"Design schools are often governed by non-designers and are surprisingly conservative, slow to change, and sometimes exploit precarious gig workers."

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

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

"Interoperability is frustrating by design, but FHIR is unlocking that data slowly."

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

"Create islands of joy at work, because everybody in this world is yearning for happiness."

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

"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."

"You can see how this is an absolutely fantastic way to get any UX question answered quickly at any time of day without bothering your instructor or your boss."

"You can now stream our entire collection of over 70 books in EPUB format with your Gold subscription."

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

"The key to combating survey fatigue is short surveys triggered at the right context, making respondents feel listened to and valued."

"The best sources for tool info are other researchers in communities like LinkedIn and Slack, not really any independent compendiums."

"AI follow-up questions led to frustrated participants because it asked highly obvious questions and ignored detailed context."

"AI agents should understand the entire context and, if no suitable result exists, come back honestly without lying."

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

"When clients join us in the field and experience research deeply, they often become advocates who come back for more."

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

"Done is better than perfect, but after AI revolution, we can do things way faster than before."

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

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

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

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

"AI is great at summaries and automating mechanical parts of research, but it’s not yet an insight machine."

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

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

"Having one-on-calls with people is one of my favorite parts of conducting research, and it felt like this was being taken away from me just for the sake of saving business resources."

"AI-generated research reports should always be tied to real feedback that you can verify behind every sentence."

"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."

"We need to speak the language of the stakeholders, whether tech-focused or human-centered."

"The danger is prioritizing speed over rigor, which risks creating monsters of bad data or harmful experiences."

"If you ask accessibility questions, it’s so important to actually respect the answers."

"Customer voice lives in minds, not in artifacts. We want people to truly hear how customers think and what they value."

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

"When there’s a major technology shift, almost everything about an application changes, including how users experience it."

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

"Before for me, AI was just a tool, but now these agents are running in the background and are mostly invisible, changing everything."

"One of my biggest pet peeves is biased questions; I hate the term validation, I prefer evaluation."

"Insight summaries act like atomic units that connect research across studies and can be routed to owning teams."

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

"Strasberg believed you can’t honestly portray fear or grief without accessing analogous feelings from your own experience."

"When developers saw the interactive color wheel I made in SVG, they were surprised but realized it reduced their workload."

"Your agency is the thing that can’t be taken away from you. It’s your means to navigate this moment and keep your sanity."

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

"What is it they say about death? It's not a door closing, it's a door opening."

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

"A major error in many services is users creating multiple accounts because they can’t find or reuse existing ones."

"Moving into law felt like starting over, but reframing it as a UX challenge made it manageable."

"Real innovation is not being first; it's about doing it right and sustainably."

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

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

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

"We were reinventing the wheel every time we entered a new market, which was incredibly slow and inefficient."

"We didn’t want to develop yet another model but rather a customizable approach to support diverse clients with innovation portfolio management."

"Buy-in is critical: stakeholders need to believe the team can move through change and support them."

"Co-creation only works when it has boundaries."

"Designers act as mediators and neutral parties to get stuck projects unstuck through design diplomacy."

"Amazon deploys new code into production into the hands of customers once every second."

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

"The biggest shift is the power moving from supply side to demand side in media."

"Iteration without reflection is not learning."

"Service designers are best placed to make inclusive design the default, not the exception."

"It’s important to establish feedback loops so each organizational layer learns from the others continuously."

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

"We intentionally created space to talk about career goals, stress, and how to support each other as a team."

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

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

"Design as a function is empathetic and human-centered, corporations are calculating and bureaucratic; integrating these value systems takes effort."

"The tech industry is retreating from responsibility and ethics despite increasing awareness of moral impact."

"Omni Oppressors try to do everything, resulting in micromanagement and harming organizational culture."

"The waggle dance communicates direction and distance to new food sources with remarkable precision."

"Feeding interview data into ChatGPT helped us develop realistic character profiles and dialogues."

"Cloud code wasn’t programmed to do this; it’s a very lightweight system where the model does most of the work."

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

"You want to ask an LLM to evaluate the fuzzy stuff because there’s no black and white output."

"Without a golden dataset, you have to build the golden dataset yourself."

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

"Unintended consequences conversations are productive because organizations want to avoid becoming negative headlines."

"Design operation is essentially service design to the design team."

"I get bored super easily; that’s why I’m super into the AI stuff right now."

"The stories you hear inside an organization are like its soul."

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

"If you are not speaking to the CEO or C-executives about compliance and transformation, someone else will."

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

"Sometimes business context points us to a direction where we no longer have the safety of our identity constructs."

"Most of our team members held term positions, and in 2020 we experienced a mandatory turnover of nearly our entire staff, creating risk of knowledge loss."

"Maintaining large-scale design systems is a real challenge that AI tools are starting to solve."

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

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

"Having standards and human approval is necessary so AI-driven work hits the story, brand, and quality requirements."

"Alex has been instrumental in setting the internal standards, and many team members have adopted his approach for consistency."

"If we think disability as a mismatch between user and environment rather than a medical problem, it becomes easier to understand how accessibility benefits everyone."

"You enter a single prompt, like washing your own car, and the system analyzes the whole context and returns research artifacts."

"Research teams often don’t know how to plug their insights beyond the immediate study to influence ongoing product decisions."

"Duplicating the map lets me answer ops questions like who are our UX domain experts or how design ops is structured."

"It is our job to lead and transform with empathy and heart because there’s fear in everyone."

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

"You can't do one without the other. Design the system, set rituals in the quality bar. They reinforce each other."