4: Barbara Spanton - 'Disposable design and our obsession with the redesign'

In this episode, we caught up with the wonderful Barbara Spanton from Ottawa in Canada. Barbara is a UX lead in Shopify and in this episode, Barbara is joined by Aman Braich, Principle designer for Intuit Australia, as well as Mark Catanzariti, service designer at Telstra. In today’s episode, we discuss the industry’s obsession with redesign.

There seems to be a culture of throwing out existing designs rather than going back to perfect or tweak them. Today we explore why we do that, how to maybe stop doing that and what opportunities exist if we spend less time redesigning and throwing out perfectly good things. We take a look at how we can focus more on mindset rather than methodology, to build – or should we say re-furbish – a more sustainable design future. Take a listen!

Key Points From This Episode:

How Barbara got involved with human centered design.

Disposable design: Why we throw out perfectly good things.

Why should businesses care about disposable design?

Suggesting alternatives to the business

The obsession with metrics.

Methodology versus mindset.

How do we know if we are making a system better?

Behind every merchant, there is a story.

Barbara’s re-design stories from Central Bank.

Ditching superiority complexes in the industry.

Barbara’s advice for emerging HCD talent.

And much more!

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Barbara Spanton on LinkedIn

Barbara Spanton on Twitter

Shopify

Intuit

Mr. Thinkr

This Is HCD Website

This is HCD on Slack

This is HCD on Twitter

This is HCD on Facebook

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