Shortcuts to establishing the legitimacy of design sabotage your ability to achieve anything meaningful.
User research makes the most difference when findings challenge closely-held assumptions. But the truth is often unpopular.
"Inevitability" means design decisions are no longer informed by user needs; now they are unilaterally imposed. The users are the ones being designed.
The golden age of UX is over. But the momentum that it brought is not yet extinguished, and a new generation of design leaders is seizing it.
By emphasizing design's role as a producer of visual outputs, our leaders have eroded the entire justification for UX as a practice.
Fear is choking out thoughtfulness in tech, and it can't be replaced with "more productivity" — because productivity is not what motivates corporate layoffs.
When outputs are valued above all else, hallucinations and slop aren't bugs — they're features.
LLMs are not the first tool to promise that they can free us from having to talk to people so we can "focus on the work." But talking to people IS the work.
Tech companies are only pretending to innovate, through copying futuristic aesthetics from science fiction without understanding their purpose.
Industry leaders like Apple and Shopify are redefining design excellence from making products usable to solely luxury branding.
Tech orgs only function thanks to people who volunteer for thankless "glue work." This is the space where UX lives; for the field to get respect we need to make this work visible.
Some leaders are starting to realize the extent to which AI has broken their ability to prioritize and ship value. Others are still doubling down.
