Bear Academy

Brendan Jarvis shared what he learned from 2 years of podcasting experience on finding and interviewing top UX influencers.

Highlights

💡 A better experience for guests and audience: look at the camera and active listening

💡 Be authentic or professional?

💡 How to find guests for a UX podcast?

💡 How to get the workflow organised?

💡 How to deal with “I don’t want to do it today”

💡 Tips for releasing a high-quality podcast every week?

Who is Brendan Jarvis

Brendan Jarvis is the Managing Founder and Principal Researcher of The Space InBetween - New Zealand’s only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab: enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design, and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture.

Website: https://thespaceinbetween.co.nz/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brendanjarvis/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/brendanjarvis

Timestamp

[12:39] A great tip for online communication: look at the camera, listen carefully

[17:33] Tip for managing podcasting: batch the invites

[18:25] Tip for managing a podcast: templates for show notes, LinkedIn posts, tweets etc.

[19:23] Spend at least 1 day preparing for each episode

[21:20] Practice writing questions like speaking, so that don’t need to check the notes often, just go naturally during the conversation

[26:21] The difference of being authentic or being professional?

[33:08] How to find guests for his podcast

[40:45] How to save time? Hire a professional editor!

[46:20] Challenge for making a podcast: finding his voice on the podcast

People or things we mentioned

Brave UX with Brendan Jarvis

Jared Spool

Interviewing Users by Steve Portigal

Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

Seth Godin

Fiverr for finding a podcast editor

On Writing by Stephen King

Tim Ferriss on podcasting and blog

A couple of weeks ago, I joined a podcast (Chiwi Journal) interview and shared my journey of being a bilingual content creator. With the host's permission, I shared this interview on my podcast as well.

In this episode, we talked about:

How do Chinese people pick up their English names?

From working at a ‘tier 18’ city in China as a designer and building a business in web2 to migrant to New Zealand to raise a family —- Bear’s story as an immigrant.

How to navigate life while moving to a new country, finding a new job and welcoming a newborn at the same time?

Why is it essential to have a role model to learn and mimic, especially in difficult life moments?

What does it feel like to start a tech podcast in 2012 and win an award from Apple?

What motivates Chinese speakers to create content in English? What emotional journey did we go through?

How create content online can change people’s life?

Two tips on being a productive content creator that can keep publishing content consistently.

What tools do we use as bilingual content creators? How to find our audiences, and how to measure success?

How to start a content creator journey while still working full-time and having a family to look after？

What’s the NO.1 lesson to pass on to the next generation?

Enjoy :)

Listening to an audiobook is a great way to learn new things, but you are more likely to forget most of the learnings as taking notes from an audiobook is tricky. I’ll show you a tip to help you better review what you’ve learned from an audiobook, and remember most of the key points. Sounds too good to be true? Check it to see if this approach suits you!

You might heard of 10000 hours rule by Malcolm Gladwell, which is to invest 10000 hours to master something. But how do you know which domain you would like to spend 10000 hours in the beginning? Introducing my 10 hours theory. Actually, it's 10,100,1000,10000 hours theory. By investing 10 hours at the very beginning, you can make sure the rest of 9990 hours you will spend is a good investment.

The making of a manager by Julie Zhuo is an awesome book for designers and design managers. It sounds like it's written for a new manager but I found it insightful and helpful for all the professionals working with other people. You will learn the mindsets, goals, and struggles of a manager, and better collaborate with your own manager. Also, if becoming a manager is your career goal, this is a must-read.

A Designer can also learn some practical tips from this book, such as running a successful design critique, managing time and how communicating with different teams. I like the clear and easy-understanding language which makes the reading experience so good. It's also an inspiration for immigrants like myself: put some effort, determination and consistency into something you love/are good at, such as writing for Julie, and the result will be the best you can imagine.

7 #tips for presenting your design work like a pro! Presentation is an essential skill for designers, and sometimes it might be overwhelming. Last week, I did a presentation with a wider audience to share what I work at in last 6 months in 12 minutes. The result was great, and I found some of my personal design presentation tips might be helpful for other designers to share or presenting design work.

Confident career decisions? It's always hard to make career decisions, no need to say to decide confidently. How do I know if it's the right choice,? As a design mentor, I've been asked this question many times: what if I don't know which way to choose as my career direction?

My answer is to define what you should know and get the answers in the cheapest and fastest ways. You can do these 3 things for research in a short time, and be able to figure out if your dream job is actually worth putting effort into. After that, you should be able to make confident career decisions :)

We all know that uncertainties are something for certain in these years, and 2022 will not different at all. Any career tips 2022 for designer? I wrote a tips list for myself as a reminder for my career in 2022, and I think it might be helpful for many people here.

Why comics are so popular? What's the secret in comics? How to read comics and most importantly for designers: what's the top tip/secret we can borrow from comics to our work? In this video, I want to share a few thoughts on Scott McCloud's awesome book: Understanding Comics.

Finally read Just Enough Research by Erika Hall,, which has been on my reading list for a while. Wow! I feel bad after reading this book: why didn’t I read it when I started my UX design career!? I would avoid so many pitfalls and have many better outcomes if I followed some research suggestions from this book!

If you need a just enough summary for this book, Erika summarised it in this awesome video [https://lnkd.in/gRQcm__S](https://lnkd.in/gRQcm__S)SS). Five things that blew my design mind from this book:

1️⃣ Surveys are the most difficult research method of all.

2️⃣ Test a competitor’s product before you even put pencil to paper. Then test some sketches. And then test at every stage as much as you can.

3️⃣ When blue-sky thinking meets reality, reality always wins.

4️⃣ The first rule of user research: never ask anyone what they want.(You risk the scope of your ideas being limited by the imaginations of others. )