Podcast Transcripts

Past Episodes, in Text

Every conversation from the Domain podcast — readable, searchable, and structured for people who prefer reading to listening.

UI design interface viewed on screen during a live session

EP. 01 — LATEST

Colour Contrast in Practice: More Than Just a Ratio

Accessibility guidelines give you a number — 4.5:1 or 7:1 — but meeting that number and building something usable are different problems. Maiken Thorvaldsen and designer Rafał Czyż talk through cases where technically passing contrast still failed real users.

38 min read Maiken Thorvaldsen & Rafał Czyż

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EP. 02

Building a Design System Without a Dedicated Team

Most companies running a component library don't have a DS team. Lena Vukovic explains how her product org maintains consistency across seven squads with no central ownership.

44 min read Lena Vukovic

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EP. 03

When Research Breaks Your Assumptions

Usability tests occasionally reveal that the entire direction was wrong. Tobias Nkrumah-Stein shares two sessions from his career where participant feedback forced a complete redesign — and what it took to get stakeholder buy-in for a reversal.

51 min read Tobias Nkrumah-Stein

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EP. 04

Responsive Patterns That Actually Hold Up

Fluid grids look clean in demos and fall apart under real content. Priya Sundarajan walks through layout patterns that survive long strings, missing images, and right-to-left text without needing per-case fixes.

29 min read Priya Sundarajan

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EP. 05

Interaction Feedback: Timing, Motion, and Meaning

A 200ms delay versus a 400ms delay changes how users interpret a system's response. Ondřej Blažejovský maps the relationship between animation duration, easing curves, and what users actually infer about what the interface is doing.

36 min read Ondřej Blažejovský

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What each episode actually covers

The podcast focuses on five areas of UI design that come up constantly in professional work but rarely get discussed in depth.

Each episode maps to a different part of this chart — the score reflects how much ground that topic covers across all five dimensions.

Accessibility — contrast, focus management, ARIA patterns, screen reader behaviour in real products
Systems thinking — component architecture, token structure, cross-team consistency at scale
User research — study design, moderated sessions, translating findings into decisions
Responsive layout — grid systems, fluid type, content-driven breakpoint logic
Motion & feedback — timing models, animation intent, perceived performance

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