“People who are good at interviewing get hired. People who are good at politics get promoted. Staffing your teams with this skill set won’t let you ship good product.”

“Make it easier” is not a product strategy

Why simplicity falls short as a standalone product strategy.

As a user, I don’t want to

Why it pays off to reimagine task-oriented user stories.

“‘Users say our website is hard to use, let’s add a chat bot.’ Congratulations, now you have two bad interfaces instead of one.”

“Research without insights and insights without action don’t count.”

“‘We asked our most satisfied users how to improve the website’ is such a baffling user research strategy.”

Scaling the design ladder: seeing like a designer

“The biggest value of design is not building better products.”

AI user research is not ‘better than nothing’

“Things that sound like customers might say them are worthless.”

Low-fidelity design is higher up the value chain

Don’t hide unfinished work behind high-fidelity visuals.

AI user research is not ‘better than nothing’

“Things that sound like customers might say them are worthless.”

‘What have we already tried?’

The most powerful product question you can ask.

Stop inventing product problems

“Forget the product, focus on the customer.”

A good design is a good essay

UX design isn’t just solving problems; it’s making a case.

Stop building features ‘for exposure’

Great UX design doesn’t ensure valuable outcomes.

Taste in design is a dead-end

“What you should have is a point of view.”

Figma Dreamweaver

“Figma Sites brings back memories of the early 00s.”

AI chatbots discourage error checking

Where today’s AI text generation falls short.

“AI may be the first anti-automation tool in that it has automated the thing developers like to do (write code) and stuck them with more of what they don’t like to do (fix someone else’s bad code).”