Quotes from recent talks

"I’m going to go over here and get shot in the face so that the team has what they need."

"We are coming from deterministic products that always behave the same, but now with LLMs, behavior is statistical and not always identical."

"We want to document not just accessibility rules but how this applies to everyone, giving broader context and reasoning."

"We don’t have to deal with spacer.gif anymore."

"A good case interviewer is there to coach you along the way, so feel free to ask clarifying questions."

"We have to stop being reactive and take control of our destinies in this evolving AI-driven world."

"Vibe coding is coding when you cannot code — it’s coding on vibes."

"Every day becomes a mental chess game. When do I run the dryer? Should I pre-cool the house before 2:00 PM?"

"Our title says researchers, but it never said only."

"The ultimate responsibility of design is not merely to shape experiences but to support the relationships through which people become who they are."

"The hardest part was losing my identity of being someone who works in tech after so many years."

"A lot of AI products are not failing because of the models. They're failing because nobody designed the experience around it."

"Research is essentially reducing risk—avoiding building the wrong thing in the first place."

"Making the invisible visible is not just good design; it’s sense-making as care."

"Describing yourself without the word design in your title forces you to focus on actual problems you solve."

"Everything that I make looks s****y. How can I turn this into a benefit?"

"Every mistake you see is their fault. Every mistake's an opportunity, though."

"When you’re stuck, talking to a person can often get you unstuck better than asking AI."

"The authors of a social contract tend to put their needs first."

"AI is fluent without standing; it never says this will not work, it never pushes back on the company."

"We want to build confidence in quality even though AI outputs are stochastic and sometimes random."

"At Anthropic, 80% of the code merged to production is now written by Claude."

"Everyone has power. The only question is whether they know it or not, and whether they know how to use it."

"The engineering environment is a huge first hurdle — running and maintaining the local app can block designers."

"Can AI help us do better in pre-research for expert-heavy workflows before we actually get access to the subject matter experts?"

"Don’t type with AI, talk to it like a brilliant colleague who knows nothing about your project yet—give it everything."

"The more that you can get context out of the backend and into a place you control, the easier it is to work with AI."

"I’m not saying Figma is out of the door, but this can be a really nice workflow in production iterations."

"We can make things that weren’t possible before just a few months ago; not just capabilities but the user experience itself."

"Rosenbot learns from all our books and 1,100+ recordings to answer your UX questions."

"AI is the instrument. You all are the musicians. Build the capabilities that make quality music."

"If you can’t beat them, join them—I got Cursor seats for my design team."

"Some of the most responsible design decisions are actually about what we do not build."

"Between your prompt and prototype, the AI made 40 decisions that you can't trace."

"Tools alone guarantee nothing. What really changes the game is where they sit in your workflow and how teams work together around them."

"We’re shipping all the time and shipping really big things often without really caring if anybody uses it."

"If you don't understand the process, you're not going to get very far with using AI for analysis."

"Social patterns are established, change-resistant patterns that emerge from the interactions between people."

"If you zoom out far enough, a new technology comes along and it sucks up human labor and puts them into a completely new paradigm."

"In impact work, you have to get on the field and understand the reality, not stay distant."

"I believe that 50% of white-collar jobs are just going away in the next 5 to 10 years."

"Creating different formats of the vision for different stakeholders improves resonance and adoption."

"The behaviors act as a gauge, not a scorecard, to see who is struggling and who is thriving."

"Healthcare UX needs you. Get out there, get amongst it, and start helping."

"Paradigm shifts depend on how a problem is described and who controls the narratives and beliefs."

"Our brains are like Ferrari with several petabytes of memory, but most of our thoughts are negative."

"I had to learn to speak contractor — shorter, simpler, in-viewport text without scrolling."

"Small wins are big overall in healthcare because they build credibility and trust for bigger changes."

"If someone doesn’t have that direct lived experience, it’s not just enough to go to the closest thing you can find."

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

"Our conference recordings include decks, notes, transcripts, reading lists, and more."

"Participants themselves need to be real humans at the end of the day to get unique insights."

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

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

"Synthetic participants shouldn't be used as a methodology but are great for cold starting research."

"To motivate people to populate the repository, be annoyingly persistent and sometimes create the template for them."

"Getting partners involved in research may mean accepting some imperfect interviews."

"AI can’t yet fully replace bespoke and careful proposal building, though it helps junior researchers draft the first outlines."

"Our job as researchers is not making reports or interviewing users; it’s providing actionable, correct insights."

"The new product approach lets researchers proofread, edit, and decide which insights should be tracked."

"Large language models cluster text using semantic relationships rather than shared vocabulary like traditional QDA."

"Things are gonna get a lot worse before they get worse."

"The moments when things 'click' often come during shower thoughts or while doing dishes — those reflective pauses matter."

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

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

"If it feels uncomfortable, you’re probably doing something right."

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

"Follow-up questions missed opportunities to probe deeper or were confusing, and participants had to repeat themselves."

"When you ask a question, try to ask one at a time so the model doesn't get lost."

"Your world is different. You probably have a design related title and tools, but the business we’re in is the same sense making for culture change."

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

"The more exposure non-researchers have to users, the better the products get."

"Michael wasn’t trying to replace in-lab usability studies or in-person ethnography, he was expanding research modalities."

"Sharing the results of studies with panelists gets them excited about contributing and keeps them engaged."

"The debate about democratization is over. The question now is how do we make the most out of it."

"We thought she was in great shape and we were thrilled, then found out she didn’t know to BCC 500 customers—this still stresses me years later."

"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."

"At NASA, we had to start AI readiness strategy with workshops led by David Salvinini, the chief artificial intelligence officer."

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

"Designers and product managers often want more control, and custom AI gives them that in research tasks."

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

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

"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."

"That productivity revolution—the idea we don’t need more headcount but better tools—is more aspiration than reality at the moment."

"Systemic deceptive design is harder to regulate because manipulation happens across time and user context."

"Meditation isn’t about stopping thinking, it’s about becoming aware of thinking."

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

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

"Legal careers value experience and credibility more as you age, unlike tech where ageism is prevalent."

"Everything touched by AI becomes synthetic and needs persistent labeling."

"It’s not about solving or fixing complexity. We’re making sense of it so we can operate in it."

"We need elegant guardrails to keep the business safe, keep participants safe, and make democratization ethical."

"If we design for the margins, we get the middle for free."

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

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

"Co-creation is where the meat of transformation happens; designers facilitate those who hold knowledge and make decisions."

"Transformation isn’t just about prototypes; it’s about designing governance."

"The mandala metaphor reminds us not to be emotionally attached to deliverables; sometimes you build to throw away."

"Managing towards outputs means someone has decided what the solution is going to be and told you to make that thing."