Quotes from recent talks

"The current wave of AI has disrupted practice so much, so quickly, that it's difficult to tell what practice is or what it will be in three years."

"You can spend a lot of time building a really cool concept that no one will care about because it’s not possible, it’s not feasible, it’s not grounded."

"Be observant means to observe what’s being said, not just what people say."

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

"Systems that can self-organize are the strongest form of resilience."

"This is exactly what joy feels like. This is exactly what love feels like."

"If you’re not questioning your place in UX right now, you’re sleeping."

"Find the people who already care about what we care about, even if they don’t call it UX."

"Together we can bridge the gap by incorporating lived expertise and knowledge through access and opportunity."

"The follow-up prompts are incredibly powerful. They help you learn the language of the field."

"Our library includes thousands of hours of videos created by over eleven hundred people."

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

"There are so many different variations of repositories, from research libraries to databases cataloging atomic insights."

"We’ve been evolving from a primarily qualitative team to a mixed methods team, expanding our quant capabilities and focusing on AI."

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

"High-quality participants are the fuel that makes the whole research operation engine run smoothly."

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

"Researchers are becoming more like enablers, spending 70% of their time lifting others rather than doing all the research themselves."

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

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

"It’s not self-driving cars, it’s power steering."

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

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

"Adding a senior researcher, Izzy, in field meant we could have more, smaller research tracks and better support for research newbies."

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

"Even bad research can be good because it creates learning opportunities."

"Researchers are moving away from viewing AI as automation and toward a sophisticated collaborator or soundboard."

"Sharing the results of studies with panelists gets them excited about contributing and keeps them engaged."

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

"We underestimated the amount of work; each workshop took about 40 hours per person to prepare and run."

"We get very fixated on our process and sometimes forget why we are here: to make people's lives better."

"Our job is to make sure the people making decisions actually listen."

"You come from the future. Now go build it."

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

"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 can provide healthy constraints, help people focus, use a common language, and act as cognitive accelerants."

"People fall into two groups: some want to see what the system is thinking and why, others just want to see the final output."

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

"It’s dangerous to believe everything AI says or to believe nothing. We must find a balance."

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

"You can't just expect insights to solve themselves if people don't know about them."

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

"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."

"That productivity revolution—the idea we don’t need more headcount but better tools—is more aspiration than reality at the moment."

"We have too many privacy lawyers and not enough consumer lawyers, which clouds enforcement priorities."

"I walked into the building and it just felt surreal. It didn’t feel right in my body to be there anymore."

"Designing for human motivation makes experiences more likely to thrive long term."

"If we get garbage in, we get garbage out — this is true for AI as much as for surveys or forms."

"My law professor outlined the modern legal process as UX: listening, researching, co-creating solutions with clients."

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

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

"Making the invisible visible makes things move forward and create alignments."

"For OKRs to work, incentives have to focus on learning, customer centricity, and evidence-based decision making, not just delivery."

"AI wasn’t the obstacle. Fragmentation was."

"Flight Center went from 10 researchers running research to over 130 people trained to safely do interviews."

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

"We needed a scalable system and GPS that everyone could follow with clear lanes for each team."

"Our clients all have innovation portfolios, but if you zoom out, it's many micro decisions over time that are often opportunistic, lacking strategic connection."

"Often we’re seen just as people who create personas or blueprints, but that’s not even what’s needed."

"Customer journeys used to be specialist knowledge, but now they’re a normalized, even commodified, organizational artifact."

"The economies of scale that benefited traditional media organizations have disappeared."

"In complex domains, best practice is past practice; what worked yesterday may not work today."

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

"Disability is less about a person and more about a person’s interaction with the environment and processes."

"Service design performs the belief, finance performs the control."

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

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

"Most heavy website performance issues come from videos, images, JavaScript, and fonts."

"Career growth is mostly about skills development, responsibility, and influence rather than just compensation or titles."

"Support structures for switching from design to academia are sparse; you mostly have to figure it out yourself."

"When we first thought about this topic, we quickly realized we needed to point the finger at ourselves because we've exhibited some of these behaviors."

"The queen is not a decision-maker, she’s just there to reproduce."

"I haven’t gone more than one day without seeing a new gen AI tool that promises to do it all with a single prompt."

"Agents are literally models using tools in a loop—they respond to themselves and the tools in chat-like conversations."

"Researchers are shy about sharing work because they worry about being judged — peer and management support help."

"A constitution is a very good exercise: write down your system’s principles and values to help guide its behavior."

"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."

"If scientists came up with a device that would slash the likelihood of ending up in a nursing home or depression, we'd be clamoring for it, but instead it's geriatrics—a systemic, incremental solution."

"AI helped me produce nearly 80 posts in a year; without AI, that pace would be impossible."

"One super small step of value is better than proposing the big picture if the client isn’t ready."

"Organizations are complex systems; you need to understand them deeply before acting."

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

"No VP or director has direct responsibility at board level. It’s the C-executives who ultimately decide."

"Forrester found that design thinking teams move twice as fast from idea to market because they’re closer to their users."

"Minimum unviable products don’t need to be perfect or scalable to start, just enough to prove demand."

"We implemented a routine practice of concise storytelling to capture key milestones that otherwise might be overlooked."

"This is not just a shift of different tools; it’s the way we build products now."

"Artificial intelligence is reshaping our workflows. Our roles are shifting."

"Books are semantically very rich and thus pull content much more effectively in our vector database than conference talks."

"The 'stay in your lane' mentality is a red flag signaling silos and turf protection instead of cross-functional collaboration."

"The variable sync tool we built is not a commercial product; it’s a utilitarian sync layer to overcome Figma’s limitations and connect design to engineering."

"It can cost up to 200 times more to remediate and retrofit a solution as opposed to designing it correctly in the first place."

"Our product simply sucks everything out of the open AI system and processes it with a knowledge graph based on ISO standards."

"Often tooling is a vacuum particularly around insights repositories—everyone wants it or no one wants it."

"Crowdsourcing the map meant anyone in our community practice could edit, and it worked beautifully."

"Hope is not a strategy, and mandates don’t build culture. What works is scaffolding."

"AI is just a better version of the tools you’re already using to refine ideas and express thoughts."

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