Design Better

• Matt Raw: Balancing legacy and innovation at The New York Times

  Visit our Substack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/matt-raw Matt Raw, Interim VP of Design at The New York Times, and his team have a tough job. Their work is seen by millions every day who come to the Times website and apps for information they can trust, presented clearly, across platforms, striking a stylistic balance between tradition and innovation. Somehow they approach the pressure of their work with grace. n this episode, we talk with Matt about what it means to design for a mission-driven organization in a time of profound technological and cultural change. Matt shares how his team is navigating the tension between tradition and evolution, how they balance experimentation with editorial integrity, and why even the smallest interface details can carry the weight of institutional trust. We also explore how the Times is adapting to new reader habits, the impact of generative AI on journalism and design, and why listening deeply to colleagues and readers remains a superpower for their team. If you missed it earlier this month, Matt also interviewed us for an AMA at the Times’ headquarters in Manhattan. Also, stay tuned after our conversation with Matt (or listen to the embedded audio below) for a special with the Australian design agency Noize uses Wix Studio to create amazing sites for top brands. Bio Matt Raw is a product design leader with over 15 years of experience creating user-centered digital products and services. As interim Vice President of Product Design Culture and Operations at The New York Times, he helps product designers thrive, runs design operations, and oversees the shared design studio. He has built and led teams of designers, managers, and leaders who deliver exceptional work spanning strategy to execution. Raw also teaches advanced UX fundamentals to MFA students at the School of Visual Arts, focusing on insight-centered problem definition and rapid validation through lightweight prototyping. His mission is empowering product designers to craft meaningful experiences for millions of users worldwide. *** Premium Episodes on Design Better This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books: You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. Upgrade to paid ***

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• The Brief: Microscopes and telescopes

  Microscopes and telescopes By Aarron Walter A friend and former colleague called me recently to catch up and get my perspective on an important question. He leads a product team at a major tech company and the design team had just been moved under him. He’s an exceptional product thinker with a sharp grasp of engineering systems and shipping processes. But managing designers? That was new territory. “Where should design really fit in our workflow?” he asked. What struck me most was that he asked at all. Too often, when design moves under product in a re-org, it becomes a service function. Something to be brought in after the big decisions are made—to polish the edges, add the visuals, and make things look good. That, of course, sells the value of design short, and my friend sensed it. He didn’t want design to just support the work of engineers. He wanted it to play a part in shaping the product. So I shared what I’ve seen in organizations where engineering and design truly thrive together: it starts with recognizing that engineers and designers bring fundamentally different perspectives to the table. *** To read the full version of The Brief, visit our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/the-brief-microscopes-and-telescopes

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• Rhiannon Bell: Designing the future of search at Google

  This is a preview of one of our premium Design Better episodes. To listen to the whole episode, head over to our Substack and subscribe: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/rhiannon-bell We all rely on search—sometimes dozens of times a day—to make sense of the world around us. But behind that simple white box is a vast, dynamic system that has to understand not just language, but intent, context, and trust. In this episode, we talk with Rhiannon Bell, VP of User Experience for Google Search, about how they navigate the complexity of designing one of the most widely used products on the planet. Rhi shares how their background in writing and storytelling shapes their approach to UX, why designing for information-seeking behavior is fundamentally different from transactional design, and how teams at Google are rethinking trust, transparency, and delight in an age of generative AI. We also dig into what it means to lead with curiosity, and how bringing a sense of play into product development can open up entirely new possibilities. Bio As the VP of UX for Google Search, Rhiannon Bell leads a team of talented Designers, Researchers and Content Strategists who are responsible for all of Google Search experiences. They have over 20 years experience in product development, working with diverse and global products such as NerdWallet, BBC, and Zynga.Rhiannon's mission is to build responsibly toward an AI-powered future, using user research, creative direction, and user-centric product development. They are passionate about pushing the boundaries of technology to solve user pain points, raising the quality bar on execution, and driving home the consumer-centric view within any product organization. They are also an active investor and advisor in the design and AI space, supporting visionaries who are shaping our world. *** Premium Episodes on Design Better This is a premium episode on Design Better. We release two premium episodes per month, along with two free episodes for everyone. Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books: You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. Upgrade to paid

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• Bonus Episode: Inside Sonos's distributed research & design process for the Arc Ultra

  For many creative people, music is a central part of life. Count us in that camp. We’ve long admired Sonos products for their quality and easy integration into our homes, and everything they design is beautiful. The integration of design and technology is often a challenge for companies. From the outside, it would seem that Sonos has something figured out in this department. To learn more about their approach, we spoke with Matt Benatan, Principal Research Scientist, and Naphur van Apeldoorn, Senior Manager, Hardware Development Engineering. We chat with Naphur and Matt about how Sonos decided to invest the time and energy into a new product—Arc Ultra, and what the R&D and prototyping process looked like—as a distributed team, they “share” physical prototypes using a 3d printer. We also talked about how they’re using onboard AI for speech enhancement, and why it seems like movie dialogue has become harder to hear over recent years (even if you don’t have kids making noise in the background while you’re trying to watch 🙄). *** Premium Episodes on Design Better This ad-supported episode is available to everyone. If you’d like to hear it ad-free, upgrade to our premium subscription, where you’ll get an additional 2 ad-free episodes per month (4 total). Premium subscribers also get access to the documentary Design Disruptors and our growing library of books: You’ll also get access to our monthly AMAs with former guests, ad-free episodes, discounts and early access to workshops, and our monthly newsletter The Brief that compiles salient insights, quotes, readings, and creative processes uncovered in the show. Upgrade to paid *** Visiting the links below is one of the best ways to support our show: Masterclass: MasterClass is the only streaming platform where you can learn and grow with over 200+ of the world's best. People like Steph Curry, Paul Krugman, Malcolm Gladwell, Dianne Von Furstenberg, Margaret Atwood, Lavar Burton and so many more inspiring thinkers share their wisdom in a format that is easy to follow and can be streamed anywhere on a smartphone, computer, smart TV, or even in audio mode. MasterClass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. Head over to http://masterclass.com/designbetter for the current offer. Dupe.com: Visual people like us feel the effects of our living and working space. To do our best work and live our best life, we need to be in a beautiful, productive space. But often our aspirations and budgets don’t quite line up. We’ve got a special hack for you that will help you design your dream living space for less. When you find a site with furnishings you love, jump into the URL bar and type Dupe.com/ in front of the product URL. You’ll be redirected to a page on Dupe.com that shows you similar products that have the look you’re after but at a fraction of the price. Try it now! Just type dupe.com/ before any product url in your browser. It’s like magic!

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• Noah Levin: AMA with Figma's VP of Design on their latest releases

  Figma is central to most designers' workflow these days (certainly is here at Design Better). So it's important to get familiar with all of the latest features. Who better to give us the back story of the releases announced at Config than Noah Levin, VP of Product Design at Figma. Join us for a conversation with Noah and a closer look at how Figma is helping designers design better. In this AMA, Noah demo’d some of Figma’s newest tools and featured, and we discussed topics including: Hiring and scaling design teams in the AI age Emerging trends in design Career growth for junior UX designers Fostering better designer-developer collaboration Improving table design workflows in Figma AI's impact on design and development roles Support for print-focused workflows Staying up to date with Figma tools and features Lessons from designing the new Figma Bio Noah Levin is the VP of Product Design at Figma. Before that he led the UX team at ClassPass in NYC, and before that he was at Google working on Mobile Search in Mountain View. He also spent some time teaching designers to code as an early advisor at Framer, and building a digital assistant for Astronauts at NASA. He studied Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon and is from Pittsburgh originally. Watch the recording on our Substack: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/ama-noah-levin-on-figmas-latest-release *** Learn more about Figma's recent product launches at https://www.config.new/

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