The Design Psychologist | Psychology for UX, Product, Service, Instructional, Interior, and Game Designers

Send us Fan MailWhy do so many personas and journey maps end up forgotten shortly after they are created?In this episode of The Design Psychologist, Thomas Watkins talks with Andrew Schall, author of The Persona and Journey Map Playbook: Designing Human-Centered Artifacts to Inspire and Drive Change.Andrew explains why personas and journey maps should be treated as strategic decision-making tools—not attractive, check-the-box deliverables. They discuss selecting the right “altitude,” connecting personas to user goals, avoiding irrelevant demographic details, and determining how much specificity a team actually needs.The conversation also explores live journaling, service blueprints, moments that matter, and using current-state research to build a practical bridge toward a future-state vision.If you want to create research artifacts that remain useful, align stakeholders, and influence product strategy, this episode provides a practical framework for doing it.If today’s conversation helped you think more deeply about your work, I’d love it if you left a quick rating or review on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast listening app. It helps more thoughtful designers discover the show—and keeps these meaningful insights coming your way. Just a star rating or a sentence or two makes a big difference. Thanks for listening!  Go to thedesignpsychologist.substack.com to get episode summaries right in your inbox so you can easily reference, save, and apply what you learn.  

Send us Fan MailWhy should we train our memories when computers can store almost anything for us?In this episode of The Design Psychologist, Thomas Watkins talks with Anthony Metivier, founder of the Magnetic Memory Method and author of The Victorious Mind: How to Master Memory, Meditation and Mental Well-Being.Anthony explains how memory training goes beyond memorizing facts or performing short-term tricks. They discuss memory palaces, location-based mnemonics, long-term retention, meditation, critical thinking, polymathic learning, and the relationship between knowledge and wisdom.The conversation also considers what memory means in the age of artificial intelligence. Anthony argues that strengthening our attention, judgment, and ability to retain knowledge may become more important as we rely increasingly on digital tools.If you want to improve your memory, deepen your learning, and develop a more capable mind, this episode offers a wider perspective on what memory training can accomplish.If today’s conversation helped you think more deeply about your work, I’d love it if you left a quick rating or review on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast listening app. It helps more thoughtful designers discover the show—and keeps these meaningful insights coming your way. Just a star rating or a sentence or two makes a big difference. Thanks for listening!  Go to thedesignpsychologist.substack.com to get episode summaries right in your inbox so you can easily reference, save, and apply what you learn.  

Send us Fan MailAccessibility should not be treated as a separate step added after a product has already been designed.In this episode of The Design Psychologist, Thomas Watkins talks with Reginé M. Gilbert, author of Inclusive Design for a Digital World, professor at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and Chief Creative Officer at Gilbert Consulting Group.Reginé explains how accessibility and user experience belong in the same design process. They discuss designing beyond the visual, working with people who have lived experience of disability, questioning assumptions about users, and introducing accessibility improvements one step at a time.The conversation also explores the difference between compliance and genuine accessibility, the W5H method, accessible writing, low-bandwidth design, assistive and adaptive technology, and the importance of understanding the laws that affect digital products.If you want to make accessibility a sustainable part of your team’s workflow, this episode offers practical ways to begin.If today’s conversation helped you think more deeply about your work, I’d love it if you left a quick rating or review on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast listening app. It helps more thoughtful designers discover the show—and keeps these meaningful insights coming your way. Just a star rating or a sentence or two makes a big difference. Thanks for listening!  Go to thedesignpsychologist.substack.com to get episode summaries right in your inbox so you can easily reference, save, and apply what you learn.  

Send us Fan MailAccessibility is not a final checklist. It is a shared responsibility that should shape a product from the beginning.In this episode of The Design Psychologist, Thomas Watkins talks with David Sloan, Chief Accessibility Officer at TPGi and co-author of What Every Engineer Should Know About Digital Accessibility.David explains how designers can look beyond visual considerations like color contrast and account for the different ways people perceive, navigate, and operate technology. They discuss assistive technology, screen readers, semantic HTML, linearization, disability language, and the difference between accessibility needs and medical diagnoses.The conversation also explores why accessibility works best as a team effort. Designers, developers, product managers, writers, and testers all make decisions that can either create or remove barriers.If you want to build more inclusive products—and make accessibility part of your everyday workflow—this conversation offers a practical place to begin.If today’s conversation helped you think more deeply about your work, I’d love it if you left a quick rating or review on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast listening app. It helps more thoughtful designers discover the show—and keeps these meaningful insights coming your way. Just a star rating or a sentence or two makes a big difference. Thanks for listening!  Go to thedesignpsychologist.substack.com to get episode summaries right in your inbox so you can easily reference, save, and apply what you learn.  

Send us Fan MailWhat makes a product feel not just usable, but desirable?In this episode of The Design Psychologist, Thomas Watkins talks with Marty Gage, co-author of User Experience Research: Discover What Customers Really Want, about how teams can move beyond guessing and uncover the experiences people actually desire.Marty shares a practical framework for connecting emotional needs to product strategy: desired emotional states, benefits, features, and sensory cues. They discuss why great design is not just about making something easy to use, but about understanding how people want to feel, what value they want from an experience, and what details communicate that value.The conversation explores useful, usable, and desirable design, the meaning behind cues like simplicity, familiarity, organization, and accessibility, and how methods like collaging and contextual inquiry can help teams translate customer insight into actionable design direction.If you want to build products and services that connect with people, align teams, and reduce the risk of guessing wrong, this episode offers a clear way to think about user experience research as the foundation for better innovation.If today’s conversation helped you think more deeply about your work, I’d love it if you left a quick rating or review on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast listening app. It helps more thoughtful designers discover the show—and keeps these meaningful insights coming your way. Just a star rating or a sentence or two makes a big difference. Thanks for listening!  Go to thedesignpsychologist.substack.com to get episode summaries right in your inbox so you can easily reference, save, and apply what you learn.  

Send us Fan MailHow many users do you actually need for a usability study?In this episode of The Design Psychologist, Thomas Watkins talks with Laura Faulkner about one of the most repeated ideas in UX research: that five users are enough. Laura explains why that rule of thumb can be useful in some situations, but dangerous when teams treat it like a law.They discuss sample size, research risk, stakeholder alignment, and why the real question is not “How many users?” but “What decision are we trying to support, and what happens if we miss something important?”Laura also shares practical advice on making research more influential inside organizations: sharing early and often, treating research as community property, helping stakeholders take ownership of findings, and building a point of view from human data rather than personal opinion.The conversation also explores synthetic users and AI, including where AI can help researchers think through test plans and where teams still need fresh data from real people.If you want to design better studies, communicate findings with more impact, and help research actually change product decisions, this episode gives you a grounded, human-centered way to think about evidence, risk, and influence.If today’s conversation helped you think more deeply about your work, I’d love it if you left a quick rating or review on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast listening app. It helps more thoughtful designers discover the show—and keeps these meaningful insights coming your way. Just a star rating or a sentence or two makes a big difference. Thanks for listening!  Go to thedesignpsychologist.substack.com to get episode summaries right in your inbox so you can easily reference, save, and apply what you learn.  

Send us Fan MailWhat does it actually mean to say a product is usable?In this episode of The Design Psychologist, Thomas Watkins talks with Phil Kortum about the System Usability Scale, or SUS: one of the most widely used tools for measuring usability. They discuss why this 10-item questionnaire has lasted for decades, what makes a usability metric trustworthy, and how researchers can use SUS scores to compare products, track improvement, and communicate usability in a shared language.The conversation covers why a number is not automatically objective, how SUS differs from measures like Net Promoter Score, when the positive version of SUS may be better to use, and why usability researchers still need effectiveness and efficiency measures alongside subjective ratings.They also explore Phil’s work on voting systems, where usability is not just about convenience but whether people can successfully cast a vote.If you want to understand how to measure human experience with more rigor, this episode gives you a clearer way to think about usability, evidence, and the difference between a score that sounds scientific and a metric you can actually trust.If today’s conversation helped you think more deeply about your work, I’d love it if you left a quick rating or review on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast listening app. It helps more thoughtful designers discover the show—and keeps these meaningful insights coming your way. Just a star rating or a sentence or two makes a big difference. Thanks for listening!  Go to thedesignpsychologist.substack.com to get episode summaries right in your inbox so you can easily reference, save, and apply what you learn.  

Send us Fan MailHow do you know whether a product idea is worth building before you spend months designing and developing it?In this episode of The Design Psychologist, Thomas Watkins talks with Jaime Levy, author of UX Strategy, about how designers, researchers, founders, and product leaders can move beyond opinion and make a stronger evidence-based case for what to build.Jaime explains why strategy is not about magically predicting the future, but about systematically reducing risk. She discusses how storyboards can help teams test the business idea before getting lost in interface details, why most companies compete in “purple oceans,” and how UX can become a source of real differentiation.The conversation also gets into AI: where it can speed up strategy work, where it can mislead us, and why human judgment, critical thinking, and customer understanding matter even more as tools become more powerful.If you care about building products people actually want, this conversation will help you think more clearly about value propositions, mental models, product differentiation, and the role of UX strategy in a rapidly changing world.If today’s conversation helped you think more deeply about your work, I’d love it if you left a quick rating or review on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast listening app. It helps more thoughtful designers discover the show—and keeps these meaningful insights coming your way. Just a star rating or a sentence or two makes a big difference. Thanks for listening!  Go to thedesignpsychologist.substack.com to get episode summaries right in your inbox so you can easily reference, save, and apply what you learn.  

Send us Fan MailSeason 2 of The Design Psychologist is here.After exploring the foundations of psychology across human factors, UX, instructional design, service design, game design, and more in Season 1, this season takes the conversation even further.We’re asking some honest—and sometimes difficult—questions about where design psychology is today, the challenges professionals are facing in their careers, and how we can use design to create a better future.Throughout Season 2, we’ll explore topics including accessibility, data visualization, helper robots, Jobs to Be Done vs. classical human factors methods, tools for expanding the power of the mind, and the growing role of AI.You’ll also hear conversations with fascinating guests, including an author behind one of the most controversial and influential articles in UX research and a YouTube creator and memory expert.And there are a few surprises along the way.If you’re interested in psychology, design, UX, human factors, emerging technology, or simply understanding how people interact with the world around them, Season 2 has plenty to explore.Welcome back to The Design Psychologist.

Send us Fan Mail Go to thedesignpsychologist.substack.com to get episode summaries right in your inbox so you can easily reference, save, and apply what you learn. What happens when human-centered design is no longer enough?Designers are trained to make things easier to use—but what if ease and elegance are no longer the point? What if the systems we need to change go far beyond screens and interfaces, touching global structures and collective futures?Our guest, Don Norman, coined the term "Norman Door" to describe a door that gives the wrong signal about how to open it—pull vs. push—highlighting poor affordances and feedback in everyday objects. This simple yet profound observation helped launch a new era of design awareness, making him one of the most influential voices in the psychology of design. His decades-long career has shaped the fields of human-computer interaction, design thinking, and usability. He is the author of the seminal book The Design of Everyday Things, and now, Design for a Better World, a work that challenges us to design for the full complexity of human and planetary needs.WHAT WE COVER IN THIS EPISODEWhat makes some errors easy to catch and others dangerously hard to detectHow decades of design decisions have shaped today’s global challengesWhat it means to shift from human-centered to humanity-centered designHow co-design empowers communities over outside expertsThe surprising design lessons learned from nuclear accidents, faucets, and guinea pigsThe role of failure in progress—and why we should embrace itKEY TAKEAWAYSDesigning for ease is not enough—today’s challenges demand designing for systems and long-term impact.User-centered design can fall short when it fails to consider environmental, societal, and ethical dimensions.Human error is not always a failure of attention—it’s often a byproduct of bad design.To scale real change, we need dandelion models—spreading seeds of knowledge and training others to do the same.Participatory design ensures that communities are not passive recipients but active creators of their own solutions.The service economy offers a path toward sustainability—if companies rethink profit and longevity.The future of design psychology isn’t about better buttons—it’s about understanding people so deeply that we can redesign society itself.If today’s conversation helped you think more deeply about your work, I’d love it if you left a quick rating or review on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast listening app. It helps more thoughtful designers discover the show—and keeps these meaningful insights coming your way. Just a star rating or a sentence or two makes a big difference. Thanks for listening!  Go to thedesignpsychologist.substack.com to get episode summaries right in your inbox so you can easily reference, save, and apply what you learn.