Quotes from recent talks

"The current wave of AI has disrupted practice so much, so quickly, that it's difficult to tell what practice is or what it will be in three years."

"Early involvement of product helps you frame the problem better and co-create a solution that others will buy into."

"The value of what we do is only really valuable if it’s recognized by others."

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

"The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among high-income nations in the world."

"AI should be your friend, not your sycophant."

"This isn’t a green pasture. It’s still a business. But at the end of the day, you can see the difference you make."

"Find the people who already care about what we care about, even if they don’t call it UX."

"The same reason they hire us is the very reason why they fire us, because when things get real, it sometimes gets hard."

"Save all this content into a shareable playlist you can copy into your own learning management system."

"We've worked with speakers for months to prepare our conference content, so it's expensive to produce, but really good."

"If all tools try to be for everyone, they risk serving no one properly."

"Research knowledge by itself is not enough. You need to add other sources like user voice, surveys, and customer feedback."

"AI tools should augment human research, not replace moderated sessions, at least not yet."

"Survey tools are no longer just survey tools; the boundaries between categories are increasingly blurry."

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

"Curated communication means linking, not explaining — think of your messages as a doorway, not the destination."

"Researchers are becoming more like enablers, spending 70% of their time lifting others rather than doing all the research themselves."

"Play is known to create psychological safety, break down barriers, and foster shared alignment."

"Stories require no learning to understand, but you really have to work to make sense of statistics."

"The first rule of book update club is you never talk about book update club."

"Quantitative ethnography isn’t mixed methods; it’s a unified method using both qualitative theory and quantitative validation."

"Full automation of research is simply not working."

"We used AI tools like NotebookLM and Gemini primarily to shortcut getting up to speed and managing transcripts, without focusing on specific tools themselves."

"There is a world of difference between what a participant says and what they actually do, and AI misses that completely."

"The most transformative part of research is being involved in the work itself."

"We want to foster a partnership between researchers and AI to enhance human expertise, not supplant it."

"Incentives are a benefit but should not be the number one reason people join a panel."

"We could either become an internal service desk that's always at capacity or find a lever that multiplies our impact."

"Our past enablement was exacerbating issues because teams had resources but not enough skills."

"The world will manage research quality for us through outcomes; we don't need to police it."

"I would prefer not to reduce human understanding to shallow sound bites."

"Every time you bring a teammate into a research session, you’re scaling change."

"Some engineers build a council of agents that debate and generate responses, which can help with bias and accuracy."

"I was interested in thinking of this method as a survey plus that you can use to get survey-like data but with more qualitative depth."

"We’re not just translators between different ways of thinking, but architects of shared reasoning processes."

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

"Designers must learn code fundamentals to use AI effectively, akin to becoming apprentices to the world’s greatest software developers."

"If we don't do hard thinking and critical collaboration when building agents, we’ll end up with armies of unused agents."

"We want to make sure researchers spend one hour in office hours, not eight to twelve hours a week helping others."

"Prioritizing insights helps pull together top reports aligned with what leadership is focused on next."

"I gathered information and ran little experiments on myself across dozens of jobs to see what might fit."

"We all say empathy is foundational for good design, yet contemporary research often remains oddly distant from real human experience."

"Design is the communication of intent—understanding exactly what you want and specifying it clearly is the hardest part."

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

"From a legal point of view, taking money from people without their true consent is a tangible harm."

"The sloppier you are, the more real you’re looking in the age of AI content."

"Duolingo’s AI push damaged immersion by breaking narrative cohesion and lowering course quality."

"I’ve seen people fudge their date of birth so their child can attend a summer camp they aren’t technically eligible for."

"My last job outside this field was as a furniture salesman — flipping burgers or wrangling children, many started outside tech."

"AI is not a tool. AI has agency. AI makes decisions that impact people's lives."

"Navigating complexity is like sailing in open ocean. A GPS won’t help if you don’t know how to read wind and water."

"Scaffolding is about hacking and doing things differently, not lowering the bar but delivering value continuously."

"For OKRs to work, incentives have to focus on learning, customer centricity, and evidence-based decision making, not just delivery."

"When the system feels chaotic, visibility is your superpower."

"Flight Center went from 10 researchers running research to over 130 people trained to safely do interviews."

"Testing accessibility at the design system level before design starts catches many issues early on."

"We needed a scalable system and GPS that everyone could follow with clear lanes for each team."

"Any service is a configuration of enterprise elements, reshaping and enabling the enterprise to deliver that service."

"Stakeholders began referring to user groups by name—humanizing conversations and keeping us focused."

"Organizations say they want to break down silos but often create new ones in product teams; service design helps reconnect them."

"We’ve worked on news organizations that folded creating content that just went out there into the void."

"Complex systems are not chaos but non-deterministic due to interdependencies and autonomy within the system."

"We must build our service vision not just for the ideal, but for how to handle things when they go wrong."

"Many new ways of doing things today were originally invented to enable people with disabilities."

"All of our models and metrics are temporary scripts. What matters is the rehearsal and how we keep rewriting the score together."

"Small feedback comments like, 'Hey, how’s that going?' keep the momentum alive in addition to structured meetings."

"Designers often don’t realize they themselves are providing services and selling a promise of value."

"Clients often want flashy autoplay video even though it negatively impacts performance and sustainability."

"Many designers don't understand corporate realities and thus have an idealistic view that clashes with organizational constraints."

"I'm basically a philosopher because 50% of people don't know what an ethicist is."

"Academic Purists believe one size fits all, ignoring context and stifling innovation."

"High functioning teams are built on trust and not control."

"Clients got used to AI-driven storytelling pretty quickly when involved in weekly progress updates."

"You can’t just be a designer adapting UX workflows assuming everybody else’s workflow stays the same; everything is changing with AI."

"Researchers are shy about sharing work because they worry about being judged — peer and management support help."

"By starting to categorize risk in detail, you naturally lead to better prompts and better evals."

"Biases are baked in through the evals used during model training and post-training."

"It depends was the most common answer to how do you know what you’re doing is working."

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

"Our approach to career development is thinking about two dimensions: what you’re good at and enjoy, and what you’re good at but don’t enjoy."

"The tools are more important than ever even if the title UX becomes less central."

"Design ops is like being the PM of the design organization."

"Doing accessibility from the start saves cost by avoiding expensive retrofits and rework later on."

"Ethics is fantastic, but for the business, the right thing sometimes is revenue."

"Disruptive change is the new normal, coming from every direction — not just technology."

"Ego death is a painful, almost burial-like process of letting go of aspects that have become our identity over decades."

"We designed many activities to hook into mandatory processes, like billing and reporting, to ensure consistent documentation."

"It took me just a little bit amount of time to get into that and actually make a proper component from Figma."

"We created AI OKRs allowing our team members to experiment and then share their findings with the team."

"Contextual navigation is really powerful — these AI-generated prompts help you dig deeper into a topic."

"Raising the floor and the ceiling means eliminating low-value problems and empowering talent to shine creatively."

"Having a single workspace for the branded house makes it easier for designers not to dip and dive between spaces, reducing complexity."

"Shifting left means thinking about accessibility before you start writing code."

"This is real serious analysis, not pre-prepared or fake data."

"Often tooling is a vacuum particularly around insights repositories—everyone wants it or no one wants it."

"Map tours are my favorite thing—taking a new hire on a guided walk of the entire community."

"When discovery is missing, teams might move fast, but often in the wrong direction."

"Think of AI as an additional team member pushing your creative thinking and expanding your idea range."

"Feedback is more like an investment and a contribution into not just the person's work, but also to their growth."