Quotes from recent talks

"AI is so incredibly persuasive; you have to be super mindful and present with it."

"Memory is part of the context; it’s about what to remember, how to index it, when to retrieve it, and transparency to the user."

"The biggest difference is availability is just I can use this, usage guidance is I exist to do this and this."

"Individually, we have very little power, but together we have a great deal of power."

"We want proof points on these six things: experience shipping products, strategizing and executing, fluency across five domains, strong influence, independent operation, and team fit."

"You become part of the infrastructure when your customer understanding is embedded in files run by AI systems and engineers."

"Journey maps often mask organization and operations problems rather than real customer needs."

"None of these apps know that we do laundry in the middle of the day. They just report data and leave the occupants to fend for themselves."

"There’s no way everyone else can see what we’re capable of doing if we don’t step out from our defined areas."

"We don’t thrive individually or collectively without the warmth that emerges from meaningful connection."

"Leadership often pressures teams to integrate AI without explaining why or how, which leads to confusion and frustration."

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

"If someone doesn’t know their question, the recommendation is an in-depth interview because it’s the easiest and most versatile method."

"Once you've seen it, you can't unsee it."

"Every gray hair means you can charge more because it’s knowledge and experience."

"S****y maps are a Trojan horse for sense-making because they’re disarming and inviting."

"WCAG says it depends, but doesn’t really help you decide what large text or bold means in practice."

"AI can help tailor upward communications, but you still need to consider the idiosyncrasies of your audience."

"Without a social contract, life is nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes said."

"The designer is not describing a profession, but naming the one remaining place where their sense of self holds together."

"Avoid generic built-in evals, because then you're not defining quality for your specific situation."

"AI writing code at parity with humans is a huge achievement, and it’s expected to surpass humans within a year."

"The Web Standards Project was just a group of regular people who banded together to wrest control from Microsoft for the good of users."

"AI models are good at local logic but not global logic, so keeping task size manageable is key."

"When AI got it wrong, it did so in ways that matter operationally, skipping required compliance or assuming outdated workflows."

"The lesson isn’t that AI was wrong, but that you still have to test it against your users."

"An agent is something that works when you are not around."

"Dev plus AI ships directly to production with no one with taste in between."

"AI is a strange design material that introduces new problems and challenges, requiring fresh perspectives and revisiting assumptions."

"LinkedIn Learning is mostly training, but here you want help in the moment, answers to your questions."

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

"Showing a clickable prototype beats still wireframes and style guides where people have to copy hex codes."

"Validation is not just about asking whether the tool works. It’s about whether it works safely, realistically, and usefully."

"If you're presenting a concept, you're endorsing it. You need to be able to say why."

"Acceleration without losing quality is a company-wide goal, not just a design, product, or tech goal."

"Engineers have never before been told they aren’t the most valuable people—this is new, so have empathy for them."

"Use AI to remove boring, menial tasks but preserve the manual, difficult hard work for yourself."

"The further you go into social complexity, the deeper the soil under your feet—the roots of intergenerational trauma and cultural stories."

"Social institutions need generations to adapt, but now changes happen within fragments of a lifetime, making transitions painful."

"The process of UX and impact strategy both start with identifying needs and then plotting a journey from where you are to where you want to go."

"Kids love to play. They challenge the world through games and simulation, so the things we create need to support play and experimentation."

"Move thoughtfully and purposefully is better than move fast and break things, especially in large companies with millions of users."

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

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

"Where big corporations don't want to bother, little seeds can sprout in maternal health."

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

"Heat pumps heat and cool your home without burning anything, running on clean energy for reduced or zero emissions."

"Design is often treated as something that is brought in at the end to make things prettier or optional."

"Power is more than authority; it involves influence, privilege, and communication styles that shape dynamics."

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

"Stop watching this video, give it a spin, check out the link below."

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

"The hardest part is acting on feedback, which requires integrating tools and aligning multiple teams like research, product, marketing, and customer success."

"You want to start with capabilities, not with a tool, and assess whether anything existing can meet those needs."

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

"Personally, if I was gonna go into some aspect of UX research, I would jump in with both feet into research repositories."

"We are asked to produce more and more work with fewer people and smaller teams."

"For many of our tech clients, there’s a demand not just to use AI but to transparently show how and why, to respond to internal scrutiny."

"Well-set-up AI systems pulling data from multiple company sources will have more context, but it’s still limited compared to human understanding."

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

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

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

"I use storytelling as armor to present findings clients may not want to hear, preserving the authentic voice."

"An insight is a finding plus an opinion — it’s the so what of it all."

"Connecting the dots and making strategic sense of data is still a uniquely human strength in research."

"C-FRE stands for curiosity, freedom, reframing, exploration, and engagement—the soft qualities we tend to overlook in play."

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

"If I really just needed only quantitative data from a survey, then I would not go the AI moderated route."

"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."

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

"Research should start with the idea that everyone in the organization becomes an expert in who our users are."

"The brain of 2026 research tools moves from helping us work to helping us think."

"Genesys includes a fake tool in the software list to stop incentive-driven participants from checking all boxes."

"Scale without guardrails becomes chaos. Coaching not caretaking protects learning and accountability."

"We went very, very big instead of an annoying side project; it became the core of our research systems."

"In the AI era, applications are conversations. AI models understand intent and execute complex tasks without programming for every scenario."

"Multi-stage rockets are like the double diamond; you jettison valuable context at every stage and lose signal."

"We must design who is in the loop and who is in the lead. The responsibility can’t be handed over to AI."

"If we’re not helping with the decision, why are they paying us what they’re paying us? That’s the essence of research."

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

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

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

"A mockup is worth a thousand prompts—visual context reduces ambiguity more than text alone."

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

"Everyone knew tech was changing the world and we all had this peak at how amazing the web was going to be."

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

"Mastery is a core human motivator; people want to understand and feel competent in what they do."

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

"That holiday party in Medina was eye-opening—tech execs talking about vacation homes, and I thought, I want that world."

"Machines cannot be accountable; responsibility is always human."

"The role of the service designer shifts from design savior to facilitator, spacemaker, and guide."

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

"Operationalizing inclusive research helps teams navigate the messy, nonlinear reality of maturing accessibility practices."

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

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

"Visualization isn’t about beautiful artifacts but about creating accessible spaces for stakeholders to collaborate."

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

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

"We can’t predict the future; all we can do is make the best guesses based on what we know right now."