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."

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

"Effort doesn’t mean progress, hard work doesn’t guarantee a harvest."

"It’s easier to sell if the team is talking about the tool — popularity inside counts."

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

"Fear is the opposite of love, not hate."

"Your time is so valuable. Ask yourself what’s the best use of your time when pivoting careers."

"Recommendations are where insights go to die unless they connect explicitly to decisions and outcomes."

"We have a responsibility to help heal communities and build trust so we can do design with intention."

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

"We've worked with speakers for months to prepare our conference content, so it's expensive to produce, but really good."

"Testing tools can help us bring the body language of the internet in front of us to see what people are doing."

"To motivate people to populate the repository, be annoyingly persistent and sometimes create the template for them."

"Total cost of ownership includes integration, customization, support, and ongoing operational effort that can be easily overlooked."

"It's almost impossible to do a survey without using some kind of tool nowadays."

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

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

"Sometimes minor questions don’t matter much, and AI can help get those out of the way so researchers focus on strategic work."

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

"Stories don’t work by extraction, people tell them and you listen."

"Things are gonna get a lot worse before they get worse."

"Quantitative ethnography isn’t mixed methods; it’s a unified method using both qualitative theory and quantitative validation."

"Users were more curious and paid closer attention because some interactions actually produced results."

"In this context, sometimes slower is actually faster because it allows going deeper and unlocking more meaningful insights."

"Nobody is going to be satisfied by insight-shaped answers or high-level summaries masquerading as breakthroughs."

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

"We want to foster a partnership between researchers and AI to enhance human expertise, not supplant it."

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

"The debate about democratization is over. The question now is how do we make the most out of it."

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

"I would rather have a product manager do crappy research than have no research at all."

"Holistic sensemaking matters."

"Seeing someone a decade later give useful UX feedback because they learned from you shows the power of long-term impact."

"AI has this strange weakness that when working with a large dataset, they often miss crucial, subtle findings."

"Follow-up questions missed opportunities to probe deeper or were confusing, and participants had to repeat themselves."

"This is a story about what happens when you stop trying to will others to think like you and start creating conditions under which both frames can coexist productively."

"The evolution in AI UIs is ongoing and rapid, and we’re still figuring out what the final form of AI-native applications looks like."

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

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

"Before AI, research teams spent over a quarter of their time consulting about research questions, often repeating themselves."

"Turning every study plan into a kind of report with new and existing insights is a mindset shift that can build a durable asset."

"I’m trying to separate who I am from what I produce and the roles I hold."

"Design research often acts like scientists with clipboards rather than humans in conversation."

"It’s strange that despite all our technology, we’re still struggling to bring design and code closer together."

"The opposite of doom scrolling is hope. Hope is active. It’s about claiming our agency in a moment that may be difficult."

"Designing for privacy is like designing for accessibility — you should aim beyond mere compliance to user-centered solutions."

"There was an expectation for you to behave like a man, but when you do, you're criticized for being aggressive."

"If 71% of people self-identify as gamers, why aren’t you learning from the video game industry?"

"Completion rates (conversion rates) and dropout rates are simple metrics but often not tracked or shared."

"I sold my Seattle house and downsized in Spokane to manage financial pressures during this transition."

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

"Navigating complexity is like sailing in open ocean. A GPS won’t help if you don’t know how to read wind and water."

"Scaffolding is about hacking and doing things differently, not lowering the bar but delivering value continuously."

"Changing course based on evidence of actual human behavior is what agility really means."

"Transformation isn’t just about prototypes; it’s about designing governance."

"The goal is to lower the floor for who can access research while raising the ceiling of what’s possible."

"Inclusive products reduce friction across customer support and operations by improving consistency across channels."

"Notice period sometimes can be more than three months for some roles, so parallel activities are essential."

"The challenge is co-developing a custom investment model that alters decision making based on portfolio logic rather than project-based thinking."

"De-risking sessions gave disgruntled stakeholders a forum to voice fears before larger workshops."

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

"Small specific interventions travel further than big programs within organizations."

"Complex systems are not chaos but non-deterministic due to interdependencies and autonomy within the system."

"We must build our service vision not just for the ideal, but for how to handle things when they go wrong."

"When we train AI on what we have done in the past, we will just do the same more efficiently, not better."

"We cannot just sit around and map systems. We can design where performance arrangements are made."

"Once collaboration loops start compounding, they become muscle memory and the structure supports our work."

"Design systems help us bring healthy consistency across digital and non-digital experiences for equity."

"Using generative AI for design risks losing the human creativity that makes design special."

"Most organizations don't care that design has an explicit standard of quality."

"You can't just measure ethics like a scientific question; you have to reason differently."

"Academic Purists believe one size fits all, ignoring context and stifling innovation."

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

"This process isn’t about replacing designers, it’s about augmenting and amplifying what we can do."

"We need to dramatically change the hats, the walls, and the workflow of how we work together in design and development."

"You need someone human deciding what information is good enough and tagged well for AI to surface it."

"Evals define a shared definition of good with tests to measure it, and that is the secret sauce for building great AI products."

"Evals are like a way to define what good looks like."

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

"A lot of design frameworks funnel thinking narrowly, which feels like baked-in limitations of human-centered design."

"For distributed embedded designers, a RACI model helps outline who’s responsible and what authority they have."

"You need to respect tacit knowledge and culture when redesigning workflows."

"What would have to be true is the most powerful question in strategy."

"Doing accessibility from the start saves cost by avoiding expensive retrofits and rework later on."

"The accessibility expert was simply lost into shouting, we must be accessible without creating a strategy."

"In 2023, design leaders were being restructured out and design relegated to a tactical, downstream function."

"Our edge isn’t in managing what exists; it’s in architecting new meaning at scale where process becomes infrastructure."

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

"If the designer or developer can see the intent of the visual element, AI can see it also."

"We created AI OKRs allowing our team members to experiment and then share their findings with the team."

"We want you to take all AI-generated info with a grain of salt but it gets you part of the way."

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

"Using AI tools like Cursor to create React components from a well-documented Figma file helps close the gap between design and code."

"Accessibility is innovation and the kinds of features people with disabilities need are incredible conveniences for the rest of us."

"Secondary research becomes a primary choice in user research in the age of AI."

"The COO isn’t paying attention to ops silos—COOs focus on longer term strategic enablement beyond today’s operational teams."

"I call this an anti org chart because it’s organic, messy, and structures emerge rather than imposed."

"Instead of prescribing a meeting, we focused on how people should feel at the end and what outcomes to achieve."

"Think of AI as an additional team member pushing your creative thinking and expanding your idea range."

"Feedback is a system. It's not just a pile of comments. It needs to be choreographed, timed, sequenced, and aimed to move the work."