Quotes from recent talks

"Kids love to play. They challenge the world through games and simulation, so the things we create need to support play and experimentation."

"If the ideas aren’t fully baked or there’s no real core thesis, then you’ve kind of missed the point."

"You have to be 80% impactful and 20% helpful — that’s the balance we try to maintain."

"You’re in the right spot, and that’s the right instinct to be building."

"Maternal health is embedded within a healthcare industry prioritizing cost control, risk management, and standardization, not maternal safety."

"Why in user experience do we have the word user? Isn’t it going away from love?"

"Climate change is bad. Probably worse than we all think."

"The integration of AI into clinical workflows is creating urgent demand for sharper UX thinking, not less."

"You should never be engaging lived experts without compensating them for their time."

"The follow-up prompts are incredibly powerful. They help you learn the language of the field."

"Rosenverse includes a fifteen thousand person strong Slack community dedicated to UX and product design."

"We never train AI models on your data, and all AI features are strictly opt-in."

"Connecting the repository to Slack and building an AI bot to answer questions fascinates users and drives usage."

"Rollout is more successful when management can clearly answer what's in it for the researcher and be honest about trade-offs."

"AI changes everything in unstructured data analysis; before it was painful manual work, now it's automated theme detection and clustering."

"Building ecosystems of interconnected tools that work seamlessly is crucial for modern, fast-moving organizations."

"If you’re a team of one, focus on getting one stakeholder at a time to sponsor your work."

"Sometimes minor questions don’t matter much, and AI can help get those out of the way so researchers focus on strategic work."

"Play disrupts hierarchy, which is why it helps teams stuck in defensiveness to move forward."

"Stories don’t work by extraction, people tell them and you listen."

"There’s no reasonable prediction that AGI will exist in our lifetimes."

"Business stakeholders push researchers for faster turnarounds and numbers, often favoring surveys over deep interviews."

"We decided not just to adapt the research team, but to change the entire product development process."

"It often feels like research becomes beholden to exact quotes rather than the richer story that context provides, what I call the tyranny of transcripts."

"AI tells you what you want to hear, which is dangerous if you’re making product decisions based on synthetic feedback."

"We are asked to produce more and more work with fewer people and smaller teams."

"Researchers are moving away from viewing AI as automation and toward a sophisticated collaborator or soundboard."

"Every single one of these companies has a landing page on their marketing website with a call to action to sign up."

"Co-creation is highly actionable for teams and genuinely engaging for customers."

"We are co-creating with the product organization to make sure everything fits seamlessly rather than being separate."

"Insights are not the end; they must lead to decisions and improved user outcomes."

"Defiance is not loud or theatrical; it is bravery and clarity."

"The hardest job I ever had was redesigning an organization, not just a system."

"Human in the loop means constantly interacting with AI, documenting your thoughts and assuring quality."

"From setup to analysis, AI moderation still requires a good understanding of what quality research looks like and how to interpret qualitative data."

"Giving people time and space to think individually and pressure test with AI before group discussion prevents dominance by power."

"Separating process from results in the UI lets you see what the AI is thinking while giving more prominence and clarity to the results."

"Don’t build a toy project; build a real business product so user needs drive your design and code iterations."

"It’s dangerous to believe everything AI says or to believe nothing. We must find a balance."

"Shadow AI usage is a huge security risk in public companies and should be managed by IT and leadership."

"Research is a design material and reframing insights for different audiences is key to maximizing their impact."

"I’m trying to separate who I am from what I produce and the roles I hold."

"Hugh Dubberly argues we should stop describing design as problem solving and instead see it as engaged conversation."

"A mockup is worth a thousand prompts—visual context reduces ambiguity more than text alone."

"Job titles are a lagging indicator—it will take a while before the industry renames roles in line with actual work changes."

"Everyone knew tech was changing the world and we all had this peak at how amazing the web was going to be."

"The universe will absolutely provide if it’s the right thing for you."

"Designing for human motivation makes experiences more likely to thrive long term."

"Organizations rarely know their error rates, which limits their ability to improve user experience or data accuracy."

"My law professor outlined the modern legal process as UX: listening, researching, co-creating solutions with clients."

"The AI Act can spark better innovation with AI rather than constraining it."

"Complex adaptive system is the domain of humans. Humans are messy and we’re complex."

"Storytelling helps surface machine quirks and failures that aren't documented—AI as assistant ethnographer has great potential."

"Key results must be measures of human behavior and outcomes, not output metrics like 'launch this service'."

"The linguistic shift from we have AI to we’re redesigning how we work signals maturity."

"The goal is to lower the floor for who can access research while raising the ceiling of what’s possible."

"Design annotations in handoffs prevent accessibility details from getting lost between designers and developers."

"Combining customer journey mapping and jobs to be done gave us a clear set of opportunities stemming directly from the garage’s reality."

"Scaffolding is like the wireframe in the physical world, it’s what we do just enough of to push the experience forward and challenge constraints."

"Visualization isn’t about beautiful artifacts but about creating accessible spaces for stakeholders to collaborate."

"Service design was originally formulated as the alternative to product thinking, but digital products are actually mostly service experiences."

"Small specific interventions travel further than big programs within organizations."

"Make yourself the magnet. Be the person who models adaptive learning so others want to join."

"Involving frontline staff as co-creators helps ensure AI is a collaborator rather than a threat."

"You cannot design for the middle; instead, you must create experiences that are customizable and adaptable."

"We cannot just sit around and map systems. We can design where performance arrangements are made."

"Naming was nothing about the name; it was about creating alignment and clarity of purpose."

"Younger managers are more alert and understand the importance of measuring meaningful indicators."

"Designing sustainable doesn’t mean removing everything fun from the web."

"Design roles are blurring or dead; super senior individual contributor roles are emerging as a new career path."

"Support structures for switching from design to academia are sparse; you mostly have to figure it out yourself."

"Directive Disruptors plow through organizations without listening, causing alienation and low morale."

"Adaptability isn’t weakness, it’s strength."

"I haven’t gone more than one day without seeing a new gen AI tool that promises to do it all with a single prompt."

"We need to dramatically change the hats, the walls, and the workflow of how we work together in design and development."

"Everything is really a system. Even punk rock had systems to enable it."

"Use custom systems for experts to quickly review and rate outputs, making feedback cycles much faster."

"Evals are a product and UX skill; learning them lets you make these systems do what you want."

"Over-enforced design system adoption bred resentment and low morale, despite good adoption metrics."

"A lot of design frameworks funnel thinking narrowly, which feels like baked-in limitations of human-centered design."

"Operations often move around organizationally, from design to product operations and back, reflecting evolving team needs."

"How can I guide my community to design the form and behavior of light on the edge of becoming this?"

"If it’s really important to you, you’ll find a way to prioritize it."

"Inclusive design operations bring together efficiency and meaningful design by embedding inclusivity into processes."

"The more the compliance level increased, the higher the cost efficiency."

"In 2023, design leaders were being restructured out and design relegated to a tactical, downstream function."

"Minimum unviable products don’t need to be perfect or scalable to start, just enough to prove demand."

"Balancing defining best practices with enabling experimentation improves the breadth and quality of work."

"This is not just a shift of different tools; it’s the way we build products now."

"Artificial intelligence is reshaping our workflows. Our roles are shifting."

"The AI doesn’t train itself; we provide context dynamically, so it enhances answers with curated data."

"Don’t be scared of frustrating engineers; great design ops will measure impact and build bridges with other teams."

"Figma natively only allows 40 variable modes, but our client required around 90 different modes to handle age groups and device types."

"You own the design system, which gives you the unique ability to integrate that accessibility thinking into all of your components."

"Secondary research becomes a primary choice in user research in the age of AI."

"The closer we worked with product ops, the better we enabled our own design and business goals."

"These islands of design were close together or far away; our map brought them all closer."

"The role of leaders is to provide just enough guidance so teams don’t feel lost but avoid bureaucracy."

"The hackathon is a low-commitment way to get people creatively engaged and having fun."

"Feedback is a system. It's not just a pile of comments. It needs to be choreographed, timed, sequenced, and aimed to move the work."