Journal tags: audio

Crash!

Did somebody drop something?

Why, yes! It’s a new episode of The Clearleft Podcast. The episode that just dropped is all about onboarding:

How do you introduce users to product features without alienating or patronising them?

It’s a tidy fifteen and a half minutes long, featuring words of wisdom from product designer James Gilyead, content designer Jo Dimbleby, and of course UX designer Krystal Higgins, who literally wrote the book on better onboarding.

I interviewed James and Jo, and used snippets of a talk that Krystal gave at one of our UX events a little while back. Have a listen:

James and Jo talk worked on a project together for Sage where thy prototyped patterns for onboarding users to product features. You can find out more about the project:

The folks at Sage had a hunch that an overview screen might be valuable for their customers. They asked Clearleft to help them test this hypothesis.

Another Clearleftie, Chris How, wrote a chapter for the Customer Onboarding Handbook published by CX Lead. You can get the book and read his chapter called Ongoing Onboarding.

That idea of ongoing onboarding is something James talks about on the podcast, calling it “longboarding”:

We ended up coining the term longboarding to describe a transition from a new user to an established user.

He goes one better with the term “non-boarding”:

Some products you don’t realize have onboarded you. And I think that’s a huge compliment.

Listen to the whole episode to get the full story. And while you’re at it, subscribe to the podcast feed or subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Boom! The Clearleft podcast is back!

The first episode of season four just dropped. It’s all about design transformation.

I’ve got to be honest, this episode is a little inside baseball. It’s a bit navel-gazey and soul-searching as I pick apart the messaging emblazoned on the Clearleft website:

The design transformation consultancy.

Whereas most of the previous episodes of the podcast would be of interest to our peers—fellow designers—this one feels like it might of more interest to potential clients. But I hope it’s not too sales-y.

You’ll hear from Danish designer Maja Raunbak, and American in Amsterdam Nick Thiel as well as Clearleft’s own Chris Pearce. And I’ve sampled a talk from the Leading Design archives by Stuart Frisby.

The episode clocks in at a brisk eighteen and a half minutes. Have a listen.

While you’re at it, take this opportunity to subscribe to the Clearleft podcast on Overcast, Spotify, Apple, Google or by using a good ol’-fashioned RSS feed. That way the next episodes in the season will magically appear in your podcatching software of choice.

But I’m not making any promises about when that will be. Previously, I released new episodes in a season on a weekly basis. This time I’m going to release each episode whenever it’s ready. That might mean there’ll be a week or two between episodes. Or there might be a month or so between episodes.

I realise that this unpredictable release cycle is the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to do, but it’s actually the most sensible way for me to make sure the podcast actually gets out. I was getting a bit overwhelmed with the prospect of having six episodes ready to launch over a six week period. What with curating UX London and other activities, it would’ve been too much for me to do.

So rather than delay this season any longer, I’m going to drop each episode whenever it’s done. Chaos! Anarchy! Dogs and cats living together!

I documented a weird bug with web audio on iOS a while back:

On some pages of The Session, as well as the audio player for tunes (using the Web Audio API) there are also embedded YouTube videos (using the video element). Press play on the audio player; no sound. Press play on the YouTube video; you get sound. Now go back to the audio player and suddenly you do get sound!

It’s almost like playing a video or audio element “kicks” the browser into realising it should be playing the sound from the Web Audio API too.

This was happening on iOS devices set to mute, but I was also getting reports of it happening on devices with the sound on. But it’s that annoyingly intermittent kind of bug that’s really hard to reproduce consistently. Sometimes the sound doesn’t play. Sometimes it does.

I found a workaround but it was really hacky. By playing a one-second long silent mp3 file using audio, you could “kick” the sound into behaving. Then you can use the Web Audio API and it would play consistently.

Well, that’s all changed with the latest release of Mobile Safari. Now what happens is that the Web Audio stuff plays …for one second. And then stops.

I removed the hacky workaround and the Web Audio API started behaving itself again …but your device can’t be set to silent.

The good news is that the Web Audio behaviour seems to be consistent now. It only plays if the device isn’t muted. This restriction doesn’t apply to video and audio elements; they will still play even if your device is set to silent.

This descrepancy between the two different ways of playing audio is kind of odd, but at least now the Web Audio behaviour is predictable.

You can hear the Web Audio API in action by going to any tune on The Session and pressing the “play audio” button.

It’s been almost two years since I added audio playback on The Session. The interface is quite straightforward. For any tune setting, there’s a button that says “play audio”. When you press that button, audio plays and the button’s text changes to “pause audio.”

By updating the button’s text like this, I’m updating the button’s accessible name. In other situations, where the button text doesn’t change, you can indicate whether a button is active or not by toggling the aria-pressed attribute. I’ve been doing that on the “share” buttons that act as the interface for a progressive disclosure. The label on the button—“share”—doesn’t change when the button is pressed. For that kind of progressive disclosure pattern, the button also has an aria-controls and aria-expanded attribute.

From all the advice I’ve read about button states, you should either update the accessible name or change the aria-pressed attribute, but not both. That would lead to the confusing situation of having a button labelled “pause audio” as having a state of “pressed” when in fact the audio is playing.

That was all fine until I recently added some more functionality to The Session. As well as being able to play back audio, you can now adjust the tempo of the playback speed. The interface element for this is a slider, input type="range".

But this means that the “play audio” button now does two things. It plays the audio, but it also acts as a progressive disclosure control, revealing the tempo slider. The button is simultaneously a push button for playing and pausing music, and a toggle button for showing and hiding another interface element.

So should I be toggling the aria-pressed attribute now, even though the accessible name is changing? Or is it enough to have the relationship defined by aria-controls and the state defined by aria-expanded?

Based on past experience, my gut feeling is that I’m probably using too much ARIA. Maybe it’s an anti-pattern to use both aria-expanded and aria-pressed on a progressive disclosure control.

I’m kind of rubber-ducking here, and now that I’ve written down what I’m thinking, I’m pretty sure I’m going to remove the toggling of aria-pressed in any situation where I’m already toggling aria-expanded.

What I really need to do is enlist the help of actual screen reader users. There are a number of members of The Session who use screen readers. I should get in touch and see if the new functionality makes sense to them.

dConstruct 2022 was great fun. It was also the last ever dConstruct.

If you were there, and you’d like to re-live the magic, the audio from the talks is now available on the dConstruct Archive. Here they are:

• George Oates
• Lauren Beukes
• Daniel Burka
• Sarah Angliss
• Matt Webb
• Seb Lee-Delisle
• Anil Seth

Thanks to some service worker magic, you can select any of those talks for offline listening later.

The audio is also available on Huffduffer on the dConstruct Huffduffer account. Here’s the RSS feed that you can pop into your podcast software of choice.

If you’re more of a visual person, you can watch videos of the slides synced with the audio. They’ve all got captions too (good ones, not just automatically generated).

So have a listen in whichever way you prefer.

Now that I’ve added the audio from the last dConstruct to the dConstruct archive, it feels like the closing scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Roll credits.

I’ve published a transcription of the talk I gave at CSS Day:

In And Out Of Style.

The title is intended to have double meaning. The obvious reference is that CSS is about styling web pages. But the talk also covers some long-term trends looking at ideas that have appear, disappear, and reappear over time. Hence, style as in trends and fashion.

There are some hyperlinks in the transcript but I also published a list of links if you’re interested in diving deeper into some of the topics mentioned in the talk.

I also published the slides but, as usual, they don’t make much sense out of context. They’re on Noti.st too.

I made an audio recording for your huffduffing pleasure.

There are two videos of this talk. On Vimeo, there’s the version I pre-recorded for An Event Apart online. On YouTube, there’s the recording from CSS Day.

It’s kind of interesting to compare the two (well, interesting to me, anyway). The pre-recorded version feels like a documentary. The live version has more a different vibe and it obviously has more audience interaction. I think my style of delivery suits a live audience best.

I invite you to read, watch, or listen to In And Out Of Style, whichever you prefer.

For over a year now I’ve been recording the audio versions of Jay Hoffman’s excellent Web History series on CSS Tricks.

We’re up to ten chapters now. The audio version of each chapter is between 30 and 40 minutes long. That’s around 400 minutes of my voice: a good six and a half hours of me narrating the history of the web. That’s like an audio book!

The story so far covers:

1. Birth
2. Browsers
3. The Website
4. Search
5. Publishing
6. Web Design
7. Standards
8. CSS
9. Community
10. Browser Wars

…with more to come.

The audio is available as a podcast. You can subscribe to the RSS feed. It’s also available from Apple and Spotify.

That’ll give you plenty to listen to while you wait for the next season of the Clearleft podcast.

Season three of the Clearleft podcast is done and dusted. I’m pretty happy with how the six episodes turned out.

Episode one

Coaching. There was one question at the heart of this episode: what’s the difference between training, coaching, and mentoring? I got some great answers to that question, with some good stories along the way.

Episode two

Design Engineering. It will come as no surprise that I really enjoyed this episode. This is a topic I think is growing in importance. The relevation for me was the way Trys framed it less as the intersection between design and development, and more about the gap between design and development. And remember we’re looking for a design engineer to join Clearleft.

Episode three

Design Research. A really fun deep dive, thanks to Steph. I feel like this episode set things up for the next two episodes. Oh, and we’re also looking for a design researcher to join Clearleft.

Episode four

Innovation. I had lots of great material to draw on here: a panel discussion, conference talks, and interviews. I really like the ensemble nature of the end result.

Episode five

Measuring Design. My favourite episode of the season, and probably my favourite episode of the Clearleft podcast so far. This episode builds on a hot topic from UX Fest. And just this week, Andy published a blog post that continues the debate. If you only listen to one episode of the season, make it this one.

Episode six

Design Principles. Needless to say, I enjoyed the heck out of this one. As a well-known nerd for design principles this felt kind of self-indulgent, but in the end there’s not much of me in it (thankfully). In fact it’s more like a case study of the work Clearleft did with Citizens Advice.

I also wrote a bit about each episode when they came out:

1. Coaching
2. Design Engineering
3. Design Research
4. Innovation
5. Measuring Design
6. Design Principles

Six episodes might not sound like much, but it takes a lot of work to put a season together. It’s rewarding though. And I’m already looking forward to crafting the arc for season four. But that won’t be until the start of next year.

Still, it’s never to early to subscribe so you’ll be the first to hear the newest episodes. Subscribe to the RSS feed or on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The final episode of season three of the Clearleft podcast is out. Ah, what a bittersweet feeling! On the hand it’s sad that the season has come to an end. But it feels good to look back at six great episodes all gathered together.

Episode six is all about design principles. That’s a topic close to my heart. I collect design principles.

But for this podcast episode the focus is on one specific project. Clearleft worked with Citizens Advice on a recent project that ended up having design principles at the heart of it. It worked as a great focus for the episode, and a way of exploring design principles in general. As Katie put it, this about searching for principles for design principles.

Katie and Maite worked hard on nailing the design principles for the Citizens Advice project. I was able to get some of Maite’s time for her to talk me through it. I’ve also got some thoughts from my fellow Clearlefties Andy and Chris on the topic of design principles in general.

It’s nineteen minutes long and well worth a listen.

And with that, season three of the Clearleft podcast is a wrap!

A new episode of the Clearleft podcast just dropped and I have to say, this is one of my favourites so far. It’s all about measuring design.

There was a bit of a theme running through UX Fest earlier this year. On the one hand, there was all the talk of designers learning to speak the language of business (to get that coveted seat at the table), which means talking in numbers. But on the other hand, isn’t there a real danger in reducing user experience to numbers in a spreadsheet?

For this episode I put the narrative together using lots of snippets from different talks, not just from UX Fest but from previous Clearleft events too. I also got some good hot takes from my colleagues Chris, Andy, and Maite. Oh, and it opens with former US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. If you know, you know.

This episode comes in at 22 and a half minutes and I think it’s well worth your time. Have a listen.

This is the penultimate episode of season three. Just one more to go!

We’re past the halfway mark for this season of the Clearleft podcast. Episode four came out today. It’s all about innovation.

At the beginning of the episode, I think you can hear the scorn in my voice. Y’see, innovation is one of the words—like “disruptive”—that gets thrown around a lot and everyone assumes it only has positive connotations. But words like “innovative” and “disruptive” can be applied to endeavours that are not good for the world.

Bitcoin, for example, could rightly be described as innovative (and disruptive) but it’s also a planet-destroying ponzi scheme—like a lovechild of the trolley problem and the paperclip maximizer designed to generate the most amount of waste for the least amount of value.

So, yeah, I’m not a fan of innovation for innovation’s sake. But don’t worry. For this episode of the podcast I set my personal feelings to one side and let the episode act as a conduit for much smarter people.

The whole thing clocks in at 25 minutes but I think this episode might have the widest range of contributors yet. There are snippets from an internal Clearleft discussion, soundbites from a panel discussion, extracts from conference talks, as well as interviews with individuals. From Clearleft there’s Chris How, Andy Thornton, Jon Aizlewood and Lorenzo Ferronato. From the panel discussion there’s Janna Bastow, Matt Cooper-Wright, Dorota Biniecka and Akshan Ish. And from UX Fest there’s Radhika Dutt, Teresa Torres and Gregg Bernstein.

I happily defer to their expertise on this topic. Have a listen and hear what they have to say.

Each season of the Clearleft podcast has six episodes. Three of the six episodes of the current season are available with another three still to come.

In case you missed them, the episodes of season three released so far are:

1. Coaching

   What’s the difference between training, coaching, and mentorship?

2. Design Engineering

   A role that sits at the intersection—or rather, the gap—between design and engineering.

3. Design Research

   The journey from evaluative research to generative research.

That’s quite a mixed bag. You might think that there’s no particular unifying to a season of the podcast.

Well, that’s kind of true. There’s no specific theme. But each season does have a meta-grouping.

At Clearleft, we think about our services in three interconnected categories: explore, create, and grow.

• “Explore” is all about the big strategic picture.
• “Create” is the nitty-gritty work of delivery.
• “Grow” is what connects those together.

Each season of the podcast focuses on one of those categories. This season it’s all about “explore” with a bit of “grow” thrown in.

The next three episodes of this season will double down on the big-picture thinking. I don’t want to give any spoilers, but I’ll just remind you that if you’re not already subscribed to the Clearleft podcast, I highly recommend rectifying that situation.

Subscribe via RSS, or on Apple, Google, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts from.

And if you’re already subscribed …thank you. If you’re enjoying listening to it half as much as I’m enjoying making it, then I’m enjoying it twice as much as you.

Seriously though, if you like what you hear, please share it around. Drop a link to the Clearleft podcast into your work Slack channel or share it in a tweet.

Thank you for listening.

We’re halfway through the third season of the Clearleft podcast already!

Episode three is all about design research. I like the narrative structure of this. It’s a bit like a whodunnit, but it’s more like a whydunnit. The “why” question is “why aren’t companies hiring more researchers?”

The scene of the crime is this year’s UX Fest, where talks by both Teresa Torres and Gregg Bernstein uncovered the shocking lack of researchers. From there, I take up the investigation with Maite Otondo and Stephanie Troeth.

I won’t spoil it but by the end there’s an answer to the mystery.

I learned a lot along the way too. I realised how many axes of research there are. There’s qualitative research (stories, emotion, and context) and then there’s quantitative research (volume and data). But there’s also evualative research (testing a hyphothesis) and generative research (exploring a problem space before creating a solution). By my count that gives four possible combos: qualitative evaluative research, quantitative evaluative research, qualitative generative research, and quantitative generative research. Phew!

Steph was a terrific guest. Only a fraction of our conversation made it into the episode, but we chatted for ages.

And Maite kind of blew my mind too, especially when she was talking about the relationship between research and design and she said:

Research is about the present and design is about the future.

🤯

I’m going to use that quote again in a future episode. In fact, this episode on design research leads directly into the next two episodes. You won’t want to miss them. So if you’re not already subscribed to the Clearleft podcast, you should get on that, whether it’s via the RSS feed, Apple, Google, Spotify, Overcast, or wherever you get your podcasts from.

Have a listen to this episode on design research and if you’re a researcher yourself, remember that unlike most companies we value research at Clearleft and that’s why we’re hiring another researcher right now. Come and work with us!

If you’re subscribed to the Clearleft podcast, then the latest episode is winging its way through the ether to your podcast software. The topic is one close to my heart: design engineering.

I wrote about this role back in February. I think my fervour comes across in that post and you can probably hear it in the podcast episode too.

As ever, I end up asking the question, “So what exactly is insert topic of the podcast episode here?”

I’ve got some smart folks answering that question. There’s an excerpt from Tobias Ahlin’s talk at this year’s UX Fest. And when I interviewed Adekunle Oduye for a previous episode on prototyping, we also discussed design engineering so I pulled out the relevant bits. But the bulk of the episode features the voice of Trys Mudford.

As you can gather from the many posts on Trys’s blog, he has a lot to say on the topic of design engineering. Luckily for me, he says it all with a clear, articulate delivery—the perfect podcast guest!

This episode finishes with a call to action (oh, the synergy!). If, after listening to 23 minutes of discussion on design engineering, you find yourself thinking “Hey, I think I might be a design engineer!”, then you should definitely head along to this job opening at Clearleft:

We’re currently looking for a design-friendly front-end developer with demonstrable skills in pattern-based prototyping and production.

Have a listen to episode two of season three of the Clearleft podcast and if you like what you hear, come and join us!

Season three of the Clearleft podcast is here!

The first episode is a nice gentle one to ease into things. It’s about coaching …and training …and mentorship. Basically I wanted to find out what the differences are between those three things.

But I must confess, there’s a commercial reason why this episode is coming out now. There’s a somewhat salesy promotion of an upcoming coaching programme with Julia Whitney. This is definitely the most overt marketing I’ve done on the Clearleft podcast, but if you listen to the episode, I think you’ll agree that it fits well with the theme.

Fear not, future episodes will not feature this level of cross-promotion. Far from it. You can expect some very revealing podcast episodes that pull no punches in getting under the skin of design at Clearleft.

The stars of this episode are my colleagues Rebecca and Chris, who were an absolute joy to interview.

Have a listen and hear for yourself.

If you’re not already subscribed to the Clearleft podcast, you should probably remedy that. The third season is about to drop any day now.

Once again, the season will comprise six episodes released on a weekly schedule.

That’s a cadence I more or less picked at random, but I think it’s working out well. Six episodes are enough for the podcast to sustain your interest without overstaying its welcome. And by taking nice long breaks between seasons, you’re never going to end up with that podcast problem of having a backlog of episodes that you never seem to get around to listening to.

That said, if you did fancy going through the backlog, there’s a mere twelve episodes for you to catch up on. Six from season one and six from season two. None of the episodes are overly long. Again, I don’t want this podcast to overstay its welcome. I respect your time. A typical episode is somewhere between 20 and 25 minutes of multiple viewpoints and voices.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed or use whichever service you prefer to get your podcasts from: Apple, Google, Spotify, Stitcher, Deezer, TuneIn, Castro, Pocket Casts, Player FM, or my own personal choice, Overcast.

Or you could just huffduff whichever episodes sound most appealing to you. But honestly, and I may be biased here, they’re all pretty darn great so I recommend subscribing.

If you subscribe now, then the episodes from season three will magically appear in your podcast software of choice. Again, I know I’m biased, but this is going to be an excellent season featuring some very smart folks sharing their stories.

Just to be clear, in case you haven’t listened to the Clearleft podcast before, this isn’t your usual podcast format. Yes, I interview people but I don’t release one interview per episode. Instead, each episode zeroes in one topic, and features different opinions from different people. It’s tight and snappy with no filler. That involves a lot of production and editing work, but I think it’s worth it for the end result.

Can you tell that I’m excited?

I was moaning about Safari recently. Specifically I was moaning about the ridiculous way that browser updates are tied to operating system updates.

But I felt bad bashing Safari. It felt like a pile-on. That’s because a lot of people have been venting their frustrations with Safari recently:

• Jorge Arango wrote Back to the Bad Old Days of the Web,
• Dave Rupert wrote One-offs and low-expectations with Safari,
• Perry Sun wrote For developers, Apple’s Safari is crap and outdated, and
• Tim Perry wrote Safari isn’t protecting the web, it’s killing it.

I think it’s good that people share their frustrations with browsers openly, although I agree with Baldur Bjarnason that’s good to avoid Kremlinology and the motivational fallacy when blogging about Apple.

It’s also not helpful to make claims like “Safari is the new Internet Explorer!” Unless, that is, you can back up the claim.

On a recent episode of the HTTP 203 podcast, Jake and Surma set out to test the claim that Safari is the new IE. They did it by examining Safari according to a number of different measurements and comparing it to the olden days of Internet Explorer. The result is a really fascinating trip down memory lane along with a very nuanced and even-handed critique of Safari.

And the verdict? Well, you’ll just to have to listen to the podcast episode.

If you’d rather read the transcript, tough luck. That’s a real shame because, like I said, it’s an excellent and measured assessment. I’d love to add it to the links section of my site, but I can’t do that in good conscience while it’s inaccessible to the Deaf community.

When I started the Clearleft podcast, it was a no-brainer to have transcripts of every episode. Not only does it make the content more widely available, but it also makes it easier for people to copy and paste choice quotes.

Still, I get it. A small plucky little operation like Google isn’t going to have the deep pockets of a massive corporation like Clearleft. But if Jake and Surma were to open up a tip jar, I’d throw some money in to get HTTP 203 transcribed (I recommend getting Tina Pham to do it—she’s great!).

I apologise for my note of sarcasm there. But I share because I care. It really is an excellent discussion; one that everyone should be able to access.

Update: the bug with that episode of the HTTP 203 podcast has been fixed. Here’s the transcript! And all future episodes will have transcripts too:

Some folks called us out for lacking transcripts for our podcasts. Fair point! So, here we go (and all future episodes will have transcripts)https://t.co/HmfwBvAicA

— Jake Archibald (@jaffathecake) August 18, 2021

The Clearleft podcast is currently between seasons, but that’s not going to stop me from yapping on in audio files at any opportunity.

By the way, if you missed any of season two of the Clearleft podcast, be sure to check it out—there’s some good stuff in there.

I’ve been continuing my audio narration of Jay Hoffman’s excellent Web History series over on CSS tricks. We’re eight chapters in already! That’s a good few hours of audio—each chapter is over half an hour long.

The latest chapter was a joy to narrate. It’s all about the history of CSS so I remember many of the events that are mentioned, like when Tantek saved the web by implenting doctype switching (seriously, I honestly believe that if that hadn’t happened, CSS wouldn’t have “won”). Eric is in there. And Molly. And Elika. And Chris. And Dave.

Here’s the audio file if you want to have a listen. Or you can subscribe to the RSS feed in your podcast-playing app of choice.

If you’re not completely sick of hearing my voice, you can also listen to the latest episode of the Object Oriented UX podcast with Sophia V. Prater. Our chat starts about eleven minutes into the episode and goes on for a good hour.

It was nice to be on the other side of the microphone, so to speak. The topic was Resilient Web Design but the conversation went in all sorts of directions.

I do enjoy a good natter. If you’ve got a podcast and you fancy having a chat, let me know.

Season two of the Clearleft podcast is in the can. Taking a step back and looking at the six episodes, I think it turned out very well indeed.

Episode One

Design Leadership. Lots of smart people in this one. And I like that the source material is a real mix: conference talks, a roundtable discussion, and an interview.

Episode Two

Employee Experience Design. More of a deep dive than a broad overview. It’s pretty much a two-hander from Chris and Katie.

Episode Three

Accessibility. This one got a lot of attention, and rightly so in my opinion. It’s got three excellent contributors: Laura, Léonie, and Cassie. My job was to get out of the way and string their knowledge bombs together.

Episode Four

Prototyping. I had three good stories to work with from Benjamin, Lorenzo, and Trys. Then at the last minute I was able to add an interview with Adekunle which ties the whole thing up nicely.

Episode Five

Diversity and Inclusion. I think this might be the highlight of the season. Again, it’s got a mix of source material from conference talks and interviews. The quality of the contributions is exceptionally good. Once again, I found my job was to mostly get out of the way and line things up so they flowed well.

Episode Six

Remote Work. I wish I could see that it was my perfect planning that led to this episode being released exactly one year on from the start of lockdown. But really it was just a very fortunate coincidence. It did give this episode some extra resonance though. And I like that the final episode of the season has the widest range of contributors. It’s like the whole cast came back for the season finale.

I also wrote a bit about what I did behind the scenes for each episode of this season:

1. Design Leadership
2. Employee Experience Design
3. Accessibility
4. Prototyping
5. Diversity and Inclusion
6. Remote Work

My sincerest thanks to everyone who contributed to this season of the Clearleft podcast, especially everyone outside Clearleft who kindly agreed to be interviewed: Temi, Laura, Léonie, Adekunle, Rifa, and Elaine.

The Clearleft podcast will take a little break now and so will I. But I’m already thinking about topics for the next season. I feel like I’m starting to get a feel for what’s working so you can another six-episode season down the line.

To make sure you don’t miss the next season, I recommend subscribing to the RSS feed, or you can subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Google, and anywhere else that dispenses podcasts.

The sixth episode of season two of the Clearleft podcast is available now. The last episode of the season!

The topic is remote work. The timing is kind of perfect. It was exactly one year ago today that Clearleft went fully remote. Having a podcast episode to mark the anniversary seems fitting.

I didn’t interview anyone specifically for this episode. Instead, whenever I was chatting to someone about some other topic—design systems, prototyping, or whatever—I’d wrap up by asking them to describe their surroundings and ask them how they were adjusting to life at home. After two season’s worth of interviews, I had a decent library of responses. So this episode includes voices you last heard from back in season one: Paul, Charlotte, Amy, and Aarron.

Then the episode shifts. I’ve got excerpts from a panel discussion we held a while back on the future of work. These panel discussions used to happen up in London, but this one was, obviously, online. It’s got a terrific line-up: Jean, Holly, Emma, and Lola, all dialing in from different countries and all sharing their stories openly and honestly. (Fun fact: I first met Lola three years ago at the Pixel Up conference in South Africa and on this day in 2018 we were out on Safari together.)

I’m happy with how this episode turned out. It’s a fitting finish to the season. It’s just seventeen and a half minutes long so take a little time out of your day to have a listen.

As always, if you like what you hear, please spread the word.