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."

"Maybe we can measure our behaviors, not just our results."

"The app is not our business. The people on the other end of that app are our business."

"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?"

"I do all the things, except for the physical installation. From customer sign-up to happy heat pump running."

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

"Together we can bridge the gap by incorporating lived expertise and knowledge through access and opportunity."

"Either way, the Rosenbot will save you a lot of time in getting your people or you up to speed on all things UX and product design."

"The Rosenbot chatbot is trained on all Rosenfeld content and is amazingly useful for answering your questions."

"There was no meaningful difference between AI follow-up questions and static researcher questions in uncovering usability issues."

"We made it mandatory to have a one-pager summary for every research project to make insights easy to manage."

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

"Continuous feedback requires collecting responses tied to the same user across multiple channels with behavioral targeting."

"Synthetic users might be okay for finding average behaviors, but they won’t replace unique insights from real users."

"Don’t try to tag all historical work at once — tag as you go to avoid re-platforming nightmares."

"Research is about answering questions that drive decisions, and that part should be democratized as much as possible."

"Our research power is our ability to influence change across organizations, not just gather insights."

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

"Most of our job is education — teaching people what AI is good for and what it’s not."

"Partner with data scientists to pick and adjust statistical tests because quantitative ethnography requires new assumptions."

"We entirely stopped using Figma at Survicate and are all working on these AI-powered prototypes."

"In this context, sometimes slower is actually faster because it allows going deeper and unlocking more meaningful insights."

"AI tools are incentivized to produce final deliverables, but that’s an output, not the essence of research."

"Researchers can become thought leaders by coaching and mentoring others on empathy and research."

"Creation is not context neutral; we must maintain morality and accountability in innovation."

"Outsystems gamified their research panel with badges because they didn’t have budget for monetary incentives."

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

"Our bet was that distributing ownership would create more advocates and free bandwidth for strategic work."

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

"Our job is to make sure the people making decisions actually listen."

"Seeing someone a decade later give useful UX feedback because they learned from you shows the power of long-term impact."

"Whenever possible, you should be breaking down your work into specific research projects or topics."

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

"The core question UX researchers ask is did we solve the right problem for the user, while PMs ask did the metric move."

"The evolution in AI UIs is ongoing and rapid, and we’re still figuring out what the final form of AI-native applications looks like."

"You don’t build in Figma or Photoshop and handoff anymore, you build in code alongside AI agents that generate working components."

"The chaos of undocumented processes makes it hard to build useful AI workflows; mapping and blueprinting help."

"The future is researchers painting the larger picture while PMs and designers focus on deep, tactical user insights."

"Broadcasting all new research leverages the halo that new content naturally has inside organizations."

"If you are questioning your path, that’s data. It’s a sign something needs to evolve and that’s okay."

"Design research often acts like scientists with clipboards rather than humans in conversation."

"It’s strange that despite all our technology, we’re still struggling to bring design and code closer together."

"Many of us have followed zigzag paths to get where we are today, and that’s one of the wonderful qualities of the UX field."

"User research then focused on basic usability problems like removing reset buttons that wiped forms."

"I walked into the building and it just felt surreal. It didn’t feel right in my body to be there anymore."

"The Echo Look failed because it missed key motivators like self-expression and companionship by focusing too much on AI."

"Sometimes a form forces you into a wrong answer by giving inappropriate options."

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

"Humans need to override and dominate AI because machines have no context or experience."

"Emergence is properties of a whole system not expressed in properties of parts. Water is liquid but hydrogen and oxygen atoms are not."

"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."

"Seeing frustrations next to system data shifted conversations from blame to true standing."

"It should be as easy to run research as brushing your teeth."

"Disability isn’t a fixed group — aging, illness, injury can put anyone into a disabled state."

"My definition of service design is dancing with needs and value."

"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."

"Often we’re seen just as people who create personas or blueprints, but that’s not even what’s needed."

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

"Learning velocity was a far better early signal than any other metric we were traditionally trained to look for."

"What would change if learning itself was not just a KPI but your North star metric?"

"With AI, we don’t want to save a few minutes here and there. We want something that has a large impact and can scale really fast."

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

"The challenge and opportunity is to expand what performance can mean."

"Once collaboration loops start compounding, they become muscle memory and the structure supports our work."

"Design systems help us bring healthy consistency across digital and non-digital experiences for equity."

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

"Design teams reporting through engineering tend to have the worst quality scores."

"Designers use deception all the time, but the moral dividing line between acceptable and harmful deception is fuzzy."

"Solo Solver leaders don’t advocate for their team and delegate culture building to others."

"True success means designing teams for resilience so they’re ready for whatever season comes."

"Using tools like 11 Labs, we instantly generated voices with emotion and appropriate cadence for characters."

"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."

"Model companies are students in a classroom wanting good points—they’re happy to run external expert evals to improve."

"We’re not teaching the model anything; we’re improving our prompts and context."

"UX research is a team sport and our research process is cross-functional and non-negotiable."

"Executives often ignore potential negative consequences, but surfacing them at least provides awareness and mitigation possibilities."

"Different AI systems have different strengths; Claude is great for creative writing, ChatGPT is concise and to the point, Gemini is deeper for research."

"End your day by writing the to-do list for tomorrow; it’s easy to get distracted when you’re not in a full-time gig."

"Organizations are complex systems; you need to understand them deeply before acting."

"One in six people in the world has a disability, that’s 1.3 billion people, not a niche but mainstream."

"Compliance is everyone's concern but no one's responsibility."

"Professional development budgets get cut first in tough times, yet skill building is more important than ever."

"Who do builders become in this new future AI universe and how do we play together?"

"We define knowledge management as a dynamic, systemic, and agile approach to creating, capturing, storing, and sharing knowledge."

"The style component was developed in two minutes rather than taking a few days to create and document."

"Many times when planning to hire, we first assess our team competencies to identify the necessary talent."

"We’ve worked with over 1100 contributors, focusing on inclusion, iteration, and collaboration."

"Design ops is like the design version of DevOps—taking care of optimizing processes so designers can do their best work."

"Changes made in this sync tool migrate to Figma and vice versa, enabling a federated push-pull system managed by design and engineering leads."

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

"When designers describe their problem, they often describe a pain point, but you have to enter the user’s actual task."

"Showing where you’re using research more visibly creates a virtuous cycle of adoption and impact."

"Starting a new job with no map felt lost; so I built a new map as my BYO orientation."

"Instead of prescribing a meeting, we focused on how people should feel at the end and what outcomes to achieve."

"Start tinkering, playing around, and pushing AI’s limits because the industry shift is going to get faster."

"Feedback is a lot like holding up a mirror. You're reflecting what's already working and like using a flashlight to hide in the corners."