremely grateful to Braden for sharing his wealth of knowledge and experience with us. Get your notepads out for this one!
We cover:
- Some of the differences in Google design from when he entered and left
- How he got into Google Ventures and why
- His experience watching the explosion of the Design Sprint
- What Range does and who it serves
- The agency challenge of working with multiple cultures
- Working the way clients want to work during COVID-19
- Testing and validating new work methodologies
- Vulnerability and connection for teams
- The challenge of jumping responsibilities as a business owner
- Personal manuals
- More!
Hustle: The Intersection of Passions (with Greyson MacAlpine)
The Funsize Show
06/01/17 • 47 min
The intersection of passions is at the center of this talk with designer Greyson. She discusses her journey to learn skills enough to shift from graphic design to product design. After finding employment and working in that field in the bay area for a while she's now pushing herself again. Striking out on her own, she’s established a freelance collective full of designers with varied skill sets called Wild and Grey.
Greyson’s work in photography, and specifically portraiture, is a reflection of her passion for people-centered design. Considering her audience as individuals, rather than as generic users, enables Greyson to have deeper connection to the things she’s making. One of the keys to this is cognitive empathy, which relies on understanding, rather than absorbing, someone else’s experience.
Greyson discusses her journey and the importance, and challenges, of both finding and facilitating mentorship. Whether looking to gain a new skill, navigating freelance life, or feeling comfortable speaking at conferences, Greyson’s philosophy is: say yes, grab any opportunity you have to learn, and, ultimately, just make shit.
“Just make sh*t.”
On this episode we discuss :
- Diversity on design teams
- Designing for real life
- Importance of mentorship
- Human-centered design
- Advantages and challenges of freelance work
- Role of empathy and psychology in design
- Responses to criticism and building relationships with clients
You can see more of Greyson’s work, and learn about her freelance collective at her website: www.greysonmacalpine.com
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Hustle: Extraordinary Collaboration (with Michael Buzzard)
The Funsize Show
01/31/17 • 50 min
Mike Buzzard is a Design Manager on the UX Community and Culture team at Google where he works on shaping, resourcing, supporting, and guiding a range of programs and projects that are designed to ensure the health and success of UX at Google. He also recently helped design the first of its kind undergraduate degree in User Experience Design at Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). He’s currently working with other design leaders to elevate the craft of design in emerging design cities and is an investor and advisor to many awesome companies.
Previously, Mike co-founded the design agency Cuban Council with his friends and collaborators, Toke Nygaard and Michael Schmidt. They created a company that could focus on making great things the way they thought it should be made. In their 10 year run, they were able to design cutting edge digital product design solutions for companies like Facebook, Google, Zendesk, Rdio, Quora, Evernote, and Epitaph Records.
"It's hugely important to understand what you're capable of
contributing and being surprised with the outcome when you partner
with someone that brings a different aspect to the work.... When you
collaborate with people and get their input and perspective it can be
extraordinary and that's what gets me out of bed every day."
Back in day as a “Creative Developer”, he helped usher in early generations of web designers and digital product designers through his commitment and contributions to sites like k10k.net, newstoday.com, designiskinky.net, and many more.
On this episode we discuss:
- How Mike helps evangelize, elevate, and grow design at Google by
working with a wide array of design teams, design leadership,
business units, partners, and agencies. - What it was like doing web design back in the old school days when folks were hacking art and code to make unique web site and
discovering the vast opportunities. Remember pixel fonts? - The story of building Newstoday.com.
- His experience being hired by Brett Gurewitz from Bad Religion (one of his personal heros) to redesign Epitaph Record’s.
- How Cuban Council was started, how they grew, and why they eventually closed the doors.
- Why collaboration and a perspective of value is important to doing great work, and why it's important to always be sharing.
- Why designers needing to trust and believe that we’re “doing what’s right for people most of the time” and that before being
able to deliver a argument that's convincing and compelling, you
have to be confident. - The story about a time when a young Mark Zuckerberg asked him to define design while they were working on the Facebook Logo.
Follow Mike here:
@mbuzzard
www.zopilote.co
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Hustle: Not Just Advertising, Building
The Funsize Show
07/15/16 • 34 min
Rick & Anthony discuss a recent article entitled State of the Digital Nation 2016 by Jules Ehrhardt.
http://blog.marvelapp.com/state-of-the-digital-nation-2016/
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08/31/15 • 32 min
So, you’re a great designer - but do you know how to listen, drive a conversation, and build consensus with your clients, company, or teams? Ryan Rumsey, the Director of Experience Design at Electronic Arts IT, hops in the Funsize studio to share his knowledge and experiences in persuasion and building consensus with stakeholders in the enterprise world.
1:00
Ryan discussing his role as Director of Experience Design at Electronic Arts IT and his expertise in Enterprise User Experience Design. He also gives us an overview of some of the things he did in his previous role at Apple.
3:15
Apple’s hush hush culture. It’s easy designing software for Apple employees because everyone at Apple only uses Apple products.
5:40
Rick talks about his experience working on enterprise design projects. Ryan discusses some of the dynamics of working in an enterprise environment and the art of selling your design work to your internal stakeholders.
7:00
We discuss Ryan’s new article “Influence and Design Success - The art of letting others have your way”. As a design leader, it’s rare to be able to take credit for the pixel level work. Your job is to motivate and inspire your team to push the envelope and produce great outcomes. Sometimes when you know you have the right answer you just can’t push it. You have to be the muse and let other believe the idea was theirs. Ryan gives us an example about a project where he struggled with the stakeholder. It’s hard to tell a client no or that they are wrong, especially when there’s data to support it.
9:10
Ryan teaches us an old improv technique from his former life as a professional actor called “Yes, and?”. The scenario is that you accept what anyone said and simply add to it so you can help drive a conversation. When a stakeholder provides a comment in the heat of the moment that you don’t agree with or know is wrong, it’s always best to let them know that you heard them and that you will take some time to consider it. When you come back to the table, remind them of the conversation they brought up and elaborate on how it inspired you to think about the problem deeper and in devising the solution to meet the need. “With your inspiration I was able to create this!”
12:00
It’s not a design exercise, it’s about understanding your team or stakeholders personality or character so you can can build consensus and get designs approved.
14:30
We aren’t using these tactics for bad or for personal best interests. It’s for the good of helping our clients and stakeholders achieve desired business outcomes and ultimately success with products people love.
“Knowing the users and having empathy for them isn’t always going to
resonate with them.”
16:00
Defending your work properly. Many of the people that tell you “no” or that you're wrong are highly successful individuals that get shit done. If you can help them get a win, then all of a sudden they will become a massive advocate. Your gut reaction is many times right but don’t just react or build. Take time to process. Learn to shut up and let things go. Let people know you heard and listened and that you’ll consider it. Instead of design lingo learn to use persuasive business words that business people understand.
18:30
How design teams can leverage these principles to build vision, consensus, plans, and designs that everyone can believe in. Use design thinking practices! Use principles and values to ensure you’re on the same page. If you don’t have any structure or framework it can be hard to know where to apply your creativity, and that makes for very dispersed shotgun approaches - and can end up focusing on things that actually might not need creativity. Hence, design language and UI frameworks. Creativity lives within structure. When things stop working, it’s time to look at your principles.
“Principles are uncovered, not necessarily developed.”
23:00
Rick and Anthony discuss how we onboard new clients to introduce our new Client Partners to Funsize, our principles, process, and our company culture.
28:00
We couldn’t find that Staind video so please tweet us if you find it!
29:00
A sidebar conversation reminiscing about a punk rock era.
31:00
Hustle Podcast Season 1 conclusion and announcement of Season 2.
Links
08/07/15 • 29 min
Brandon Breitenbach is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pare Booking, a kick ass digital product that’s changing the way musicians and artists book shows and get paid. Recently, Brandon stopped by the studio while visiting Funsize to discuss the history of our working relationship, how we made decisions, the process and tools we used and what the ideal client and design agency relationship can look and feel like.
2:00
Introduction to the Pare Booking's product and user experience. Pare Booking modernizes the process for musicians and artists to book shows, manage contracts, and get paid.
4:00
Brandon’s share's his music and music booking industry background.
4:47
How Funsize met Pare Booking. Brandon and Anthony talk about the history of how Pare Booking and Funsize found each other and how quickly we were able to get started.
6:25
Why Pare Booking chose to work with Funsize. Brandon talks about what it feels like to hire a design and development vendors. Joel Beukelman recommended they work with Funsize and Brandon trusted his friend and moved forward. You can usually tell at the first conversation if there’s a match between a client and an agency. You gotta follow your gut!
8:20
Phi talks about how awesome it is to be held accountable but also to have the breathing room and trust to move forward in making design decisions.
9:00
Brandon discusses his experience working relationship with Funsize. Phi shares how we used Sketch and Marvel, two completely new tools on this project, to maximize our effort and time, and how we crafted a unique design process to be able to design the MVP app in a very short period of time.
10:50
Clients are subject matter experts. Sometimes designers don’t always know “what’s best”.
11:40
A dream client is one that that has good taste.
12:30
We discuss conceptual design, atomic design, and how they were applied in the Pare Booking project. For Pare Booking, Funsize presented multiple concepts as screen designs supplemented with mood boards/style tiles to expand on the concepts voice, feel, and visual language. This is a good way to explore and create the personality of the brand or product, outside of just focusing on what it can look like. For Pare, this lets them see the scope of the “why” behind each concept.
15:19
“We didn’t have a brand or identity when we started this project...”
16:09
Brandon mentioned that 3 concepts was just the right amount. If we had delivered any more it would have been overwhelming for him. Brandon was playing golf (and left at the 16th hole!) when he reviewed our concepts for the first time.
17:10
Brandon and Anthony talk about what’s it’s like working together in an agile design engagement. What worked was the amount of communication and transparency Pare and Funsize had throughout the project. This resulted in a high amount of trust. Both companies did their part in getting each other what the other needed to be successful.
19:45
How Funsize uses [Pivotal Tracker to manage design sprints and transparency with our team, clients, and stakeholders. Keeping your team's best interest in mind while estimating design sprint stories will help create the best work possible. Pare has now adopted Pivotal Tracker as their internal product management tool. We recall [Hustle Season 1, Episode 7: "Death to Time Tracking", where we talked about how Funsize stopped time tracking and how Pivotal Tracker has been critical in allowing the client and agency relationship to flourish.
22:50
Pare Booking was the first project in which Funsize used Sketch 100% through the duration of the project from wireframes to finished design. Phi talks about the advantages of Sketch and how it helped meet our project objectives and save time.
25:00
Whether you use Photoshop or Sketch, having a system in place to dynamically design empowers the designer to make a change in the overall design without having to worry about accumulating unnecessary design debt.
26:19
“I will use Funsize as long as I possibly can.”
26:30
Pare’s iPhone app is launching in the Apple App store between August and September 2015. If you’re a touring musician, artist, or speaker, please check out www.parebooking.com and sign up for early access!
27:00
Check out Funsize's Pare Booking Dribble Collection to see what the Pare Booking design will look like. Also feel free to demo the Pare Marvel Prototype for a hands-on experience with the app's design and user experience.
27:40
Rick announce...
Hustle: Whose Job is UX? (feat. Peter Merholz)
The Funsize Show
05/05/15 • 48 min
Show Notes:
- 0:55 Rick is back from paternity leave. His new son is awesome.
- 1:11 Joining us on this episode is the Senior Director of Design at Jawbone, friend of Funsize, and a hugely inspirational designer, Mr. Peter Merholz.
- 1:30 Anthony chronicles Peter's background with the international consulting firm, Adaptive Path, which is perhaps best known for championing "User Experience."
- 1:50 Fun Peter Merholz facts: Peter hired Funsize while at Groupon and was Funsize's first client. Thanks, Peter! He also coined the term 'blog'.
- 3:44 Fun fact about the new Up4 from Jawbone is that it can do NFC payments!
- 4:00 The theme for this episode was conceived following Peter's blog post "There's no such thing as UX design."
- 5:20 Don Norman, credited with the coining the term User Experience in the early 90s, created the User Experience Architect's office at Apple.
- 6:25 Initially, Adaptive Path considered themselves a user experience consultancy because no one else was talking about user experience at the time. The term "design" was an avoided term because designers were not involved in product strategy, often reduced to pixel pushers and production workers.
- 8:40 "User experience is an outcome, not a practice." - Peter Merholz. There are many contributing factors to good or bad user experience, but design is only one part of the whole.
- 9:32 User experience designers were actually interaction designers, information architects, or other designers cloaking themselves with the phrase because it sounded good.
- 11:11 Picking apart the concept of the "User Experience Designer." A litmus test for the viability of the "User Experience Designer" career path: How would one grow as a UX designer? What's that path or evolution look like?
- 14:20 The thing that we call "User Experience design" may fit in two buckets: 1) Product Management & 2) Design Execution.
- 15:00 A historic lapse in balanced Product Management may have generated "User Experience Design."
- 17:00 Product designers began to create a set of user research & persona development practices in order to ensure product strategy would not forget to acknowledge the user.
- 18:20 Strategically-minded designers can lead products as well as strategically-minded engineers or business persons.
- 21:55 If we do call "User Experience Designer" a profession, it would be best compared to a film director.
- 25:00 Anyone who tells you they've figured out how the formula for the perfect product team is lying to you.
- 25:50 Peter eventually left consulting because he found the relationship they had with clients wasn't leveraging his agency enough impact on final products. Peter effortlessly flips the interview around on Funsize to discuss how we ensure impact with clients and products.
- 28:00 Funsize discusses our team structures and project pacing.
- 29:25 We share about a tactical program we run called Special Ops, in which designers may do work that can help steer the product in the direction we believe it should go. Special Ops often strengthens our impact within the client organization.
- 32:00 We discuss pairing design teams with clients and the importance spreading out designer's velocity across more than one project at a time. No designer works alone!
- 33:45 We talk about the problems with in-house designers at product companies and how to avoid driving designers insane.
- 35:00 Peter discusses tactical hiring decisions and team formation at Groupon, to which he gives credit for stronger impact of designers and decisions.
- 38:30 We recall our discussion with our friends at Adobe, where we learned that there's two designers to 60+ engineers at Photoshop.
- 39:00 Peter recalls hiring outside design support while at Groupon.
- 42:15 We note how, for consultancies, it's becoming just as important to help the people and companies you work with hiring internal teams as it is to help them with needed design work.
- 43:00 Design teams in an organization are very different from other types of teams, and they shouldn't be structured or managed as though they were...
04/10/15 • 45 min
It’s a wonderful time to be a product designer. There's more design and prototyping tools available to us than ever before (and more and more keep popping up). It’s safe to say we’ll all be using these tools in various ways to achieve the specific results we need. Keynote is a fantastic low-barrier-of-entry tool that allows product managers, designers, and marketing professionals to achieve product success while maximizing time
In this special SXSW '15 Hustle/Balance Podcast cross-over episode, Joel Beukelman and Ted Boda talk about how Keynote has allowed cross discipline teams at Google, Nest, and Netflix to work quickly and efficiently together to craft great products.
Show Notes:
- 0:45 Drinking bourbon and opening up the show
- 1:30 Joel talks about his new job at Google working on Android Auto, how he and Ted started working with Keynote for prototyping at Netflix, and the inspiration of the Balance Podcast.
- 3:30 Ted introduces himself and his experience working on the Keynote team at Apple, Nest, and his new exciting projects.
- 4:55 “Keynote is my entire design tool.” - Joel
- 4:55 Keynote has all the features you need to plan, design, build consensus, track changes, present and spec your entire product; and can maximize valuable time.
- 9:50 Keynote does everything you need to do 80-90% really well in one tool.
- 10:50 Ted talks about presenting Design to Steve Jobs.
- 13:27 There are sooo many prototyping tools available today.
- 20:00 Just show me the damn thing! Oh that’s the thing!
- 23:40 Pixel pretty damn perfect. Your mock doesn’t matter. Even if your design is perfect the engineer isn’t going to necessarily make it perfect.
- 24:22 You’re at an advantage if you're working on a project with an established visual identity.
- 32:58 When you’re at a big product company it’s all about money and conversion and testing. The last 25% is the polish that happens in implementation.
- 34:00 You have to know the voice of your product and Keynote makes it easy for writers to hop in and do their work.
- 37:30 Details matter. When you’re doing something wrong for the driving context people could die.
- 39:00 Use the tools that works best for you. Joel and Ted prefer tools that save time.
- 41:25 Get ted and Joel to do a workshop at your company at www.keynote.com
- 43:23 Joel runs out of Bourbon.
###Links:
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Subscribe to The Funsize Digest
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02/13/15 • 35 min
Currents: Good Design vs. Beautiful Design (with Tony Sanchez and Anthony Armendariz)
The Funsize Show
10/22/24 • 24 min
In this episode, Tony and Anthony explore the nuanced distinctions between good and beautiful design. They consider the subjectivity of beauty, influenced by cultural and individual preferences, and the importance of usability and business objectives and what constitutes “good” design. Citing a mobile game that succeeds commercially and the unconventional design of the Cybertruck, they underline the tension between aesthetics and functionality. The conversation shifts to natural phenomena like the Northern Lights and the balance between awe-inspiring visuals and the tendency to overlook everyday wonders.
Follow Tony and Anthony on
X: Tony Sanchez Anthony Armendariz
Linkedin: Tony Sanchez Anthony Armendariz
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Check out more exciting episodes on the Funsize Show Website.
Web: www.funsize.co. | Instagram: @funsizeco | X: @funsize
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FAQ
How many episodes does The Funsize Show have?
The Funsize Show currently has 104 episodes available.
What topics does The Funsize Show cover?
The podcast is about Ios, Web, Design, Software, Podcasts, Project Management, Arts, App, Business, Innovation, Android and Careers.
What is the most popular episode on The Funsize Show?
The episode title 'Hustle: Good Managers Garden (Juliana Vislova, Mercury)' is the most popular.
What is the average episode length on The Funsize Show?
The average episode length on The Funsize Show is 43 minutes.
How often are episodes of The Funsize Show released?
Episodes of The Funsize Show are typically released every 19 days, 15 hours.
When was the first episode of The Funsize Show?
The first episode of The Funsize Show was released on Oct 23, 2013.
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