Quotes from recent talks

"The map on the note card wasn’t calling anyone out. It was providing this shared point of reference."

"Sustaining this kind of work isn’t profitable, but it’s valuable for the community."

"AI can help find proof that the problem you want to solve exists and is worth investing in."

"Designing social contracts from the end backward allows us to rethink housing, wages, savings, and care."

"Your continued feeling of precarity is the point; the system requires your continuous adaptation as a source of labor."

"Evals are a definition of what good looks like."

"AI slop means a lot of low quality AI-generated content with little human thinking and decision-making involved."

"The most basic level of power is consent — did you choose to be in this situation or use this product?"

"There’s going to be role fluidity but also hardening of expertise because people care deeply about what they do."

"Generic advice is usually too broad for a complex workflow such as escalation or compliance."

"AI is not going to make you an expert but it compresses access to previously inaccessible domains."

"We are not just designing for people anymore. We're designing for people and the agents that are working alongside them."

"The typical handoff just didn’t work out anymore in compressed AI-led cycles."

"Intelligent interfaces enable us to create value with experiences we couldn’t previously imagine, elevating design instead of replacing it."

"Our books are evergreen; you can get a lot from a book that might be 18 years old."

"We’re focusing on observable behaviors and outcomes, not specific tools or time saved, to measure AI fluency."

"Creating a plan first, then building the prototype, helps catch issues early and aligns stakeholders."

"Design is no longer just about building. It’s also now about setting boundaries."

"What AI is asking out of every individual contributor is to take on the skill set of a manager."

"If the best AI prototyping tools can’t understand our complex design system, no other tool can."

"Process and discipline got thrown out the window, but we really need new processes that incorporate these new AI tools."

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

"Sometimes when you're lost, the thing to do is stop and stop repeating the story you've told yourself for years."

"We are ultimately status-seeking monkeys, and our attachment to work is largely about our perceived role and rank."

"Design is an intention for change, not just a solution handed off to engineering."

"Reading books and articles is no longer central for many young people. What will replace books and articles for collective knowledge building?"

"The vision really does say This is where we could be in the future and that emotional component is really important."

"You can do everything right and still get poor results, but it’s no excuse not to do the right thing."

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

"Managerialism justifies one size fits all efficiency techniques that increase burnout and diminish professional authority."

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

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

"Many healthcare constraints are assumptions that have never been tested or questioned."

"When you’re doing a survey, think about if it can be done in a way that is much more accessible."

"It’s the best way, absolutely best way, to unlock all the goodness in our content."

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

"If research is going to slow down the product process, most companies will end up releasing those products without doing the research."

"It's almost impossible to do a survey without using some kind of tool nowadays."

"An SOW at LinkedIn takes six to eight weeks, and by then sometimes the project isn’t even relevant anymore."

"Human moderation will always have a place because humans are unpredictable and random."

"Human oversight is crucial because no single metric like date alone can determine if research is outdated or still relevant."

"How might we democratize empathy at scale within our organizations?"

"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."

"The human-in-the-loop element is absolutely crucial to each research."

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

"Simulated users is pure enshittification. It’s not worth the paper it’s printed on."

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

"If you’re in a big company, think smaller to work bigger — narrow your focus rather than get distracted by every shiny tool."

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

"The most expensive part of digital initiative is not delivery, it’s that messy middle—the space between insights and moving things forward."

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

"People were more likely to explain their thought process and just more context around the particular situation of their org."

"The larger the dataset you work with, the more costly it is to run a single operation on AI models."

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

"Holistic sensemaking matters."

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

"We created monsters by stitching together many disjointed research tools that don’t scale well."

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

"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."

"You can think of design and development as a rocket escaping Earth's gravity well — process overhead is the fuel you need to jettison."

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

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

"Impact tracking as a community exercise builds a collective sense of research value and inspires adoption across teams."

"Teaching yoga and working in real estate brings me tangible connection to people that I missed in tech."

"You can’t know a human honestly from the outside alone; you have to let their reality work on you."

"Open standards rock. Proprietary monopolies keep you from making stuff and limit creativity."

"Democratization means people without 'UX researcher' in their title are doing the research work—a 4:1 ratio compared to formal researchers."

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

"I wanted to be in a place where I was making people feel better, not worse."

"Not all monetization is equal; pay-to-express models are less threatening to social dynamics than pay-for-power schemes."

"Data quality involves accuracy, completeness, uniqueness, timeliness, and representativeness—not just error reduction."

"I sold my Seattle house and downsized in Spokane to manage financial pressures during this transition."

"Speed is not everything we need velocity—speed plus direction is key."

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

"AI will soon enable us to automatically flag leading questions and coach researchers for quality."

"Leadership buy-in is critical to champion inclusive design and drive product innovation and culture change."

"We are no longer just a collection of cars, we are a focused racing team ready to hit the track."

"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."

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

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

"Our goal ultimately is not to deploy a static solution but to make sure humans in the system achieve their goals successfully as often as possible."

"Europe has leaned more into public sector service design work, which impacts the kinds of metrics and approaches seen in the book."

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

"Adaptive capacity is a fractal pattern visible at individual, team, organization, and societal levels."

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

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

"Investors front load the cost they expect to win at all costs."

"You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems."

"We should break with the concept of projects and embrace change management over time to advance service design."

"Generative AI is not creative; it’s just pattern finding and recycling what’s been done before."

"Smaller design orgs rate high on some health indicators but often have no growth path; very large orgs get bogged down by bureaucracy."

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

"The Leadership Functions chart helps reflect on where you spend time, what you enjoy, and where you feel confident."

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

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

"Don’t overcomplicate workflows; the simplest thing that could possibly work is often best."