Quotes from recent talks

"Critical making requires critique, theory, activity, reflection, leading back to theory, but it doesn't have to start with theory. It can start anywhere."

"If you can’t see how this artifact is going to be a reference that is constantly pointed to, maybe you shouldn’t make it."

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

"Healthcare is not just a user journey, it's an interdependent journey of layers and phases."

"What does a hysterectomy cost? $2,000, $13,000, or $40,000? It depends who you ask and who pays."

"You’re objectifying you when you say I love you. Love is oneness, not separation."

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

"The hardest part is knowing what needs to change but not having the influence to change it."

"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."

"Rosenverse includes a fifteen thousand person strong Slack community dedicated to UX and product design."

"There is a huge space for improvement in AI features for UX research if these have any future."

"Research knowledge by itself is not enough. You need to add other sources like user voice, surveys, and customer feedback."

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

"Simplicity can be a differentiator, as shown by Tally, which gained traction as a free, easy form builder."

"No matter what your contract says, once your data is in the cloud connected to an LLM, you have to accept the risk it could be exposed."

"No more than five key insights — any more and teams start going off in different directions."

"Research is about answering questions that drive decisions, and that part should be democratized as much as possible."

"It’s not about play at work being silly; it’s about weaving it in seamlessly so it just feels right."

"Monoculture in stories is like having just one narrative that doesn’t capture the full reality."

"Empathy is key to wanting to do this job — wanting users to do well."

"If rules and stats update in real time, you could know when saturation is reached as data streams in."

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

"Our AI-supported mornings were no longer about just dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s, but deeper analysis sessions including clients."

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

"Researchers can become thought leaders by coaching and mentoring others on empathy and research."

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

"Incentives are a benefit but should not be the number one reason people join a panel."

"We could either become an internal service desk that's always at capacity or find a lever that multiplies our impact."

"Our past enablement was exacerbating issues because teams had resources but not enough skills."

"If someone had a hunch or guess, we have failed them as researchers."

"I would prefer not to is the kind of world many of us find ourselves in right now."

"You are the expert in understanding the lived experiences of your users. It’s ongoing work helping those around you develop a shared understanding."

"Some engineers build a council of agents that debate and generate responses, which can help with bias and accuracy."

"AI moderation did not make the research easier. It made it possible under real world constraints."

"The real breakthrough was when the pilgrim’s mechanical bird spoke both ways, braiding their words together to reach the summit."

"Google Translate completely reinvented itself by replacing many translation systems with a single neural network capable of zero-shot translations."

"Don’t build a toy project; build a real business product so user needs drive your design and code iterations."

"Information is power in organizations, so deploying AI agents means reconsidering who gets access to what data."

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

"Tying insights directly into team backlogs or goals can transform research from information to active stakeholder in decisions."

"I was so desensitized to the stress and urgency that it just became my baseline for living life."

"No role exists in isolation, said Fred Rogers, emphasizing interconnectedness beyond the individual."

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

"You don’t want to wait for permission. If you see something valuable, start doing it and demonstrate its worth."

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

"The sloppier you are, the more real you’re looking in the age of AI content."

"Competitiveness doesn’t motivate play as much as it used to; companionship and collaboration are more motivating now."

"I’ve seen people fudge their date of birth so their child can attend a summer camp they aren’t technically eligible for."

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

"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."

"Service blueprint is a knowledge graph – it gives AI intent and helps AI be more useful."

"Everyone has a customer — whether external users, third-party vendors, or internal colleagues; those humans consuming your product are your customers."

"The linguistic shift from we have AI to we’re redesigning how we work signals maturity."

"Not every problem needs research; sometimes it’s fine to ship quickly and learn after."

"Design annotations in handoffs prevent accessibility details from getting lost between designers and developers."

"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."

"When we see the problem space from multiple lenses, we can understand stakeholders’ outcomes and emotional needs."

"The new chapter in the second edition looks at service design as a change methodology for organizations, recognizing how ambitious it can be."

"We want concrete evidence that we are helping people make better decisions in their lives."

"Make yourself the magnet. Be the person who models adaptive learning so others want to join."

"If you only design for the ideal experience, you might panic and hire back human help when things don’t go as planned."

"Many new ways of doing things today were originally invented to enable people with disabilities."

"Finance is not just a system; finance is a performance."

"Program managers are the unsung heroes who can back up design ops work in many organizations."

"Designers often don’t realize they themselves are providing services and selling a promise of value."

"Be curious, keep learning, and believe you can make a difference in sustainability."

"I feel good about the work I do, but my company doesn't ship good work."

"There is no value in outsourcing the thinking of philosophy to AI; doing the thinking yourself is the point."

"Leadership Dichotomies are not opposites but spectrums where leaders find their dominant position and comfort range."

"No bee micromanages another; they have different roles and contribute independently but in sync."

"What if we trained Midjourney on our own style? That felt more ethical and right for our project."

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

"Campfires are tribal, engaged knowledge spaces, libraries are corporate buildings, organized and curated."

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

"Confidence scores from the model are not a good idea because the model has no memory."

"Without a design ops function, teams make their own flavors that dilute brand and accessibility."

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

"Our approach to career development is thinking about two dimensions: what you’re good at and enjoy, and what you’re good at but don’t enjoy."

"I know exactly this job, all its problems and dysfunctions, and I don’t want to do that anymore."

"Execution without discipline means no impact."

"You don’t have to overhaul your process to be inclusive; small changes embedded across stages make a huge difference."

"What if we are optimizing ourselves into relevance?"

"Designers have a set of superpowers that give us a unique ability to envision a better future."

"If the choice is adapting or dying, what would it look like if we adapted?"

"We designed many activities to hook into mandatory processes, like billing and reporting, to ensure consistent documentation."

"Annotate in Figma dev mode lets you provide accessibility details that AI models will implement automatically."

"Designers should have a sense of belonging too. They should be having fun while learning and working."

"We want to keep our content evergreen by focusing on people skills and critical thinking, not just tools."

"Raising the floor and the ceiling means eliminating low-value problems and empowering talent to shine creatively."

"Figma natively only allows 40 variable modes, but our client required around 90 different modes to handle age groups and device types."

"You own the design system, which gives you the unique ability to integrate that accessibility thinking into all of your components."

"The task objects are central to a popular conceptual design approach called OOUX."

"There’s no future without craft—craft is the foundation for all the operational work that follows."

"Starting a new job with no map felt lost; so I built a new map as my BYO orientation."

"Teams started shipping multiple new features every few weeks, not because they cut corners, but because of fewer false starts."

"Start tinkering, playing around, and pushing AI’s limits because the industry shift is going to get faster."

"The hidden hero or villain of craft is really feedback, the quality of feedback that we give."