App of the Week: figr.design

Paul has been road-testing AI design tools as part of a workshop he ran on AI and UI, and after going through dozens of them, one stood out: figr.design.

What makes it work where others fall short? A few things. It lets you feed in a significant amount of context upfront, things like style guides, design systems, and personas, which means the output is far more tailored than the generic average you often get from AI design tools. Iteration is also genuinely fast. You can queue up a whole list of changes and it processes them all in one go, rather than making you wait between each tweak.

The prototypes it produces are more realistic than what you would typically get out of Figma. Text fields you can actually type in, accordion states that open and close, button states, fully responsive layouts. Not exactly revolutionary in theory, but refreshingly functional in practice. Export to Figma is available when you need it.

The main limitation is that you cannot manually adjust elements yourself. Everything goes through the conversational interface. Paul has also been looking at a tool called Inspector, which runs locally and connects to the Claude API so you pay as you go rather than a flat monthly token allocation. It has been a bit fiddly to set up but worth keeping an eye on.

For anyone regularly using Figma for wireframing and prototyping, it is worth giving figr.design a proper look. The shift Paul describes, from hunching over Figma to leaning back and having a conversation with the tool, is a fairly good summary of where this kind of work is heading.

Rebuilding a Website in 2026

Paul has fundamentally changed how he approaches website rebuilds, and the shift is largely down to AI making a genuinely hard problem, getting good content onto a website, a lot easier.

The old problem

Website rebuilds have traditionally meant migrating existing content into a new design. Which sounds fine until you remember that most of that content was written by subject matter experts who know their field but have never thought about writing for the web.

The result is pages that lecture rather than help, that bury the things users actually want to know, and that rarely arrive on time, because the content phase is almost always where projects stall.

Why things are different now

AI has changed three things meaningfully.

• First, generating content is no longer the enormous manual effort it used to be.
• Second, doing the research that informs good content, finding out what users actually ask, worry about, and need, is much simpler with tools like Perplexity.
• Third, AI-powered search engines are pushing toward a more question-oriented approach to content anyway, which makes getting this right more important than it used to be.

How Paul works now

Here is the process Paul walks through for a rebuild project.

1. Online research

Using Perplexity, Paul researches the audience. For a well-known client, he'll ask specifically about them. For a smaller or niche client, he looks at the sector. He is looking for the questions people are asking, the tasks they are trying to complete, their objections, goals, and pain points. This takes about 10 minutes.

2. Personas

The research output goes into AI, which identifies patterns and segments it into a set of personas. A couple of hours of back and forth to get these right.

3. Company overview

Paul records his kickoff meeting with the client and points AI at the transcript. Out comes a clean summary of what the company does, its products and services, and how it talks about itself. An hour for the meeting, plus 10 minutes for the summary creation.

4. Top task analysis and information architecture

If time and budget allow, Paul runs a formal top task analysis, collecting and prioritizing the questions users most want answered. For card sorting, he uses UX Metrics. If there is no time for that, AI brainstorms the top tasks from the personas and company overview. Either way, those tasks get fed into an AI-generated information architecture.

5. Building out the IA

Paul builds the IA in the CMS or in Notion, assigning the relevant tasks and questions to each page. Stakeholders can see the structure and understand what each page is there to do before a word of copy is written.

6. Getting stakeholders to contribute

Rather than asking stakeholders to write content (a recipe for delays), Paul asks them to do two simpler things for each page: bullet-point answers to the questions assigned to that page, and any other talking points they want included. Bullets only. No pressure to write.

7. Writing the content with AI

This is where it all comes together. Paul sets up an AI project with four inputs:

• A web copywriting best practice guide covering readability, structure, and scanning
• A company-specific style guide built from existing brand materials
• The audience personas
• The company overview

For each page, he drops in the questions and stakeholder bullet points, and the AI drafts the content using all of that context. Paul recommends Claude for writing tasks. The result is copy that actually reflects the company's voice and addresses what users need, rather than generic filler.

8. Review and refinement

Stakeholders review the draft and leave comments, ideally directly in Notion where AI can read the page, take in the comments, and rewrite accordingly. One more pass by stakeholders and it is ready to go.

Paul has been using this approach on half a dozen projects and reckons you can work through a full site's worth of content in about a week (depending on size) once the setup is done. For clients, it is a service worth paying for because it takes the content burden off them while producing noticeably better results than migrating whatever was already there.

One thing Paul is careful to flag: this does not mean starting from absolute scratch every time. Old articles, compliance pages, event databases, templated content that just has to be there, all of that can still come across. The point is to treat migration as the exception rather than the default.

Read of the Week: State of UX 2026

The Nielsen Norman Group article Design Deeper to Differentiate confirmed, in Marcus's words, most of what Paul has been saying for the past year. Paul took this as further evidence he is always right!

A few of the key points from the article:

UX has stabilized after the 2023-24 downturn, but teams are leaner. UX practitioners are now expected to cover more ground and demonstrate business impact rather than just shipping deliverables.

AI fatigue has set in, both among designers tired of the "you're being replaced" narrative, and among users who have grown skeptical of AI features that add sparkle without actually improving anything. The article argues that trust is now the central design problem for AI-powered products, covering transparency, control, consistency, and what happens when things go wrong.

UI quality is becoming commoditized. If your value is primarily in making interfaces look good and work correctly, the ceiling on that work is dropping. Real differentiation lives in service design, content strategy, complete user flows, and the connective tissue that links everything together over time.

The hard-to-automate skills, taste, contextual understanding, critical thinking, and judgment, are where humans still add the most value. To thrive, the article suggests UX practitioners need to position themselves as strategic problem-solvers with a broad toolkit rather than deliverable-focused specialists doing what it calls "design theater."

Paul agreed with all of it. Marcus mostly agreed too, while noting that it must be genuinely difficult to be a UX specialist inside a large organization right now, particularly in teams that have cut so far back that one person is expected to cover the entire discipline. The answer, in Marcus's entirely unbiased view, is to hire Headscape!

Marcus' Joke

I stole a neck brace from the hospital. I feel kind of bad, but at least I can hold my head up high.

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We dig into the realities of building your own product versus running an agency, the role AI plays in modern product development, and whether the flood of AI-built apps is a threat or an opportunity for professionals.

Plus, we check out Bleet, an app that turns your meeting transcripts into social media content, and Paul shares how AI-powered personas are changing the way he approaches user research.

App of the Week: Bleet

You know you should be posting on LinkedIn. You've told yourself that every week for the past 6 months. But then you sit down, stare at the blank post box, and realize you have absolutely no idea what to write about. So you close the tab and promise yourself you'll do it tomorrow. You won't.

Bleet is an app built by Stu Green (and collaborator Nick) that solves this by mining the conversations you're already having. It takes your meeting recordings and transcripts, extracts the key topics using AI, and helps you turn them into social media posts. And the thing that sets it apart from just asking ChatGPT to write something for you is that it pulls your actual words and phrases from the conversation, piecing them together into posts that genuinely sound like you rather than generic AI slop.

How It Works

You connect your meeting recordings or transcripts (or even just speak a thought into the app), and Bleet will surface a list of topics you covered. From there, you pick the ones you want to post about and hit "create." You can dial in how much creative liberty the AI takes, from near-verbatim to lightly polished.

So you sit down for 10 minutes once a week, pick a handful of topics, schedule them up, and you're done. A single meeting can generate enough content for almost a week of daily posts.

What About Client Confidentiality?

The number one concern people raise is about sharing sensitive client information. Bleet strips out client names, specific people, and identifiable details. It focuses on the general topic and the ideas discussed, not the specifics of who said what in which meeting. And of course, you review everything before it goes anywhere, so if something feels too close to the bone, you just skip it or edit it.

Topic of the Week: Building Products vs. Running Agencies

Stu Green has lived both lives. He's run agencies, built products from scratch, and sold 2 SaaS businesses. So what's the difference between building for clients and building for yourself? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Start by Solving Your Own Problem

Both of Stu's successful apps, a project management tool and HourStack (a time management app), started the same way: he needed something that didn't exist. The project management tool grew out of running his own consultancy. HourStack came from juggling small children and fragmented work hours, and wanting a way to visualize and stack little blocks of productive time.

If you're genuinely your own best customer, there's a good chance others like you exist. And if even 2 or 5 or 10 of them show up, you've got the start of something real.

The Myth of "I One-Shotted This"

AI has made it dramatically easier to build apps, but Stu is refreshingly honest about the gap between a demo and a product. Sure, he cloned entire apps in a single prompt and it looked great. But behind that impressive facade? Hours of iteration, hosting setup, video infrastructure, S3 servers, and a stack of decisions that require real product-building experience.

The people posting "I built this in one shot" on X are technically telling the truth, but they're showing you the Hollywood set, not the house behind the door. Getting from prototype to something you can actually charge money for still takes professional knowledge. You need to know what questions to ask, which answers are good, and when you're being led down a rabbit hole.

Two Tiers of AI Tools

Paul and Stu landed on a useful mental model: there are essentially 2 categories of AI building tools.

1. Tools for everyone: Platforms like Lovable or Figma Make that let anyone create a basic app or prototype. Great for personal use, proof of concepts, and quick experiments.
2. Tools for professionals: Things like Cursor and Claude Code that enhance a developer's ability to build production-quality software faster and better, but still require real expertise to use well.

Think of it like desktop publishing in the '90s. When it arrived, everyone panicked that graphic designers were finished. Instead, regular people made terrible flyers with Comic Sans, and the professionals used the same tools to produce better work, faster. AI-built apps are following the same pattern.

The 3-Stage Development Model

Paul offered a framework for thinking about where AI fits in the build process:

1. Prototype and proof of concept: Anyone can do this with AI tools. Great for validating ideas quickly and cheaply.
2. The production build: This still needs a professional. Security, scalability, accessibility, solid architecture: these are non-negotiable if people are paying to use your product.
3. Post-launch iteration: Once a professional has laid a strong foundation, less technical people can step back in and make tweaks and improvements with AI assistance, because they're working within a well-built structure.

A Revenue-Sharing Model Worth Considering

Stu floated an interesting agency model: instead of charging a client the full upfront cost to build their app, what if you took partial ownership? The client pays a smaller retainer and upfront fee, you build and host the product, and you share in the revenue. If the app takes off, everyone wins. If it doesn't, your exposure is limited.

The key is picking partners carefully. They need to bring the marketing and audience side of the equation, because your job is the infrastructure and development. It's a model that silverorange, a Canadian agency, used successfully with e-commerce clients years ago, and it still holds up.

When to Sell

Stu sold both his apps when they hit what he calls "the plateau," that point where growth flattens and your churn rate starts catching up with new customer acquisition. At that stage, you either invest heavily to push through (hiring, scaling infrastructure, customer success teams) or you sell to someone who wants a product with proven recurring revenue.

For Stu, as a creative who'd rather build new things than manage database consultants and customer support, selling was the obvious choice. He used brokers both times, people who handle the paperwork, the letter of intent, and protect both sides of the deal. They take a cut, but they also sent chocolates, so it all evens out.

Finding the Right Ideas

With everyone building apps now, how do you pick the ones worth pursuing? Stu's answer is to not go it alone. Find partners who are excited enough about the idea to invest their time and audience. If you pitch an idea and nobody wants in, that's useful information. If someone does, you've got both validation and a distribution channel on day one.

He tested this with an AI running coach concept, reaching out to local running coaches in Jacksonville. When they responded with polite indifference, he moved on rather than sinking months into a product nobody was asking for.

Read of the Week: AI-Powered Personas

Paul shared his latest obsession: using AI to breathe new life into user personas. He's written 2 articles for Smashing Magazine that walk through the process:

1. Functional Personas With AI: A Lean, Practical Workflow: How to build genuinely useful personas that focus on what people are trying to do, not just demographic data.
2. AI In UX: Achieve More With Less: Broader lessons from using AI across user research, design, development, and content creation.

The approach: take all your research (surveys, interviews, call logs, analytics) plus deep online research from tools like Perplexity, feed it into AI, and generate highly detailed personas, far more detailed than the traditional single-page variety. Then load those personas into a project in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, with instructions to answer questions from the persona's perspective.

The result is something you can consult in every meeting, on every decision. A product team can upload photos of next season's lineup and ask "what would our audience think?" A web team can test wireframes against the personas. Real user research still matters, of course, but this approach makes research-informed thinking available at a frequency and scale that traditional methods never could.

Marcus's Joke

"I tried to steal spaghetti from the shop, but the female guard saw me and I couldn't get pasta."

Courtesy of comedian Masai Graham. And yes, it's exactly as bad as you think.

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Topic of the Week: Preparing for 2026 and the UX Reckoning

We spent a good chunk of this episode discussing an article from the Nielsen Norman Group that, while technically published in early 2025, remains just as relevant today. Written by Kate Morin, Sarah Gibbons, and others at NNGroup, it tackles the challenges facing our industry head-on.

UX Is Back on the Chopping Block

Let's not sugarcoat it. It's been a tough time for UX professionals. Layoffs have hit hard, particularly in the US, and there's a palpable sense of doom and gloom floating around LinkedIn and other professional spaces. We've seen this before, though. We set up Headscape right in the middle of the dot-com bust, after being laid off ourselves. It wasn't fun, but times like these have a way of separating the wheat from the chaff.

Economic downturns tend to clear out people who jumped into UX because they saw easy opportunities, leaving behind those with genuine understanding and passion for the work. And despite all the negativity online, the World Economic Forum actually ranked UX design as one of the 8th fastest-growing industries. So the discipline itself isn't dying. There's just been a mismatch between the number of people entering the field and the reality of what the market can absorb.

The Rebranding Debate Is a Red Herring

Some people are suggesting we rebrand UX to "product design" or "experience design" to solve our problems. We don't think that's the answer. The word "design" does carry some baggage. In many business minds, it's seen as a luxury rather than a business-critical function. So when budgets get tight, "design" gets cut while "conversion optimization" and "customer retention" survive. That's a perception problem, not a naming problem.

The real issue is that there are too many low-quality UX practitioners who've been churned out through bootcamps. They've been taught a process to follow, and they follow it come what may. That's not their fault; they were taught that way. But six months of bootcamp doesn't prepare you for the messy, contextual reality of actual UX work.

The AI Reckoning

The negativity around AI on LinkedIn has been phenomenal lately. There's anger about "AI slop" and a general feeling that it's no good for anything. Paul posted about using AI to help create personas and do online research, and got absolutely slated for it.

AI is just a tool. Like any tool, if you use it badly, you get bad results. If you use it well, it can be genuinely helpful. The good news is that we're finally moving past the "AI for AI's sake" phase. We're starting to see thoughtful integration of AI into products and services, AI that actually solves real user needs.

Every technology goes through the same cycle. Remember video recorders? First, we were just amazed the technology worked at all. Big analog buttons, you started recording and stopped recording, and that was it. Then manufacturers added more and more features until the things became unusable with their tiny buttons and complicated preset systems. Then someone invented a code you could enter from the Radio Times to set recording times automatically. And finally, Sky came along with "press a button and it records." AI is going through that exact same evolution right now.

Shallow UX Is Suffering (and That's Okay)

Templates, processes, production-line UX: that stuff is really struggling, and it will continue to struggle. AI can do that now. You're not going to make money or build a career by blindly following the double diamond and churning out deliverables.

What you need going forward are distinctly human skills: critical thinking, taste, knowing whether something is heading in the right direction, and navigating messy organizational dynamics. Those are the skills that matter. Soft skills like relationship building, facilitation, and empathy are going to be far more valuable than whether you can use Figma.

Stop Worshipping Templates and Processes

UX is messy. You can't box it up the same way on every project. Templates and checklists are great starting points, but they're not a substitute for thinking. Context is everything.

There's no such thing as best practice. When someone from Google or Facebook says you need a 6-week discovery phase with facilitated usability testing of at least 6 people, and sure, that probably worked great for their situation, with their team, their product, and their stakeholders. But it doesn't mean it's right for your startup or your client with a third of the budget and massive internal politics.

If you've been taught a linear process, shift your mindset. Don't have a process. Have a toolkit of techniques you use as and when appropriate. You don't always need a discovery phase; sometimes a quick phone call is enough. You don't always need journey mapping; sometimes that's just not appropriate.

Don't Lose the Human Connection

Be careful that all these AI-powered conveniences don't cost you your connection with actual users. It's tempting to just run surveys, do unfacilitated remote testing, or let AI do online research. But you don't build real empathy that way.

When you sit down to write copy or design an interface, you want to be able to picture the person in your head. You want to feel who they are, what they'd say, what they'd struggle with. The more levels of abstraction between you and your users, the harder that becomes. Even if it's just talking to one or two customers, make sure you're seeing them as real people.

Become a Unicorn (a.k.a. Generalist)

For years, we've been told to specialize. But now? We need to become more comfortable wearing multiple hats. You might be doing wireframing, user research, strategy work, and training, all in the same week. You might need to understand adjacent fields like marketing, business strategy, data modeling, or product management.

AI can help extend your capabilities. Maybe you know a bit about accessibility or SEO, but not enough to do a full audit. With AI's help, you can now be better in those areas. Still not as good as a specialist, but better than you would have been alone.

Stop focusing so much on outputs (wireframes, reports) and start focusing on outcomes. Elevate your thinking from tactical to strategic.

If you want to dig deeper into this, check out Paul's free email course. It's 30+ emails on thinking more strategically and holistically about UX.

Read of the Week: Design Patterns Catalog by Projects by If

We stumbled across a brilliant resource from an agency called IF. They've created a design patterns catalog with a particular emphasis on building trust through transparency, user control, and thoughtful approaches to consent and data sharing.

This is increasingly important, especially as AI becomes more prevalent. It's not about slapping a testimonial on a page and calling it done. It's about baking trust into the experience itself. The catalog is beautifully illustrated and well-explained, making it a great scannable reference.

Paul found this while working on Bleet, a tool that automatically extracts advice from your recorded meetings and turns it into social media content. The trust challenge there is obvious: you're uploading client meetings with confidential information, so finding patterns for building that trust was essential.

Marcus's Joke

"I dropped a tub of margarine on my foot two weeks ago. I can't believe it's not better."

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App of the Week: Bolt.new

This week we're looking at Bolt.new, a vibe coding platform designed specifically for non-developers. Unlike tools like Cursor that are built for developers to pair program with AI, Bolt is aimed at people like marketers, designers, and small business owners who want to create functional applications without ever touching code.

Paul has been using Bolt to build practical tools for his own business, including a custom top task analysis app, WordPress plugins, JavaScript extensions, and CSS animations. The platform handles everything from the database to publishing and hosting, making it genuinely accessible for non-technical users.

However, we'd caution against treating these tools as production-ready for enterprise use. They're excellent for prototyping, internal tools, and small-scale applications, but they likely won't pass rigorous quality control in larger organizations. Think of them like desktop publishing was in the early days. They democratize creation but don't eliminate the need for professional expertise.

For production-ready code, the real value comes when developers use AI pair programming tools where they can review, understand, and quality-check the output. The future likely involves professionals using these tools to increase productivity rather than replacing expertise entirely.

Topic of the Week: The State of Higher Education and Digital Transformation

Andrew Millar, who runs the digital team at Dundee University, joins us to paint an honest picture of the current higher education landscape. It's not pretty, but his candid insights offer valuable lessons for anyone navigating organizational crisis, whether in universities or elsewhere.

The Perfect Storm Facing Universities

Higher education has always claimed poverty, but the structural problems have become impossible to ignore. Universities face two fundamental financial challenges: funding per student hasn't kept pace with inflation over the past decade, and research grants typically only cover around 80% of actual costs, leaving institutions to make up the difference.

International students became the solution to plug this gap. They could be charged higher fees and effectively cross-subsidized teaching for domestic students and research activities. This worked until a perfect storm hit: COVID disruptions, international conflicts, hostile government rhetoric toward international students, and for Dundee specifically, the Nigerian economy's collapse, which dramatically reduced one of their key international markets.

Dundee found themselves with a 30 million pound deficit. Within a year, the principal resigned, the entire executive changed, the Scottish government stepped in with emergency funding, and 500 staff members have left from a workforce of around 3,000.

The Three Phases of Crisis Management

Andrew outlined three distinct phases organizations go through during financial crisis, and his framework offers practical guidance for anyone facing similar situations.

Phase 1: Cut, Cut, Cut

When crisis hits, budgets get slashed, often multiple times. Andrew recommends categorizing everything into three buckets: what's absolutely critical to keep the lights on, what will hurt but won't cause lasting harm, and what's easy to eliminate. This is actually an opportunity to clear out legacy systems and processes that nobody uses but somehow persist.

The challenge is that during this phase, people aren't open to change or new ways of working. They just want to see the existing stuff cut. Don't waste energy trying to introduce innovations here. Focus on strategic pruning.

Phase 2: The Great Spaghetti Flying Contest

This is where everyone becomes an expert on how to solve the crisis. Phrases like "we should at least try it" and "isn't it good to test ideas?" fly around constantly. The problem is that these are the exact phrases digital teams have been using for years to encourage experimentation, now thrown back at them by people with competing priorities.

Governance structures become critical here. You can clarify requests (ensuring they're truly worth pursuing), compromise on scope, or clog them up in committees until priorities become clearer. When your escalation paths have collapsed, as they did at Dundee when leadership departed, you're left justifying decisions without backup.

The key insight: never say "computer says no" via email. Have conversations. Explain your reasoning. When people understand the constraints, they typically accept them. Email refusals just get escalated to whoever shouts loudest.

Phase 3: The Big Squeeze

With less money, fewer people, less institutional knowledge, and no clear strategy, this phase is when things get really difficult. But paradoxically, it's also when people become more open to change. They've accepted that old ways aren't working and are more receptive to credible, evidence-based proposals for doing things differently.

Digital Team Transformation and the Hub-and-Spoke Model

Andrew's team has evolved significantly since their original digital transformation work. They reduced the number of people managing the corporate website from 350 to about 20 while maintaining quality. Now they're moving toward a hub-and-spoke model, with centralized governance but distributed execution.

The ideal version of this model, which IBM pioneered, has people embedded in individual departments but reporting into the central digital function. This creates healthy tension, since they need to keep their central manager happy while also serving their local colleagues. It maintains standards while building subject matter expertise across the organization.

One emerging priority is what Andrew calls "generative engine optimization," ensuring content is structured so AI tools can accurately surface and represent it. As more users get information through AI intermediaries without ever visiting your website, getting this right becomes critical.

The Value of Community: Scottish Web Folk

The conference that inspired this episode, Scottish Web Folk, emerged partly out of necessity. When travel budgets got cut, Dundee created their own event. It's now grown to over 150 attendees with strong sponsor support, all while maintaining its community-first ethos.

The conference bans sales pitches from sponsors, limiting them to 30 seconds of self-promotion. Instead, it emphasizes knowledge sharing between suppliers and institutions. This approach keeps sponsors coming back because they recognize that embedding themselves in the community pays long-term dividends.

For any digital team, hosting events like this builds internal credibility and external relationships simultaneously. It positions you as thought leaders within your organization while creating the networks that sustain careers and enable collaboration across institutional boundaries.

Marcus's Joke

"I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out she was a cheetah."

That's a wrap for this episode. See you in the new year!

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Apps of the Week

Before we get into our main discussion, we want to highlight a couple of tools that caught our attention recently.

UX-Ray 2.0

We talked about this last week, but it deserves another mention. UX-Ray from Baymard Institute is an extraordinary tool built on 150,000 hours (soon to be 200,000 hours) of e-commerce research. You can scan your site or a competitor's URL, and it analyzes it against Baymard's research database, providing specific recommendations for improvement.

What makes UX-Ray remarkable is its accuracy. Baymard spent almost $100,000 just setting up a test structure with manually conducted UX audits of 50 different e-commerce sites across nearly 500 UX parameters. They then compared these line by line to how UX-Ray performed, achieving a 95% accuracy rate when compared to human experts. That accuracy is crucial because if a third of your recommendations are actually harmful to conversions, you end up wasting more time weeding those out than you saved.

Currently, UX-Ray assesses 40 different UX characteristics. They could assess 80 parameters if they dropped the accuracy to 70%, but they chose quality over quantity. Each recommendation links back to detailed guides explaining the research behind the suggestion.

For anyone working in e-commerce, particularly if you're trying to compete with larger players, this tool is worth exploring. There's also a free Baymard Figma plugin that lets you annotate your designs with research-backed insights, which is brilliant for justifying design decisions to stakeholders.

Snap

We also came across Snap this week, which offers AI-driven nonfacilitated testing. The tool claims to use AI personas that go around your site completing tasks and speaking out loud, mimicking user behavior.

These kinds of tools do our heads in a bit. On one hand, we're incredibly nervous about them because they could just be making things up. There's also the concern that they remove us from interacting with real users, and you don't build empathy with an AI persona the way you do with real people. But on the other hand, the pragmatic part of us recognizes that many organizations never get to do testing because management always says there's no time or money. Tools like this might enable people who would otherwise never test at all.

At the end of the day, it comes down to accuracy and methodology. Before using any such tool, you should ask them to document their accuracy rate and show you that documentation. That will tell you how much salt to take their output with.

E-commerce UX Best Practices with Christian Holst

Our main conversation this month is with Christian Holst, Research Director and Co-Founder of Baymard Institute. We've been following Baymard's work for years, and having Christian on the show gave us a chance to dig into what nearly 200,000 hours of e-commerce research has taught them about conversion optimization.

The Birth of Baymard Institute

Christian shared the story of how Baymard started about 15 years ago. His co-founder Jamie was working as a lead front-end developer at a medium-sized agency, and he noticed something frustrating about design decision meetings. When the agency prepared three different design variations, the decision often came down to who could argue most passionately (usually the designer who created that version), the boss getting impatient and just picking one, or the client simply choosing their favorite.

Rarely did anyone say they had large-scale user experience data to prove which design would actually work better. They realized they could solve this problem by testing general user behavior across sites and looking for patterns that transcend individual websites. If they threw out the site-specific data and only looked for patterns across sites, they could uncover what are general user behaviors for specific UI components and patterns.

It started with just checkout flows. It wasn't even clear they would ever move beyond that. But now, 15 years later, Baymard has a team of around 60 people, with 35 working full-time on conducting new research or maintaining existing research.

The Role of Research-Backed Guidelines

One important point Christian emphasized is that Baymard's research isn't meant to replace your own internal testing. You should always do your own data collection and usability testing. The point of having a large database of user behavior and test-based best practices is that when you're redesigning something, you have maybe 100 micro decisions to make. You can't run internal tests for every single one of those decisions.

Even Fortune 500 companies that have the budget don't have the time to wait for results on every micro decision. So what happens is you collect research on the two or three big things that are site-specific or unique to your brand or customer demographic. But all the generic stuff (how to design an expand and collapse feature, how the quantity field should work, how the phone field should be designed in a checkout flow) these are extremely standardized UI components where users have standardized expectations.

You shouldn't squander your internal test resources on testing things that are completely generic. That's where pre-made research comes in. It removes 97 of the micro decisions so you can focus your resources on what's unique and important to your brand.

Common E-commerce Conversion Killers

We asked Christian what kills conversion the most on e-commerce sites. While it depends on each site's specific issues, there are some concrete things Baymard has consistently seen sites fail at that are surprisingly easy to fix.

The Order Review Trap

In countries where you have an order review step (where users review the whole order before pressing "place order"), there's a really dangerous trap. The order review step and the order confirmation step look very similar in users' minds. Both are textual pages that appear after entering credit card data. Both show a summary of information.

In testing, Baymard consistently sees some users misinterpret the order review step for a confirmation step. This is a critical error because these users will exit the page thinking they've completed their order. They don't even realize the abandonment occurred. It's the worst type of checkout abandonment that can happen.

A very simple trick is to take the "place order" button that you usually have at the bottom of the page and duplicate it so there's also one at the top of the page. One audit client did this and got a $10 million return on investment from just duplicating that button. It won't affect 10% of users, but if it prevents one out of 200 users from abandoning, that's half a percent of all your site revenue you've recovered.

Error Recovery Experience

Christian called this "the least sexy but most important topic" in checkout flows. The general error recovery experience in checkout flows has improved over the 15 years Baymard has been researching, but it's still way too poor.

When a validation error occurs, users struggle with three things:

1. Understanding that an error actually happened
2. Understanding where the error is
3. Understanding how to resolve it

Best practices for error recovery:

• Provide visual styling for each field that's wrong
• Have a description at the top of the page that outlines all errors
• Use conditional logic: if there's only one error, scroll them to that field. If there are multiple errors, scroll to the top where they can see the overview

Baymard sees users who fix one error, resubmit, and then get frustrated when the page reloads with another error they didn't see. They sometimes conclude the page is broken. When Baymard surveys users, 6% say they've abandoned a checkout flow in the past quarter due to perceived technical errors. Most of these aren't actual technical errors, the page is just extremely complicated to use.

Adaptive Error Messages

Instead of saying "phone number is invalid," tell users exactly why. Your technical system knows exactly which validation rule was triggered. If the phone number is wrong because it includes a special character, tell them: "Special characters cannot be used. You don't need to include the country code." If it's too long or too short, say that specifically. This helps users recover faster.

Ideally, much of this should be fixed in the backend. Postcodes are a great example, some people put a space in UK postcodes, some don't. Some write it all uppercase, some use mixed case. Why isn't this fixed in the backend? There should be something tidying it up and dropping it into the database in the correct format.

Product Data and Imagery

One area where Baymard has seen genuine improvements is around product data and product imagery. Most sites took a long time to figure out that the content on the product details page is crucial to user experience.

When users land on a product details page, 90-95% of what they do as a first action is look at the image. But they also use images for tasks where it's a terrible idea. For instance, if trying to figure out whether a speaker has the right connection, instead of going to the specification sheet, they look for images showing the speaker from the back to see the connections. If they can't see it, they conclude it doesn't have the connection and abandon that product.

Users are extremely visually driven, even trying to use images to solve problems where it's a poor strategy. Sites need really good imagery from multiple angles, detailed videos showing what goes on visually, and proper product descriptions.

Building Trust in E-commerce

We asked Christian about building trust beyond the lazy approach of just shoving social proof and awards on the site. His insights were revealing:

Social Proof On and Off-Site

Social proof is important both on your page and off it. If people are in doubt whether to trust you, they won't trust your version of whether they should trust you. They'll go offsite to check reviews. Responding to negative reviews is crucial because it helps explain or set context. Users often seek out negative reviews more than positive ones to do due diligence. They understand not every product is perfect for every user, but they want to know if the shortcomings are relevant to them.

Return Policies and Professional Design

Clear and generous return policies help build trust. But there's also the "aesthetic usability effect", having a well-worked design without complications builds trust and credibility. Sites that look too dated will degrade trust. If something looks like it was made in the nineties, users may question if it's too unprofessional.

Simply having a site that's not too complicated to use also builds trust. If users get completely stuck, they may conclude it's too unprofessional or wonder if there's something wrong with the business.

These effects depend quite a bit on whether people know the brand. It changes dramatically if it's a large known brand versus a completely unknown small site with new users.

The Future: AI and E-commerce

We couldn't resist asking Christian about AI's impact on e-commerce. There are similarities to when voice applications came out five or six years ago. Everyone said we'd order everything with our voice, but that didn't really happen. This time may be different, but it won't go as fast as people think, at least not for all purchases.

There are some commodity items and household staples you just want restocked when they run out. Those are well suited for AI purchasing, the same type of products you'd buy on subscription today. But many purchases require users to be in control.

Where AI is already changing things massively is not in the complete purchase but in research and product discovery. Which digital camera should I buy? Which one is best for my requirements? This has always been an offsite experience. Users typically have multiple e-commerce sites, review sites, blogs, and social media open when researching purchases. That part is changing rapidly with AI.

But going from winnowing down millions of products to a few options, then having AI auto-purchase one of them, will take quite a while before users are that confident. It may even be generational, people our age may never fully trust it even when it becomes trustworthy, while the next generation growing up with competent AI will develop different habits.

Final Thoughts

What really strikes us about e-commerce optimization is how it's death by a thousand cuts. It's not that one of these things will wreck your conversion rate, but collectively they cause real problems. When you're dealing with an entire e-commerce site, there are so many little things that it's impossible to plan for all of them upfront. You will miss things.

That's why post-launch optimization is crucial. There will always be things that need improving, and that ongoing work can span years. It's a big job, but the research and tools that organizations like Baymard provide make it far more manageable than trying to figure everything out from scratch.

Marcus's Joke

And now, as always, Marcus leaves us with his joke of the week:

"My dad suggested I register for a donor card. He's a man after my own heart."

That's actually quite good, Marcus. We'll allow it.

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App of the Week: Baymard UX-Ray

Before we get into our main conversation, we need to talk about an extraordinary tool that just launched. Baymard UX-Ray is built on the Baymard Institute's 150,000 hours of ecommerce research. If you're not familiar with Baymard, they've been conducting rigorous usability research for years, building an enormous repository of what actually works in ecommerce design.

What makes UX-Ray remarkable is how it applies all that research. You can input your own site or a competitor's URL, and the tool scans it against Baymard's research database. It then provides specific recommendations for improvement, each one linked back to detailed guides explaining the research behind the suggestion.

Now, we'll be honest. Tools like this can feel a bit depressing when you first encounter them. Another thing that AI can do that used to be our job, right? But the reality is more nuanced. You still need expertise to ask the right questions, to know when to ignore advice that doesn't fit your situation, and to implement recommendations effectively. What UX-Ray really does is democratize access to quality research, allowing smaller teams and solo practitioners to benefit from insights that would otherwise require a massive research budget.

For anyone working in ecommerce, particularly if you're trying to compete with larger players, this tool is worth exploring.

Life as a Freelancer Serving Small Businesses

Our main conversation this month centers on something we don't discuss enough in the UX and web design community. Most of the advice you read online, most of the case studies and best practice articles, come from people working with large organizations. We're guilty of this too. Between the two of us, we've worked with clients like Doctors Without Borders, GlaxoSmithKline, and major universities. That shapes our perspective in ways we don't always recognize.

Paul Edwards brings a different lens. He's spent 20 years as a freelancer, and while he's worked with organizations of varying sizes, the common thread through his client list isn't scale. It's circumstance. His clients typically have small or nonexistent marketing teams. They're often time-poor and lack technical expertise. Most importantly, they have skin in the game in a way that corporate clients rarely do.

The Origin Story

Paul's freelance journey started dramatically. On November 5, 2005, he had a tantrum at his job as a commercial manager for a civil engineering company and quit on the spot. No savings, no business plan, no real idea what he was doing. He just knew he'd been teaching himself web design with Dreamweaver and Fireworks, and he thought maybe he could make a go of it.

What followed was the classic freelancer trajectory. He worked his friends and family network, which led him into academia and international development work. He found himself building sites for projects funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, DFID, and the World Bank. These weren't necessarily well-funded projects despite the prestigious funders, but they gave him experience working with agencies across Europe and projects in Africa focused on critical issues like hygiene and sanitation.

What Makes Small Business Work Different

When you're working with a small business owner, the stakes are fundamentally different. As Paul put it, the number of clicks their campaign generates directly affects how much money they take home at the end of the month and the security of their family. That changes everything about the relationship.

This isn't to say working with large organizations is easy or that the work doesn't matter. But in a corporation, success and failure are distributed across many people and many factors. When you're working with someone who owns their business, your work has an immediate, visible impact on their livelihood. The opportunity cost of failure is enormous. The credit for success is also more direct, which can be incredibly motivating.

Paul's business has evolved toward more retainer and time bank arrangements over project work. This shift happened gradually but has been transformative. For clients, it guarantees access to his expertise when they need it. For Paul, it provides income stability. But there's another benefit that often gets overlooked. When you have long-term retainer clients, especially small ones with staff turnover, you become a point of continuity in their organization.

One of Paul's retainer clients had a marketing department of two people. Both left within a year. Paul was literally the only person who understood the history of their digital presence, their past campaigns, and their strategic direction. That kind of institutional knowledge is incredibly valuable, and it's something freelancers can uniquely provide.

The Budget Reality

We had to ask about budget because it's the elephant in every room. When you're working with smaller clients, you simply have fewer resources to work with. So how do you adapt all the best practice advice that assumes you have time for extensive user research, iterative testing, and comprehensive documentation?

Paul's answer was illuminating. He doesn't find himself frustrated by advice that doesn't apply to his situation. He just doesn't apply it. As a generalist, he's always picked and chosen what's relevant, learning what he needs for each specific job and disregarding the rest. He can't let his head explode trying to take in everything, so he focuses ruthlessly on what matters for the work at hand.

The reality is that best practice often needs to be adapted regardless of client size. A lot of what gets labeled as essential process work serves organizational needs as much as user needs. In a large organization, you might conduct extensive research partly to align compliance, get legal on board, and protect your client contact from political fallout. In a small business where you're talking directly to the decision maker, you can move faster and iterate post-launch.

That doesn't mean cutting corners on things that matter. Paul still does discovery and research work, but he structures it differently. Rather than one large project with research baked in, he often does pre-project discovery as separate billable work. This allows him to flex the scope based on what the client has in-house, what they lack, and what will actually move the needle for them.

Filtering Clients and Managing Risk

One of the most valuable parts of our conversation was Paul's approach to client selection. He's learned through hard experience that taking on a client who isn't a good fit costs far more in stress and lost time than the revenue is worth. Every single time he's taken someone on when his gut said no, it's been worse than if he hadn't brought that money in.

So Paul has developed a risk scoring process. He researches Companies House filings and financial accounts. He Googles potential clients thoroughly. He makes sure to be himself from the first conversation, explaining that he's blunt and tends to say what he thinks. Some people say they want that but really don't, and it's better to discover the mismatch early.

When things do go wrong, which is rare after 20 years, Paul offboards as quickly and graciously as possible. He sees it as partly his fault for misjudging the fit, so he tries not to burn bridges. He'll help them find someone else to work with and exits professionally.

We wondered whether this kind of risk management is more necessary when working with smaller organizations. After all, you know Oxford University will eventually pay their bills, even if slowly. Paul's experience is that payment risk exists at all scales, but small businesses can have more volatile finances. However, most of his clients pay within 48 hours, which is remarkable. The key is that by moving toward retainer and time bank models where time is paid upfront, a lot of payment anxiety simply disappears.

The Generalist Advantage and AI's Role

Our conversation kept circling back to the value of being a generalist, and how AI is amplifying that advantage. Paul described AI as helping him get out of his own way. If he knows 90 percent of what's needed to help a client but lacks that final 10 percent, he used to decline the work. The opportunity cost of getting it wrong felt too high. Now, AI helps him bridge that last 10 percent with confidence.

He shared a perfect example. A trade business client, selling into the architectural sector, wanted help with their Google Ads campaign. Paul had dabbled in PPC but wasn't an expert. The client was willing to pay him to learn, which was fortunate, and AI supported that learning process. It helped him analyze the massive amounts of data that PPC campaigns generate, identify trends, and fill knowledge gaps. The result was a completely new campaign with much lower spend, a huge increase in relevant clicks, and better funnel positioning. The client was so pleased they sent him a Christmas hamper, a first in 20 years.

This is what the return of the generalist looks like. AI isn't replacing expertise. It's allowing people with broad knowledge and good judgment to tackle problems that previously required specialists. You still need to know enough to ask good questions, to recognize when something feels off, and to verify AI's suggestions. But you can now say yes to opportunities that would have been too risky before.

What Large Organizations Can Learn

Near the end of our conversation, Paul made an observation that stuck with us. While he learns constantly from working with small businesses, he thinks there's value flowing the other way too. People working with large organizations, like us, often miss things that become obvious when the stakes are personal and immediate.

When you work with a business owner who's putting their family's financial security on the line, you can't hide behind process or best practice. You have to deliver real value. You have to be adaptable. You have to become genuinely invested in their success because they're so clearly invested themselves. That kind of clarity and accountability can be harder to find in large organizational work, where responsibility is diffuse and success has many parents.

This Month's Reads

Each month, we share a few articles, videos, and resources that caught our attention and sparked interesting conversations about the state of our industry.

Functional Personas: A Practical Guide

Following up on last month's discussion about AI-generated personas, Paul has now written a comprehensive guide for Smashing Magazine. The article walks through his method for creating functional personas using AI, explaining when this approach makes sense and how to implement it effectively. If you've been curious about whether AI-generated personas can actually be useful, this piece answers that question with practical examples.

Experience Design: The Return of the Generalist

Nielsen Norman Group has posted a video arguing for a terminology shift from "user experience design" to "experience design." Their reasoning is that UX has developed a reputation problem. People think they know what it means, but they're often wrong, associating it primarily with visual interface design.

We have mixed feelings about this. The problem isn't really the word "user." It's the word "design." When most people hear design, they think of visual design and interface work, not the broader strategic and research work that UX encompasses. Changing to "experience design" doesn't solve that fundamental misunderstanding.

That said, the video makes interesting points about the return of the generalist, which aligns with much of our conversation this month. As tools like AI make specialist knowledge more accessible, there's growing value in people who can work across disciplines and see the bigger picture.

Marcus's Joke of the Week

A perfectionist walks into a bar. Apparently it wasn't set high enough.

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We talked about why this stuff isn’t just bad manners, but also an accessibility issue, and how to push back when your boss is shouting about conversion rates. We also wandered off into personas, because what’s a Boagworld Show without a tangent or two?

App of the Week

This week app is Be My Eyes. It’s designed to support blind and low-vision users by letting them connect with volunteers (or increasingly, AI) who can describe what’s in front of them. It’s practical, humane, and a great reminder that sometimes technology really does make life easier. Unlike my dishwasher, which still beeps at me like I’m trying to launch a nuclear missile.

Topic of the Week: Deceptive Design, Accessibility, And The Real Cost Of Manipulation

This is where we rolled up our sleeves and got into the meat of it. What actually counts as deceptive design, why it’s more than just “bad UX,” and why the accessibility crowd are getting involved.

What Do We Mean By Deceptive?

There’s no single definition everyone agrees on, but the gist is: if you’re deliberately steering or trapping users into something they didn’t intend or need (and especially if it lines your company’s pockets) it’s deceptive. That’s different from an anti-pattern, which is just poor design born of ignorance.

Why It’s An Accessibility Issue

Deceptive patterns catch everyone out eventually, but they’re especially cruel to people with cognitive disabilities, attention difficulties, or those relying on assistive tech.

If you’ve ever been stuck doomscrolling until you realized it’s not lunchtime but bedtime, you’ll know the feeling. The difference is, for some users, the consequences can be more than just a lost afternoon. That’s why accessibility guidelines are starting to take these patterns seriously.

If you’re keen to see where this work is going, have a poke at these:

• WCAG 3 Working Draft
• W3C User Stories
• Proposed Personas Draft

Where It Gets Messy

Of course, it’s rarely moustache-twirling villains plotting this stuff. Most of the time it’s teams chasing KPIs (sales, clicks, engagement) and nudging too far. That’s how you get:

• The big shiny green “Buy with insurance” button, while the “Buy without” option is hiding in grey.
• Cheaper plans buried three clicks down, so the expensive ones look like the only choice.
• The friendly phone call that turns into a hard sell for extended warranties.

On paper the numbers look great. Meanwhile, refunds, complaints, and customer churn quietly tick upward. But hey, at least the dashboard looks good, right?

The Role Of AI

AI has the potential to make things better (look at how Be My Eyes uses it) but it also risks making things worse. More chatbots standing between you and an actual human being, for instance.

At the moment we haven’t seen a tidal wave of AI-driven trickery, but the ingredients are all there. Somewhere in Silicon Valley, there’s probably a twenty-something rubbing his hands and plotting.

Pushing Back Without Becoming Unemployed

Telling your boss “this is unethical” might get you a polite nod. Showing them how deceptive patterns increase refunds, tank repeat purchases, and hike up customer support costs? That’s when people start listening. Always lead with the business case, because sadly “doing the right thing” isn’t enough in most boardrooms.

Offer alternatives that still meet goals but don’t annoy users. Equal-weight buttons. Clear language. Confirmations before adding sneaky extras. And if management still insists, put your concerns in an email so there’s a record. Nobody likes receiving an email that basically says, “I warned you.”

Personas With A Bit More Reality

While we’re at it, let’s talk personas. Most marketing personas are about as useful as a chocolate teapot. They’re built around demographics and stereotypes. King Charles and Ozzy Osbourne would end up in the same persona (same age, same country, both live in castles). Clearly useless.

Instead, think functional personas. Base them on needs, tasks, objections, and accessibility requirements.

You don’t need a “disabled persona.” Just make sure some of your personas have traits like dyslexia, ADHD, low vision, or anxiety about being conned. That way, you’ve got a ready-made reason to say, “This won’t work for Priya, who relies on a screen reader.”

The Big Picture

Deception feels like a shortcut. It isn’t. It costs you in trust, support overhead, and long-term loyalty. Treat deceptive design as an accessibility barrier, argue with data, and keep users in your personas. That way you’ll serve both your customers and your company—and maybe sleep better at night.

Read of the Week

In this week’s show we also highlighted two cracking resources:

Deceptive Design

A collection of manipulative patterns with real examples. Perfect for calling out “that thing the boss wants us to try.”

Deceptive Patterns and FAST by Todd Libby

Slides from Todd’s talk. Great for showing stakeholders that you’re not just making it up as you go along.

Marcus Joke

We’ll wrap up with Marcus’s groaner of the week:

“I told a joke on a Zoom meeting and nobody laughed. Turns out I am not even remotely funny.”

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App of the Week

Check out Emotion Sense Pro—a Chrome extension that analyzes micro‑expressions and emotional tone in real time during Google Meet calls, while keeping all data safely on your device. It's privacy-first, insightful, and a bit unsettling. But if you're moderating user tests, hosting webinars, or running interviews, it gives a useful look into unseen emotional cues.

Topic of the Week: Trust as Your UX Superpower

This week's topic dives into why trust is absolutely essential in today's digital landscape. Here's a summary of what was discussed, but we encourage you to listen to the whole show for more detailed insights.

We're convinced trust isn't optional, it's foundational. Amid a haze of misinformation, broken customer promises, slick AI-generated content, and user fatigue, building trust isn't just ethical, it's strategic.

Why Trust Is Harder to Earn (But More Rewarding)

Trust isn't automatic anymore. Big brands used to get the benefit of the doubt. Now users are skeptical. Scams and data breaches have made people cautious. Small problems like unfamiliar checkout pages, strange wording, or awkward user flows make people suspicious.

UX Choices That Build (or Break) Trust

Keep your visuals and interface consistent so users don't have to work hard. When people get confused, they put their guard up. Think about clicking through to a payment page with no familiar branding. That tiny moment can kill trust. Messages like "Only 3 left in stock" can seem manipulative if users don't trust you yet.

Speak Like a Human

Talking about "the company" instead of "we" creates distance. Use normal conversation with "you" and "we" instead of "students" or "customers." Skip the marketing language. And remember that if your photos don't show people like your users, they might leave without saying why.

Trust-Building in Action

Here are concrete steps that showcase trust-building in real-world scenarios. Implementing these practices can transform how users perceive and interact with your digital experiences:

• Audit for trust breakpoints. Look for spots where your UI might confuse users.
• Loop in legal early. This stops compliance from ruining your tone with last-minute jargon.
• Test trust directly. Ask "Would you feel comfortable sharing your data here?" during testing.
• Use authentic social proof. Link testimonials to sources, use third-party reviews. Even better? Simple, unpolished video testimonials.
• Prioritize clarity over cleverness. Skip the buzzwords.
• Make human support obvious. This is one of the strongest trust signals you can offer.

Trust runs through every part of your experience. Get it right and it becomes your biggest advantage.

Read of the Week

This week's read is "Hierarchy of Trust: The 5 Experiential Levels of Commitment" by Nielsen Norman Group. They outline a trust pyramid:

1. Baseline trust. Can the site meet my needs?
2. Interest & preference. Is this better than alternatives?
3. Trust with personal info. Worth registering?
4. Trust with sensitive data. Can I trust you with payments?
5. Long-term commitment. Will I come back?

Main point? Don't ask for level-3 or level-4 commitments before earning levels 1 and 2. Users leave when you push for sign-ups or newsletter pop-ups too early. Build trust in stages.

Listener Question of the Week

"Is productizing my services a good idea, and if so, how should I approach it?

It depends. Productisation can add clarity but might limit your value by putting your service in a rigid box. We find it works better to focus on outcomes rather than fixed processes.

If you do want to productise:

• Focus on the outcome, not the deliverable. Example: "Conversion rate strategy" not "5 interviews and wireframes."
• Stay flexible. Your process should change as the project develops.
• Don't use fixed pricing that punishes change.
• Think about your service's value, not just features.

Most of us will get further with a custom toolkit and clear outcomes than a one-size-fits-all "product."

Marcus’s Joke

“I removed the shell from my racing snail. I thought it would make it faster, but if anything, it’s more sluggish.”

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We explore how she built a UX center of excellence almost from scratch, how the team is transforming culture through coaching and community, and what it takes to push UX forward in a challenging environment. There's also a digression into Apple's questionable design choices, a fantastic app recommendation, and of course, Marcus' joke.

App Of The Week

This week’s app recommendation is Zuko Form Analytics. It’s an incredibly helpful tool for anyone involved in conversion rate optimization or form design.

Zuko tracks detailed interactions with every field in a form—like how long someone spends in a field, where they drop off, and what fields trigger abandonment.

You get session-level insights, and it all works via a simple JavaScript snippet. There's a free tier to get started (up to 1,000 sessions), and pricing starts around £40/month for 5,000 tracked sessions. It’s the kind of tool we wish we’d known about sooner.

Topic Of The Week: Building UX Capability at Oxford University

We were thrilled to be joined by Sarah Zama, UX Lead at the University of Oxford, to discuss a journey we’ve had the privilege of being part of: building a UX center of excellence in one of the most decentralized institutions in the world.

Getting Started With Limited Resources

Paul originally worked with a small team at Oxford to create the business case for a UX team, ultimately recommending a center of excellence model rather than a centralized tactical team.

Why? Because hiring enough UXers to match developer headcount across such a massive organization was never going to be viable. Instead, a small, strategic team could focus on enabling others.

Sarah took that vision and ran with it. She started with a written plan—not just a strategy that collects dust but a living, practical document with measurable outcomes. She quickly assembled a lean team, brought in an existing accessibility lead, and even secured a six-month secondee to help with projects and spread good UX practice further into the organization.

A Consultative, Empowering Approach

The Oxford UX team doesn’t do UX for people. Instead, they help others do UX better. Through consulting, coaching, training, and providing reusable assets (like a design system), the team makes itself useful across a broad landscape without getting dragged into execution.

This consultative model includes:

• Workshops to support high-profile projects
• Guest training sessions with external speakers
• Custom-built resources tailored to Oxford’s context
• Supportive relationships with departments already doing good UX

They’ve also cleverly leveraged accessibility requirements as a wedge to introduce better UX thinking, combining compliance with best practices to gain traction.

Growing a UX Culture

Perhaps most impressively, Sarah and her team have focused on growing a UX culture through grassroots advocacy. They’ve built a UX Champions network that now includes over 150 people from across the university. This community shares knowledge, resources, and a passion for improving user experience, even when UX isn’t in their job title.

It’s a smart way to scale. By empowering individuals and embedding UX thinking across departments, Sarah's team extends its reach far beyond what any centralized team could manage.

The Frustrations and the Wins

Sarah admits the biggest challenge is visibility. Getting buy-in across such a large institution takes time and constant communication. There’s also the frustration that people still perceive UX as a cost or blocker rather than an enabler of success.

But the wins are meaningful. A growing, skilled team. A network of passionate advocates. And projects where UX clearly moved the needle. Sarah credits much of the team’s progress to strong collaboration, openness to learning, and sheer persistence. It’s a long game, but one that’s already paying off.

You can follow Sarah’s team and explore their resources at staff.admin.ox.ac.uk/ux. They welcome feedback, iteration, and anyone who wants to borrow from their growing UX playbook.

Read Of The Week

This episode’s recommended read is The Leadership Dilemma, an article Paul wrote for Smashing Magazine. It reflects on the exact challenges Oxford faced: how do you scale UX influence when your team is too small to do all the work? The article walks through a strategic approach to UX leadership that empowers others, shifts the organizational mindset, and creates lasting change.

If you’re trying to build UX maturity in a large or slow-moving organization, this is worth your time.

Question Of The Week

This week’s question wasn’t submitted via email but came up naturally during the show: "What does a typical week look like for a small UX team in a large organization?"

Sarah’s answer? There’s no such thing as a typical week. Her team works on everything from:

• Running UX training
• Providing design and accessibility consultations
• Participating in project meetings
• Developing shared resources like design systems

They also embed temporarily into project teams to upskill staff, run workshops, and seed best practices. Some team members even take secondments into other departments to help spread UX thinking more deeply.

All of this reflects their consultative, empowering model. It’s not about building everything themselves but enabling others to build better.

Marcus' Joke

And finally, Marcus graced us with this gem:

"When I was young, I thought rich people owned Bose music systems and the rest of us had Sony products. Turns out they were just stereotypes."

We’ll let you groan in your own time.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back soon with another episode!

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App of the Week

This episode highlights two key apps making waves in the design space:

Figma Sites

Announced recently at the Figma conference, this new tool aims to let you publish websites directly from Figma, competing with players like Webflow and Framer. However, we share a healthy dose of skepticism about its current capabilities—especially its accessibility issues and lack of data entry support, which limits its usefulness beyond very simple sites.

Readdy

This AI-powered assisted coding tool stands out as a promising alternative. Unlike traditional prototyping in Figma, Ready lets you describe your UI in natural language, and it generates real HTML and CSS code that’s responsive and supports data entry. This means you can create interactive prototypes faster, test them in real-world conditions, and iterate with ease. It’s not about replacing designers but augmenting their productivity, and it offers a glimpse into how AI can support design workflows in practical ways.

The Future of UX, AI, and the Job Market

We begin by reflecting on the state of UX and where it’s headed, especially with AI’s rapid development changing the landscape. Jared shares his ongoing work guiding UX professionals to unlock their full potential within organizations, emphasizing the gap between what UX can deliver and what’s often realized. This disconnect often results from a lack of awareness or understanding within teams, and Jared’s leadership sessions aim to close that gap.

AI’s Impact on UX Design

We delve into AI tools emerging in design, focusing particularly on generative AI and assisted coding. While AI is often hyped as a threat to designers, we agree it’s more of a productivity booster than a replacement. AI lets us do more with less effort, but it doesn’t eliminate the need for thoughtful, skilled UX design. The analogy Jared uses — comparing AI’s rise to previous tech shifts like blacksmiths transitioning to new materials — reminds us that professions evolve rather than vanish overnight.

We discuss the limitations of current AI design tools, such as Figma Sites, which lack the sophistication needed for anything beyond very basic websites. On the other hand, Readdy offers a more practical approach by generating actual working code through conversational commands. It’s a step forward but still not a magic bullet. The process requires human input, iteration, and adjustment, which is where UX professionals continue to add value.

An interesting angle comes from the critique of AI as reinventing the command line — a somewhat clunky, text-based interface for describing complex UIs. This makes it tricky to fully express the nuances of design and iterate quickly, especially in production environments where prototyping demands fast, precise changes.

The UX Job Market Reality

Turning to the job market, Jared offers a clear-eyed analysis: although there are more UX jobs available now than ever before, there are also far more UX professionals competing for them. The result? Overcrowded job listings and intense competition, especially for junior roles. The industry isn’t shrinking; rather, it’s saturated.

He points out that the issue isn’t job scarcity but a mismatch between experience levels and job requirements. Many bootcamp graduates enter the market with limited experience, and companies often prefer hiring senior candidates to junior ones due to cost efficiency and immediate impact. For those struggling to find work, Jared advises gaining real-world experience by volunteering on meaningful projects with tangible outcomes, like improving a local charity’s website to boost adoption rates.

For senior professionals, the key is precision: tailoring applications meticulously to each job posting and clearly demonstrating how your skills match the role. Generic resumes won’t cut it when hiring managers sift through hundreds of applicants. This targeted approach greatly improves the chances of landing interviews and offers.

Looking Ahead: Will AI Replace UX?

We debate an intriguing prediction by Jakob Nielsen that many UX battles are “won” and that AI might replace human interaction with websites entirely, as AI agents fetch and personalize content for users. While fascinating, we question the commercial and practical realities. Advertisers still rely on website visits for revenue, and user experience involves more than information retrieval; it’s about connection, context, and trust.

We emphasize the enduring importance of educating organizations about real UX issues, including accessibility and ethical design topics that remain under appreciated despite technological advances.

Final Thoughts

The conversation wraps on an optimistic note: despite challenges, UX as a profession is robust, filled with opportunity, and evolving with new tools and methods. The future may be uncertain, but it’s far from bleak. Embracing AI as an aid, not a threat, and focusing on building relevant experience and clear communication skills will serve UX professionals well.

Marcus Joke

To lighten the mood, Marcus closes with a classic:

“I went to a zoo and saw a baguette in a cage. Apparently, it was bred in captivity.”

Thanks for tuning in to this week’s episode. Whether you’re grappling with AI’s role in design or navigating a tough job market, we hope this conversation gives you clarity and confidence to move forward. See you next time!

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In this week’s episode of the Boagworld Show, we’re joined by none other than Andy “The Pioneer” Clarke. We dig deep into the role of aesthetics in UX, explore how AI can conduct user interviews, and debate how to approach pricing conversations with clients. Alongside our usual banter, you’ll find insights into why design needs personality and how creative direction can add real value, whether you’re designing marketing sites or B2B dashboards.

We also introduce a new AI-powered user research tool, share some standout reading recommendations, and end with the usual Marcus groaner (you’ve been warned).

App of the Week: Whyser

This week we took a look at Whyser, an AI tool designed to conduct user interviews on your behalf. You simply set up your interview goals and questions, and the AI takes care of the rest; scheduling, conducting, and even analyzing interviews.

What impressed us most was how well the AI adapted its questions based on our answers. It felt remarkably natural and even asked follow-up questions relevant to what we’d said earlier. That’s a big deal for those of us who struggle to find time to do interviews at scale.

Whyser isn’t without its drawbacks; it does put a layer between you and your users, which can dilute the empathy you build through real human conversation. But if time or access is limited, this could be a game changer. Especially helpful for teams that rarely get to talk to users directly.

Topic of the Week: Why Aesthetics Still Matter in UX

We hear it all the time: “Design is about solving problems.” That’s true, but it’s not the whole picture. In this episode, we explore the undervalued role of aesthetics in UX and why visual design, art direction, and brand personality still matter.

From Usable to Memorable

We kicked off with a discussion about how too many websites today feel like “colored-in wireframes.” They’re functional but lack soul. The shift toward product-thinking has stripped personality from digital experiences. As Andy put it, “Everything looks like Bootstrap.”

Yet, personality plays a critical role in how users connect with your brand. Whether it’s a SaaS dashboard or a marketing homepage, how a product feels impacts engagement, trust, and even long-term retention. People stick around when something makes them feel something—even if they can’t quite explain why.

The Cognitive Load Link

There’s a practical side to aesthetics too. Good design improves usability not just through layout but also by boosting mood. A more pleasant experience reduces cognitive load, making interfaces feel easier to use.

That means aesthetics aren’t just about making things pretty; they’re a lever for user performance and satisfaction. It’s not fluff; it’s function wrapped in emotion.

Art Direction in Unlikely Places

Andy gave a great example from his time working on a cybersecurity app. Hardly a glamorous field, yet he found space to inject moments of brand personality through microinteractions, onboarding flows, and visual consistency. Even in utilitarian tools, design can reflect a brand’s values and improve the user experience.

As he put it: “You don’t need to delight, but you do need to differentiate.”

Reframing Creativity

The problem, we all agreed, starts in education. Many young designers are trained to focus on flows, not feelings. They're brilliant at getting users from A to B but haven’t been taught how to make that journey enjoyable or memorable.

Andy argued that curiosity is the missing ingredient. Design isn’t just about function, it’s about communication. And communication thrives on references, storytelling, and creativity. He showed us how keeping a library of visual influences, whether it’s old magazine layouts, album covers, or supermarket packaging, can help inject new life into projects.

Selling the Value of Aesthetic Thinking

Websites are easy to build these days. What clients are really paying for is the ability to tell their story well. That’s where we, as designers, add value.

Andy’s take? Spend 95% of your budget on creativity and 5% on implementation. Tools like Squarespace can handle the build, what matters is how it looks, feels, and communicates. That’s where your edge lies.

And when clients say, “But we already have a brand,” the job becomes about interpreting that brand, stretching it into a full visual language, not just slapping a logo onto a template.

So if you’ve felt the creative spark dimming lately, maybe it’s time to step away from your Figma files and pick up an old design annual, flick through a vintage magazine, or just take a walk with curiosity as your guide.

Read of the Week

This week we didn’t highlight specific articles, so no recommended reading to share. That said, the conversation itself was rich with references; from Blue Note album covers to 'Smash Hits' magazine layouts—and might inspire you to go digging through your own design bookshelf.

Listener Question of the Week

We didn’t have a listener question either, but the discussion turned to one that’s always on designers’ minds: How do I handle client feedback without compromising the design?

Andy’s advice was simple but brilliant: only give clients choices over things they can’t mess up. Stakeholders will always want to contribute; so let them. But steer them toward harmless decisions. Let them choose between two acceptable color variations or headline treatments, but don’t give them free rein over critical layout or concept work unless you're okay with every option on the table.

Another smart tip: give clients creative choices using metaphors. Instead of asking “Do you want this to feel formal or informal?” ask “If your brand were a movie or celebrity, who would it be?” It’s a great way to pull out emotional nuance without falling into clichés like “trustworthy” and “professional” (which, let’s face it, everyone says).

And finally, validate your design decisions with user testing. Don’t let testing dictate the design, but do use it to confirm you’re on the right track. That way, you move from subjective opinions to informed decisions and you keep the project moving forward.

Marcus's Joke

And to close the show, here’s Marcus’s joke (we apologize in advance):

Scientists have found that cows produce more milk when the farmer talks to them.

Apparently, it’s a case of in one ear and out the udder.

We’ll leave you to groan in peace.

Thanks for listening, or reading, if you’re one of our show notes faithful. If you enjoyed Andy’s insights, be sure to check out his work over at Stuff & Nonsense. Until next time!

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App of the Week

We’ve been wrestling with Figma’s built‑in prototyping limitations—particularly the lack of real form fields—and this week we discovered Bolt. Bolt lets you import a Figma frame URL and instantly spin up an interactive prototype complete with working inputs and text fields. That means you can run realistic usability tests without hand‑coding forms or cobbling together workarounds.

Topic of the Week: Bringing Clarity to the Chaos of Design Job Titles

In an era when “UX designer,” “UI designer,” “product designer,” and “service designer” all coexist, you might feel like you need an advanced diploma just to understand your own role. We certainly do. Let’s unpack what each title really implies, why the trend toward “product design” worries us, and how you can bring crystal‑clear definitions into your next job posting or team conversation.

Why Job Titles Matter

Even if you’re happy wearing multiple hats, inconsistent naming can cause real headaches:

• Employer confusion: Hiring managers may post for a “product designer” but expect the traditional UX responsibilities you’ve mastered.
• Scope creep: Without clear boundaries, you’ll end up doing support tickets one week and sales decks the next—often without the title or compensation to match.
• Perception gaps: Outside the design bubble, “designer” still conjures images of pretty pictures, not strategic problem‑solvers.

Getting titles straight not only sets expectations for you, it helps stakeholders understand the value you bring.

The Rise of Product Design

Lately, many companies are retiring “UX designer” in favor of “product designer.” On the surface, this feels like career progression: a broader focus that spans UI, analytics, and even marketing. Yet we see two risks here:

1. Internal focus: “Product designer” can imply you’re optimizing existing features and metrics, rather than uncovering latent user needs.
2. Ambiguous boundaries: When design expands outward, it often steps on the toes of customer success, support, and even engineering roles.

If your title leans toward “product,” make sure you and your team agree on whether that includes user research, email flows, or post‑launch monitoring.

Breaking Down the Roles

Here’s how we interpret the four most common titles—and how they overlap:

UI Designer

UI designers focus on the look and feel of your screens. Their goal is to reduce friction and make interactions intuitive. Think pixel perfection, animation timing, and responsive layouts. They might not set research objectives, but they’ll ensure that every button state feels just right.

UX Designer

UX designers own the end‑to‑end experience. From SEO‑driven landing pages to post‑purchase emails, they obsess over every touchpoint. If you care about conversion funnels, user flows, or cross‑channel consistency, you’re in the UX camp.

Product Designer

Product designers straddle the middle: they build interfaces and track success metrics, but they’re also tasked with aligning features to business goals. In healthy organizations, they champion user advocacy and roadmap prioritization, but that balance can tip too far toward internal KPIs.

Service Designer

Service designers operate backstage. They optimize the processes and systems—think support scripts, training materials, or fulfillment pipelines—that empower on‑stage teams to deliver seamless experiences. Their scoreboard? Operational efficiency and scalability.

How to Bring Clarity to Your Team

Labels alone won’t solve confusion. Here’s how we recommend making roles crystal clear:

Define scopes explicitly

In every job description or team charter, list the deliverables you own—and those you don’t. For example, “Responsible for wireframes and prototypes, not email automation.”

Align on success metrics

Agree on the KPIs or user outcomes tied to each role. If you’re a UX designer, maybe it’s task completion rates; if you’re a service designer, it might be first‑response times.

Foster cross‑role collaboration

Schedule regular syncs between UI, UX, product, and service designers so everyone sees the handoffs and dependencies. That shared visibility prevents silos.

Revisit titles periodically

As your organization evolves, carve out time every six months to discuss whether roles—and their titles—still reflect who does what.

By naming responsibilities clearly and encouraging open dialogue, you’ll reduce friction, align expectations, and help everyone—from junior hires to C‑suite—understand what “designer” really means in your organization.

Resources of the Week

Here are two go‑to resources for leveling up your UX practice:

Leaders of Awesomeness

A free community and weekly webinar series led by Jared Paul that challenges conventional UX metrics and dives into real‑world best practices.

Baymard Institute

An extensive repository of user‑research reports covering ecommerce, web forms, mobile patterns, and more—now searchable via AI to surface exactly the studies you need.

Marcus Joke

“I never wanted to believe my dad was stealing from his job as a road worker. But when I got home, all the signs were there.”

Find The Latest Show Notes

We also review a new batch of AI-powered design tools and uncover where they currently fall short. Plus, we look at how AI can still be incredibly useful for user research—when used the right way.

Finally, we answer a question from our Agency Academy about giving feedback in a way that doesn't crush your colleagues, and Marcus closes out with one of his typically pun-tastic jokes.

App Of The Week

We explored two sides of AI in this episode—one disappointing, one surprisingly powerful.

AI Website Builders: Not Quite There Yet

While on the road (and supposedly on holiday), Paul trialed four AI-powered tools that promise to design and code entire websites based on your prompts. The tools included:

• UXPilot
• V0
• Polymet
• Loveable

All four are generating excitement among many, but from a UX perspective, we found them underwhelming. Results were inconsistent at best—white text on white backgrounds, bland copy, missing CSS, and difficult-to-edit layouts. Even with carefully crafted prompts, they failed to deliver production-ready (or even prototype-ready) experiences.

If you’re curious, they’re cheap enough to try—but don’t expect them to replace designers or developers anytime soon.

A New Way to Use AI: Deep Research for User Insights

On the flip side, we’ve found AI incredibly useful for online user research, especially when time or resources make traditional methods tough.

Paul used Perplexity to perform sentiment analysis across:

• Social media mentions
• Review sites like Trustpilot
• Online forums like MoneySavingExpert

He asked it to uncover what users liked, disliked, questioned, or hesitated over when it came to purchasing insurance. The results? Incredibly insightful—and backed up with linked sources to verify accuracy.

You can also ask it to find testimonials that support key selling points, making it great for conversion optimization.

If you're short on research time, tools like Perplexity offer a fast and surprisingly effective way to better understand your audience.

Topic Of The Week: Why Usability Alone Isn’t Enough

It all started in a casino. Well, sort of.

While walking through a bank of overly-themed slot machines in Vegas, Paul had a realization: if a UX designer created a slot machine, it would probably be terrible. We’d remove all the friction. Strip away the flashing lights. Replace the reels with a simple “Win or Lose” button. It would be technically better, but emotionally dead.

And that’s the problem.

Too often in UX, we treat usability as the holy grail. We remove friction, optimize flows, and tidy up interfaces. But we sometimes forget the _emotional layer_—the personality, surprise, or joy that makes a product memorable.

The Risk of Sterile Design

When we fixate only on usability, we risk creating something that is forgettable. Efficient, yes. Effective, perhaps. But emotionally flat. That’s not what builds brand loyalty. That’s not what users remember.

It’s like eating a plain rice cake. Technically food. But not something you'd write home about.

We need to learn from other industries. Slot machine designers understand user psychology on a visceral level. They’ve mastered the art of creating anticipation, excitement, even obsession. Not that we should copy their manipulative tactics—but we can learn from how they invoke emotion.

Same goes for print designers, who often embrace bold creative expression. Or the restaurant industry, where service, ambiance, and delight matter as much as the food.

Emotional States Affect Usability

It’s not just about delight for delight’s sake. Emotional state directly affects cognitive load. When someone is stressed, even the simplest interaction feels hard. When they’re relaxed or entertained, they glide through even complex tasks.

We need to design for these emotional states. A well-designed interface doesn’t just help users complete a task. It shapes how they feel about doing it.

Consider the Mailchimp example. Back in the day, their UI was full of little delightful moments—from their chimp mascot Freddy to playful animations. None of it was strictly necessary. But it made the product feel human, friendly, and approachable. And it mattered.

What Can We Do?

We should be testing and measuring more than just usability.

Some suggestions:

• Use semantic differential surveys. Give users a list of emotional adjectives and ask which ones best describe the experience.
• Monitor sentiment through social listening. Tools like Perplexity can help uncover how people feel about your product online.
• Track qualitative feedback. Those smiley-face buttons at airport security? They can work for digital experiences too.
• Use metrics beyond task completion. Net Promoter Score (NPS), emotion mapping, and post-task satisfaction ratings all provide deeper insights.

Final Thought

UX isn’t just about helping users complete a task quickly. It’s about how people feel while doing it—and how they remember that experience afterwards.

The best designs don’t just work. They resonate.

Read Of The Week

We found two fantastic reads this week that both hit close to home.

• The Path to Design Leadership by Hang Le (who led teams at Dropbox, among others) outlines what real design leadership looks like. It’s not just about managing people or reviewing work—it’s about shaping business strategy, improving design quality, and driving cultural change. A must-read if you're looking to lead through influence, not just seniority.
• Product Waste by Rich Mironov offers a powerful way to frame design’s business value. It argues that 50% of product effort results in waste—features nobody asked for, used, or needed. Reducing this waste (even slightly) creates opportunities to redirect resources toward real innovation. We also love how this supports our recommendation to run a Strategic User-Driven Project Assessment as a way of reducing risk and waste.

Listener Question Of The Week

"How can I provide feedback on site improvements without offending the person who originally designed it—especially if they’re sitting in the room?" — Paul, from the Agency Academy

A common challenge—especially when you're trying to improve a product while preserving team morale.

Here’s how we approach it:

Start by acknowledging the difficulty of the situation. We’ve been on the receiving end of feedback ourselves, and it never feels great—even when it’s valid. So open by saying something like, “Look, I know giving feedback on work is tough, especially when the person who made it is right here—but I promise this isn’t about blame, it’s about improvement.”

Next, set the tone early: “Every website is a compromise.” Between budgets, legacy systems, stakeholders, and tight deadlines, no one gets to implement a perfect vision. Acknowledge that and it’ll help lower defense.

If someone gets defensive, listen. Then reflect their concern back: “Absolutely, tight deadlines would make that tough.” That empathy often disarms tension more than anything else.

We also make sure to start with praise. Highlight what’s working. That way, when the critique comes, it lands better.

And most importantly: keep the focus on the future. Instead of what went wrong, talk about what could be improved moving forward. Frame your feedback as collaborative enhancement.

And yes—if all else fails, a bit of humor (carefully deployed) can help lighten the mood. Just maybe don’t start with “Who built this shitshow?”

Marcus’s Joke

Why are mountains funny? Because they’re _hil_arious.

Thanks for joining us for another episode. If you’ve got a question you’d like us to tackle, or a joke to offer up, drop us an email at paul@boagworld.com. And if you’re not already in our Slack community or the Agency Academy, come say hello.

Until next time—don’t just design for usability. Design for memory.

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App of the Week

This week's recommendation is UXPressia, a powerful yet easy-to-use visualization tool. UXPressia helps teams collaboratively create customer journey maps, personas, and impact maps. Although the visual output isn't necessarily designer-quality, it excels at engaging stakeholders and team members in user research activities. It's particularly useful for empowering non-designers to contribute meaningfully to UX strategies.

Topic of the Week: Defining Your Role as a UX Design Leader

As UX professionals, many of us often find ourselves caught in cycles of endless implementation, working on tasks dictated by others rather than strategically influencing user experience. If you're feeling overworked, understaffed, and under-appreciated, it's time to redefine your role. Here’s how you can proactively take control and transform your position from pixel-pusher to strategic UX leader.

Clarify Your Goals

Senior management frequently sets high-level organizational objectives that, while seemingly vague, offer essential clues to aligning your UX efforts strategically. Start by identifying those broader goals—whether increasing efficiency, targeting new demographics, or enhancing sustainability—and ask yourself how UX can meaningfully contribute. Present these alignment opportunities to your manager, framing your UX role around supporting company-wide goals. This shifts your focus from reactive tasks to proactive strategic initiatives.

Leverage Your Resources Wisely

Rather than dwelling on resource limitations, carefully evaluate what’s already at your disposal:

• Budgets and Software: Identify any discretionary funds or tools available.
• Internal Staff and External Support: Consider tapping into colleagues from other departments or engaging reliable external agencies. Establishing preferred supplier lists helps manage quality and ensures that external agencies align with your UX standards.
• Autonomy and Training: Use your authority to delegate smaller UX tasks, freeing yourself to focus on strategic planning and education.

This perspective allows you to create impactful strategies within existing constraints. For instance, shifting your role to training internal teams on basic UX practices like user research and testing can extend your influence without increasing headcount.

Expand Your Influence

True UX leadership isn’t just about completing projects; it’s about cultivating a user-centered culture throughout your organization. Here's how:

• Education and Empowerment: Provide training materials and workshops to build UX capabilities within other departments.
• Policies and Standards: Establish clear UX standards and guidelines, creating a framework everyone in your organization can follow.
• Metrics and Accountability: Introduce meaningful UX metrics that encourage internal competition and drive continuous improvement. For instance, turning analytics into league tables among departments can spark healthy competition and motivate better user experiences.

Transforming your role into that of an internal UX consultant positions you to make a broader impact, aligning user-centric design with the overarching organizational strategy.

By following these steps—clarifying your objectives, leveraging your resources, and expanding your influence—you can redefine your role as a UX design leader, shifting from mere execution to strategic empowerment.

Read of the Week

Jacob Nielsen recently wrote an intriguing article titled "Future is Lean, Mean and Scary for UX Agencies". Nielsen predicts challenging times ahead for UX agencies, primarily driven by a shift towards more robust internal UX teams and the rapid rise of AI. However, we believe the narrative is somewhat skewed toward Nielsen's experience with larger organizations. While internal teams are expanding, they often remain overstretched, and the role of specialized UX agencies is still crucial. AI will indeed reshape the industry but likely as an enhancement rather than a replacement, empowering both in-house and external UX teams to deliver more sophisticated solutions rather than merely cutting costs.

Listener Question of the Week

Question: How should agencies handle clients who approach them with projects partially completed using AI-generated code, expecting it to be quick and cheap to finalize?

This is a growing challenge as clients become increasingly confident in AI capabilities, sometimes overestimating what AI can deliver without professional oversight. Here's our approach to handling this:

Clients may assume AI-generated code is nearly complete, but the reality is often different. AI-generated code may appear functional but frequently lacks:

• Accessibility and Security: AI can produce code that seems correct but fails to meet essential standards.
• Performance Efficiency: AI doesn't guarantee optimal performance, and expert human oversight is crucial.

Clients may think professional review of AI-generated code is simple, but developers often find reviewing unfamiliar code more time-consuming than writing from scratch. Educating clients about this reality is essential. Position yourself clearly by explaining:

• AI is powerful but requires human expertise to ensure the code is accessible, performant, and secure.
• Reviewing AI-generated code is inherently complex, frequently taking longer than starting anew.

Clarifying these points upfront can manage expectations and reinforce your value as professionals who ensure quality and reliability beyond what AI alone can achieve.

Marcus Joke

"I asked the librarian if they had any books on paranoia. She whispered, 'They're right behind you.'"

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App of the Week

This week, we're excited about Useberry, a versatile user-testing platform that covers a wide range of UX research tasks like card sorting, tree testing, five-second tests, preference tests, and single-task usability studies. It's particularly appealing due to its comprehensive features, straightforward user interface, scalability, and affordable pricing model. With a free tier for small tests and scalable packages allowing incremental purchases up to 2000 responses per month, Useberry makes rigorous user research accessible without heavy upfront costs.

Topic of the Week: Invisible User Research

One of the biggest hurdles in UX is convincing stakeholders of the importance of investing in user research. Often, organizations resist due to perceived cost, time constraints, or simply misunderstanding its value. However, this doesn't mean UX practitioners should abandon research altogether. Instead, we're advocating the concept of "invisible user research," embedding research seamlessly into the workflow without explicitly seeking permission or additional budgets.

Embedding Research into Your Workflow

Invisible user research is all about reframing how you incorporate research activities. Instead of flagging them as separate tasks, integrate research directly into your design activities. For example, avoid creating separate budget line items for user research; instead, simply extend your design phase slightly to accommodate quick, effective tests and validation steps.

Practical Approaches

Leverage everyday moments in your project timeline to slip in valuable research:

• Stakeholder meetings: If stakeholders question the design or argue over choices, propose a quick user test as a neutral way to resolve debates. For instance, if a stakeholder believes users might miss an essential CTA, perform a quick five-second test. You'll have concrete data within hours.
• Feedback delays: When awaiting feedback on your designs, use that downtime productively. Conduct small, targeted surveys or quick polls to fill knowledge gaps.
• Routine presentations: When stakeholders request updates or progress presentations, add a quick round of user research to validate your work and strengthen your position.

Addressing Common Objections

Stakeholders often push back against research for several common reasons, but here's how you can respond effectively:

• "It's too costly or time-consuming": Highlight how small-scale tests (like quick surveys or five-second tests) take minimal time and cost very little.
• "Our users are too busy or inaccessible": Utilize surrogate groups, such as customer support teams or sales representatives who interact daily with users.
• "Your research is biased or insufficient": Emphasize that even limited testing is more reliable than subjective opinions. Additionally, use tools like ChatGPT to ensure questions are unbiased and clearly phrased, or offer to conduct further rounds of testing to reassure stakeholders.

Reframing Research as Efficiency and Risk Management

Positioning invisible user research as efficiency gains or risk management can be particularly persuasive. Explain that catching design issues early prevents costly revisions later. Frame user research as a routine activity that ensures project success, rather than as an optional extra.

Pragmatism Over Process

Finally, remain pragmatic. Rather than adhering rigidly to a formalized research process (extensive discovery phases, multiple rounds of card sorts, or lengthy reports), opt for quick, targeted interventions tailored to immediate needs. This responsive approach ensures research stays relevant, actionable, and minimally disruptive to the workflow.

By adopting invisible user research, you embed essential UX validation into everyday project activities, ensuring user-centered outcomes without needing formal approval at every turn.

Read of the Week

We have three great articles recommended for strategic UX leaders:

• Are You Asking Enough of Your Design Leaders? from McKinsey emphasizes treating design leaders as strategic partners at the executive level, advocating for a more impactful role beyond implementation tasks.
• How to Bring Value as a Design Leader Without Getting Hands-On outlines practical ways to effectively lead UX teams by stepping back from hands-on design tasks and focusing on team support and organizational communication.
• UX Debt by Nielsen Norman Group introduces the concept of UX debt, akin to tech debt, highlighting how design shortcuts during development can accrue and negatively impact user experiences, providing strategies for managing and mitigating this debt effectively.

Listener Question of the Week

This week, we tackle a listener's common frustration: "How can I convince stakeholders to fund user research when they view it as unnecessary?"

The reality is, stakeholders often view user research as an optional expense rather than an essential investment. To combat this, you need to reframe the conversation:

• Highlight risk management: Show stakeholders how user research mitigates potential risks and prevents costly mistakes. Emphasize that decisions grounded in user data can avoid expensive rework later.
• Tailor your argument: Speak directly to stakeholder motivations. If you're addressing a finance person, stress the cost savings from preventing development errors. For marketers, highlight how understanding users leads to stronger market positioning. For developers, stress efficiency and reducing rework.
• Normalize research: Integrate user research as a standard part of your workflow, removing it as a separate line item in budgets. Stakeholders often accept research implicitly when it's framed as part of design processes rather than as additional, discretionary tasks.

By subtly repositioning user research within your existing processes and clearly communicating its practical, immediate benefits, you significantly increase the likelihood of stakeholder buy-in.

Marcus Joke

And finally, Marcus's inevitable joke of the week:

"I accidentally drank a bottle of invisible ink last night. Now I'm in A&E, waiting to be seen."

Thanks for joining us—we'll catch you next time!

Find The Latest Show Notes

We also have a fantastic Figma plugin to make your mockups more realistic, a thought-provoking read on AI’s impact on UX, and a listener question on handling the ever-growing number of software subscriptions. Oh, and of course, Marcus has a joke. But don’t get your hopes up.

App of the Week: Quick Fill

This week, I came across Quick Fill, a Figma plugin that helps you populate your designs with realistic-looking data. We’ve all been there—presenting a mockup to stakeholders, only to have them fixate on the fact that every name and profile picture is identical. Quick Fill solves that by auto-generating realistic text, names, addresses, and other useful content to make your designs feel more natural.

Not only does this improve stakeholder buy-in, but it also helps you spot design issues early on. Ever built a UI that looks perfect until you enter a name like “Marcus Brian John Lillington” and suddenly everything breaks? This plugin helps catch those issues before they reach development. Highly recommend giving it a go.

Topic of the Week: The Metrics Trap

Metrics can be an incredibly powerful tool—but only if you track the right things. Too often, businesses latch onto the easiest numbers to measure rather than the ones that truly reflect success. And that’s where things start to go wrong.

The Dangers of Poor Metrics

A classic mistake is tracking surface-level engagement over meaningful outcomes. For example, an insurance company might focus on the number of quotes they generate rather than the number of actual policies sold. I’ve worked with companies who obsess over lead generation, but when you dig deeper, half of those “leads” never convert into paying customers. If you optimize for the wrong metric, you optimize for the wrong behavior.

Then there’s the McNamara Fallacy, which essentially states that we measure what’s easy rather than what’s important. It’s easy to track the number of form submissions. It’s harder to track customer satisfaction, lifetime value, or the real impact of UX improvements. But those harder-to-measure metrics are the ones that truly matter.

Short-Term Thinking vs. Long-Term Success

Another issue is the obsession with short-term metrics. Quarterly targets and monthly reports drive short-term decision-making, often at the expense of long-term strategy. A UX redesign might cause a temporary dip in conversions as users adjust, but if you panic and roll everything back immediately, you’ll never see the long-term benefits.

It’s also important to balance different types of metrics. I always recommend tracking at least three key categories:

• Conversion metrics (sales, sign-ups, or other key actions)
• Usability metrics (error rates, time-on-task, Net Promoter Score)
• Engagement metrics (return visits, time spent, interactions)

If you only track one type, you risk making short-sighted decisions that improve one number at the expense of everything else.

See Also: What is Success? How To Define Key Performance Indicators

Making Metrics Work for You

So, what’s the solution? First, stop relying on a single “magic” number to measure success. No one metric will ever tell the full story. Instead, combine different data points to get a more holistic view.

Second, give things time before making decisions based on data. A website redesign, pricing change, or new feature will take time to bed in. I always tell clients to wait at least two weeks before reacting to data shifts—longer if it’s a major change.

Finally, use qualitative data to understand the “why” behind the numbers. Metrics can tell you what’s happening, but they won’t explain why users are struggling. That’s where usability testing, surveys, and direct feedback come in.

Reads of the Week

This week’s must-read articles focus on the evolving role of AI and its impact on UX.

1. Generative AI – The Power and the Glory – This article explores both the immense potential and the significant challenges that come with generative AI. It breaks down the current state of the technology and where it’s headed.
2. Enhancing the Experience of Using AI – A deep dive into how we can make AI tools more user-friendly, highlighting best practices for designing AI-driven experiences that feel intuitive and useful.

Both pieces offer valuable insights into the future of AI and UX. If you're keen to understand how AI is shaping our field, these are must-reads.

Listener Question of the Week

Sarah G. asks:

“In an age where literally every tool requires a subscription, how do companies of one decide what they really need—and how do they afford it all?”

Great question, Sarah. This is something I struggle with myself, and over time, I’ve developed a few key strategies:

• Keep a spreadsheet – Track everything you’re subscribed to, including renewal dates and costs. It’s easy to forget about that random tool you signed up for six months ago.
• Set calendar reminders – Before a renewal, ask yourself if you’re still using it. If not, cancel.
• Look for multi-purpose tools – I love specialized apps, but sometimes, an all-in-one tool can save money. Notion, for example, replaces my project management software, CRM, and notes app.
• Avoid annual subscriptions (unless you’re certain) – Monthly payments may seem pricier, but they give you flexibility. There’s always a better tool around the corner.
• Only pay for what saves you time – Every tool should earn its keep. If it doesn’t save you significant time or money, it’s probably not worth it.

And of course, listening to this podcast keeps you up to date on the best tools so you don’t waste money testing duds!

Marcus’ Joke

To end on a high (or low, depending on your tolerance for dad jokes):

“I'm giving my chimney away for free. You could say it's on the house.”

Yep. That happened.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for tuning in, and as always, if you have questions or topics you’d like us to cover, drop us a message. See you next time!

Find The Latest Show Notes

A/B Testing Tools You Can Trust

With Google Optimize's departure, many of you have been asking what tools we're using now for AB testing. Let's break down our top three picks that we've thoroughly tested:

VWO (Visual Website Optimizer)

We love VWO's generous free tier - you get 50,000 test sessions without spending a penny. Perfect if you're running a smaller site or just getting started with testing.

Crazy Egg

Here's a tool that keeps things simple but powerful. Beyond basic A/B testing, you get heat maps and scroll tracking to really understand how your users behave. It won't break the bank either.

Check Mango

Looking for something focused purely on A/B testing? Check Mango might be your answer. It's lean, cost-effective, and does one thing really well - no fancy extras to distract you.

We've found each of these tools reliable for improving conversion rates and user experience. The key is picking the one that matches your needs and budget.

Why Face-to-Face Still Matters

Let's talk about something Marcus is passionate about - the power of in-person connections. Yes, we're living in a digital world, but there's something special about being in the same room with colleagues and clients that Zoom just can't replicate.

Our Pre-Pandemic World

Back in November 2019, when Marcus moved to his current location, having a direct train to London was a huge draw. Regular business trips were just part of life. Then everything changed. Suddenly, those London trips became rare, replaced by meetings with American clients. This shift taught him something important - while digital tools are brilliant for staying connected, they can't fully replace those in-person moments.

The Headscape Story

Marcus shares something from his experience at Headscape. Their office used to buzz with energy - spontaneous chats, brainstorming sessions, and that special camaraderie you only get from sharing a physical space. When they went remote during the pandemic (mainly for practical reasons), something changed. The friendly vibe started to fade. Sure, their Zoom meetings were productive, but that magic of face-to-face connection? It was missing.

Finding Our Way Back

So what did they do? They started scheduling regular meetups. Last November's two-day retreat in Bath was a game-changer. Not only did they nail their strategic planning (something that never quite works over Slack), but they rekindled those genuine connections that make their team special. Those coffee break chats, the shared laughs during brainstorming - you just can't get that through a screen.

What AI Tells Us

Marcus even asked AI about the benefits of meeting in person. It highlighted things like non-verbal cues, stronger relationships, and better focus. While good video calls can tick some of these boxes, they often miss that deeper emotional connection that comes from being together.

Impact on UX Work

For those of us in UX and conversion optimization, this isn't just theory - it affects how we work. When you're designing experiences that connect with users, you need to understand human interaction at its core. Being in the same room lets you pick up on those subtle cues - a raised eyebrow, a slight hesitation - that often lead to our best insights.

Looking Ahead

As remote work grows, we need to be intentional about bringing people together. Even occasional face-to-face events can help fight the isolation that comes with too much digital communication. While technology keeps us connected, nothing beats a real handshake or sharing a meal with colleagues.

What You Can Do

Feeling the digital burnout? Try organizing an in-person meetup. Whether it's coffee with your team or a proper retreat, these real-world connections can spark the creativity and warmth that virtual meetings sometimes lack. Remember - while digital tools are essential, real relationships need real interaction.

Essential UX Reading

Want to understand how AI is changing our field? Here are three must-read pieces from Nielsen Norman Group:

• Redefine Your Design Skills to Prepare for AI. A practical guide to evolving your design skills for the AI era.
• A Shift From Command-Based Interactions to Outcome-Based Interactions. Jakob Nielsen explores how we're moving from traditional interfaces to more outcome-focused systems. It's fascinating stuff that might change how you think about user interactions.
• We Must Embrace AI and Shift to a More Strategic Role. A compelling look at how AI is pushing us to become more strategic in our UX roles.

These articles offer practical insights for staying ahead in our rapidly evolving industry.

Your Questions Answered

Paul Edwards asked us something interesting in the Agency Academy:

"I would love to hear about what automations people have set up. I'm going down that road and need some inspiration."

Let's share how we've streamlined our daily work:

Email Management & Communication:

We use Clean.Email to keep our inboxes tidy by automatically unsubscribing from newsletters we don't need. For regular responses, Spark helps us set up template replies—a real time-saver.

Text Expansion Tools:

Ever catch yourself typing the same things repeatedly? TextExpander and TypeText are lifesavers, letting us insert common content with just a few keystrokes. No more copy-paste errors!

Social Media & Email Marketing:

Buffer and CoSchedule handle our social media scheduling, while Klaviyo and Mailchimp manage our email sequences. Post once, reach everywhere—that's the dream, right?

Workflow Integration:

Zapier is our secret weapon. When someone signs up for a workshop through Stripe, it automatically triggers a thank-you email. And Notion? It keeps our podcast production flowing smoothly, notifying me as soon as Marcus uploads the edited audio.

The Little Things:

We even automate image compression with TinyPNG and use smart templates for proposals. It's all about finding those repetitive tasks that slow you down and asking, "Could a computer do this for me?"

If you have any other tools or resources you'd like to link, feel free to let me know!

Marcus's Joke

Here's Marcus's dubious contribution this week:

"I'm a member of a golfing WhatsApp group. One day, a husband asks his wife, 'If I died, would you date another man?' She replies, 'Of course I would.' He continues, 'Would you let him move into our house?''Yeah, of course I would.' 'Would you let him sleep in our bed?' 'Yeah, of course.'Then he asks, 'Would you let him use my golf clubs?'She answers, 'Definitely not.' He asks, 'Is that because they're personal to you?' And she replies, 'No, it's because he's left-handed.'"

Thanks for joining us! Whether you're exploring A/B testing tools, planning your next team meetup, or looking to automate your workflow, we hope today's show gave you some practical ideas to try. See you next time!

Find The Latest Show Notes

Form Analysis Tools: A Game-Changer for UX

We kick off by exploring some exciting form analysis tools that can revolutionize how we optimize web forms. Tools like MouseFlow, Zuko, and EXATOM offer powerful insights into form performance, helping identify where users struggle and drop off.

Zuko particularly caught our attention with its focused approach and reasonable pricing, making it an attractive option for teams looking to improve their form conversion rates.

Strategies for Promoting UX Value

The main segment focuses on practical strategies for UX professionals to demonstrate their value within organizations. We explore several key approaches:

• Show, Don't Tell: Create tangible assets like prototypes and user journey visualizations rather than getting bogged down in documentation. This could include creating proofs of concept under the radar to excite senior stakeholders and help remove roadblocks.
• User Exposure: Get stakeholders in front of users through open usability sessions and compelling "horror videos" of user testing. Consider making session attendance mandatory for project stakeholders, like gov.uk does.
• Collaborative Workshops: Engage stakeholders through exercises like customer journey mapping and the "user attention points" exercise. The latter helps stakeholders understand the importance of prioritization by giving them limited "attention points" to allocate across page elements.
• Internal Education: Become an educator through newsletters, lunch-and-learn sessions, and guerrilla marketing tactics like creating mouse mats with personas or mugs with design principles.
• Data-Driven Approach: Establish meaningful KPIs and consistently encourage testing. Start by simply suggesting "Why don't we test that?" whenever there's disagreement in meetings - over time, this mindset can become part of the organizational culture.

Agency Insights: The Art of Discounting

From our Agency Academy discussion, we tackle the thorny issue of when and how to offer discounts as an agency or freelancer. We explore the importance of having clear policies around discounting and ensuring any discounts come with reciprocal benefits.

Read of the Week

We wrap up with a look at a guide to efficient web design workflow, published on the Wix blog, which introduces an interesting approach to breaking down complex fixed-price projects into more manageable sub-projects.

And Finally... Our Weekly Joke

To end on a lighter note, here's this week's joke (courtesy of Marcus):

A Roman soldier walks into a bar and holds two fingers up. He says "five beers, please."

Find The Latest Show Notes

You might wonder why this matters. Well, as AI becomes more deeply woven into our daily lives, the way we interact with these systems shapes their value. It's not enough that AI can perform amazing feats - these capabilities need to feel natural and accessible to everyone.

When I look at today's AI interfaces, I see familiar frustrations: clunky search functions, disorganized content, and confusing customization options. These aren't just minor annoyances - they're barriers that stand between users and AI's full potential.

But here's the real challenge that has begun to obsess me: AI systems often struggle to truly understand us - our context, preferences, and what we're trying to achieve. This gap creates an exciting opportunity for UX professionals to shape the future of human-AI interaction.

Would you like to learn the secrets of encouraging users to take action on your websites? Whether it is signing up for a newsletter, getting in touch, or purchasing a product, we all want users to do something.

Well, there are still 2 early bird tickets left for my upcoming workshop, and one of them has your name on it.

The Lifecycle of Technology: Where AI Stands

Let me share something interesting about how technologies evolve. I've noticed three distinct phases that most innovations go through:

1. Amazement Phase: Remember that magical moment when you first used a mobile phone away from home? That's what happens when new tech first appears - we're simply amazed it works at all.
2. Feature Expansion: Then comes the avalanche of features. Just as phones gained cameras and apps, becoming our digital Swiss Army knives, AI tools are rapidly expanding their capabilities.
3. Usability Focus: Finally, we reach the phase where ease of use becomes paramount. The goal shifts to making interactions feel natural and enjoyable.

Right now, I see AI straddling the second and third phases. ChatGPT initially wowed us with its conversational abilities. Then came the exciting additions - it could handle images, audio, and more. But now we're facing the real test.

You've probably experienced some of these growing pains yourself - conversations that feel disconnected, interfaces that don't remember your preferences, AI that misses the point of your request. These aren't just technical challenges - they're signs that AI needs to evolve beyond raw capability to truly understand and serve user needs.

The Two Faces of AI UX Challenges

In my experience, improving AI's user experience involves tackling two distinct but connected challenges:

Interface Design Problems

Let's start with familiar territory: the interface. Despite AI's sophisticated capabilities, the way we interact with these systems often feels stuck in the past. When I use platforms like ChatGPT, I encounter:

• Limited search functionality within conversations.
• The inability to pin or organize discussions for future reference.
• Confusing interfaces for customization of different workflows.

While these issues can be frustrating, they're the kind of design challenges we've successfully tackled before. With thoughtful UX investment, we can overcome these obstacles.

Beyond Interfaces: Natural Interactions

Here's where things get really interesting. Traditional UI design principles alone won't solve our core challenges with AI interaction. Instead, I see AI pushing us toward something more ambitious: goal-driven interaction.

This shift in human-computer interaction has caught the attention of industry leaders. Jakob Nielsen recently explored this idea in a LinkedIn post, while Golden Krishna's book The Best Interface is No Interface advocates for moving beyond traditional interfaces altogether. To realize this vision, we need to fundamentally rethink how humans and machines work together.

From Commands to Goals: The Future of AI Interaction

Think about how we typically interact with technology today. Planning a holiday means jumping between websites, comparing flights and hotels, and managing multiple bookings. It's a command-driven process that feels increasingly outdated.

AI offers something fundamentally different: goal-driven interaction. Imagine simply telling your AI assistant, "Book me a holiday in Greece within a £2,000 budget," and watching it handle the details autonomously.

While we're not quite there yet, 2025 looks promising. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, recently discussed the imminent arrival of advanced AI agents in a blog post on eWeek. These developments could revolutionize how we interact with technology.

But this evolution brings new challenges:

• Understanding Intent: AI needs to grasp the nuances of our goals, even when they're not perfectly articulated.
• Balancing Autonomy and User Control: Finding the sweet spot between AI independence and user oversight is crucial.
• Trust and Transparency: Users need confidence that AI is acting in their best interest, with clear reasoning behind its decisions.

Context: The Key to Seamless AI Interactions

At the heart of these challenges lies context. For AI to truly enhance our lives, it needs to understand the full picture of each interaction. I see this playing out across three key dimensions:

Personal Context

When I think about AI understanding personal preferences, I'm not just talking about remembering your personal likes and dislikes. It's about grasping the importance of a decision to the user - knowing when to ask for clarification and when to make an educated guess.

Consider my interactions with my wife around shopping. When she asks me to pick up bread, I know from experience to seek clarification first - she has strong preferences about the type she enjoys. Yet if she asks me to purchase a keyboard, she'd rather skip the detailed questions, despite my deep interest in computer peripherals. This perfectly illustrates the contextual awareness that AI systems must develop.

Task Context

Different tasks demand different levels of involvement from the user, not just because of personal preference, but because of the level of commitment the task involves. Booking a holiday requires more oversight than ordering office supplies. AI needs to recognize these distinctions and adjust its approach accordingly.

World Context

AI also needs to understand the world around it and the unique characteristics of the things it is interacting with. Consider a smart fridge managing your groceries. It needs to understand real-world nuances - like how quickly lettuce spoils or how long that jar of Marmite typically lasts. Without this awareness, automation can create more headaches than convenience.

Real-World Contextual Failures

We've all experienced what happens when AI misses the context mark. Take Amazon's recommendation system:

• Buy knitting supplies as a gift, and suddenly your feed is flooded with yarn and needles, completely missing that it was a one-off gift.
• Purchase a camera, and instead of suggesting useful accessories like tripods, you're shown more cameras - as if most people need multiple cameras.

These missteps do more than annoy - they erode our trust in AI's ability to truly understand and serve our needs.

Strategies for Designing Better AI Experiences

As I navigate this emerging field, I've found that improving AI experiences requires a delicate balance of innovation and caution. There's no established playbook, which makes experimentation and sensitivity essential.

Building Deep User Profiles

Creating comprehensive user profiles isn't just about collecting data - it's about understanding the intricate ways people approach tasks and make decisions. We need models that can capture these subtle human behaviors.

Balancing Ethical Considerations

Ethics must guide every step of this journey. Different users have varying comfort levels with AI involvement. Our systems need the flexibility to accommodate these preferences while maintaining privacy and autonomy.

The Role of UX Professionals

Through my work as a user experience consultant, I've seen how crucial it is to embed user-centric thinking in emerging technologies. This isn't just about improving algorithms - it's about understanding human psychology and behavior.

This challenge demands a nuanced touch that can't be left to AI developers alone. UX professionals bring vital insights about human behavior and user-centered design. Their involvement ensures these technologies truly serve user needs.

The Need for Collaboration

That's why I'm convinced that collaboration between AI developers and UX professionals is crucial. Together, we can create solutions that balance technological advancement with human needs.

Looking Ahead: The Potential for Human-AI Synergy

The future of AI extends beyond feature lists and accuracy metrics - it's about creating experiences that feel natural and supportive. By focusing on the interplay between context, user intent, and AI capabilities, we can build truly transformative tools.

UX professionals possess the perfect blend of skills, insight, and empathy to lead this transformation. In the years ahead, our role will be ensuring that AI doesn't just work - it works for users.

Find The Latest Show Notes

In this episode of the Boagworld Podcast, we delve into the transformative role of AI in UX and web design. From cutting-edge Figma plugins to tools that revolutionize SEO, Paul Boag and Marcus Lillington share insights, tools, and strategies that can elevate your workflow. Whether you're a seasoned designer or new to the field, there's something here to enhance your productivity and effectiveness.

The Challenges of Broadband and Digital Evolution

Paul kicks things off with a good old moan about his broadband woes, lamenting his epic quest for faster internet speeds. It’s the kind of saga every techie can relate to, complete with bureaucratic bungling and dashed hopes. Meanwhile, Marcus jumps in with his usual dose of cheeky humor, poking fun at Paul’s plight while reminding us all to roll with the punches in our ever-evolving digital lives.

Exploring the Potential of Bluesky

Bluesky, a decentralized social platform, captures Paul's attention. Unlike traditional platforms, it allows users to choose algorithms that align with their preferences while maintaining their profiles. This adaptability is akin to email protocols where different clients coexist, offering flexibility and control. Paul’s enthusiasm highlights the importance of platforms designed with user autonomy at their core. Follow Paul on Bluesky to stay updated and chat.

Tools of the Week: Pathway and Baymard’s Figma Plugin

Pathway

Pathway is a user research platform offering robust features such as:

• Card sorting
• Prototype testing
• Surveys
• Five-second tests

Its generous free tier makes it a valuable resource for freelancers and small teams, allowing up to three projects and 250 responses per month.

Baymard Figma Plugin

Baymard’s free plugin brings data-driven insights directly into your Figma designs. Use it to:

• Justify design decisions with evidence-based reasoning.
• Include client-facing explanations for features like carousels or negative space.

This tool bridges the gap between design intuition and client buy-in, making it indispensable for designers.

SEO: From Skepticism to Acceptance

Paul reflects on his evolving perspective on SEO, a topic he once viewed with strong skepticism. In fact, he even wrote a post on Smashing Magazine that captured his cynicism about the field at the time. While that article highlights why many designers have been wary of SEO, Paul’s perspective has evolved significantly. With guidance from Paul Edwards, he’s embraced modern SEO strategies that align with user experience, including:

1. Language Optimization: Crafting content with the phrases users actually search for.
2. User Journey Focus: Understanding informational, navigational, comparative, and transactional keywords.
3. Technical Improvements: Enhancing site performance, fixing broken links, and ensuring accessibility.

The synergy between SEO and UX is undeniable. When done right, SEO not only improves search rankings but also creates a more user-friendly experience.

The AI Revolution in Design

AI is redefining how designers approach their work. Paul shares some standout tools:

Figma AI

Figma’s AI features include:

• Renaming layers for clarity
• Pre-populating content fields
• Auto-generating layouts

While its design-from-scratch capabilities remain underwhelming, these quality-of-life features can save designers significant time.

Relume

Perfect for rapid wireframing, Relume allows designers to quickly assemble block-based layouts. While its full designs need refinement, its speed and ease make it ideal for client presentations.

Adobe Max Highlights

From generative fills to intuitive image redirection, Adobe is leveraging AI in groundbreaking ways. The Adobe Max conference showcased features that simplify complex design tasks, pushing the boundaries of creative possibilities.

Enhancing UX with AI Tools

AI isn’t just for design; it’s transforming UX research and analysis as well. Here are three standout tools making waves in the UX world:

Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity offers free heatmaps, session recordings, and AI-driven data queries, providing valuable insights into user behavior.

Attention Insight

Attention Insight predicts where users will focus on a page with 96% accuracy, helping designers make informed layout decisions.

Strella

Strella automates user interviews and analyzes themes, creating highlight reels to showcase key findings. These tools empower UX professionals to make data-driven decisions while saving time.

Practical Copywriting and Admin Tools

Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor optimizes web copy for clarity and conciseness. Its AI tools streamline edits, making content more scannable.

Notion AI

Notion AI integrates ChatGPT-like capabilities with context awareness, helping users craft tailored content with ease.

FixKey

FixKey rewrites text with custom prompts for improved grammar and style. It’s a flexible tool for refining and enhancing written content, from casual emails to polished presentations.

Spark

Spark is an AI-powered email client that simplifies email management. It can summarize threads, draft replies, and even customize templates for individual conversations.

Conclusion: Breaking Habits and Adopting AI

The key to leveraging AI lies in breaking out of old routines and exploring new possibilities. Paul urges listeners to pause before starting tasks and ask: Could AI make this faster or better?

By integrating these tools into your workflow, you’ll not only stay ahead of the competition but also unlock new levels of creativity and efficiency.

Marcus’s Joke

To wrap things up, Marcus shared his customary "dad joke" with this gem:

Why don’t skeletons fight each other? Because they don’t have the guts.

Next Steps

Dive deeper into these topics and join the conversation in our Slack channel.

We’ll see you next time, where we’ll continue exploring the ever-evolving landscape of web design and UX!

Find The Latest Show Notes

As we approach the new year, it's time to reflect on the state of user experience design and look ahead to what 2025 might bring. In this episode of the Boagworld Podcast, Marcus and I dive into the trends, challenges, and opportunities that lie ahead. Here are the key takeaways from our discussion.

The Rise of Seamless AI Integration

2024 marked a pivotal year for artificial intelligence, with tools like ChatGPT, MidJourney, and Claude reshaping workflows across industries. However, much of the focus has been on the technology itself, often at the expense of usability. In 2025, we predict a shift toward creating seamless, user-friendly AI interfaces that integrate into our daily workflows.

What This Means for Designers

As designers, we need to think beyond basic AI chat interfaces and envision ways to incorporate AI into broader user experiences. Imagine:

• Dynamic image generation: Tools like KREA allow precise control over visuals, ensuring images guide users' attention effectively.
• Smart predictive features: AI can dynamically generate personalized content, such as personalized imagery or auto-generated text tailored to user needs.

Takeaway:

The challenge for designers in 2025 is to make AI feel invisible, integrated, and intuitive—a natural extension of existing user flows.

AI Agents: From Novelty to Necessity

AI agents, capable of executing multi-step tasks autonomously, represent another exciting frontier. Whether it’s arranging interviews, conducting user research, or booking reservations, these agents promise to save time and reduce manual effort.

Current Limitations

While tools like Claude and specialized platforms like Strella are beginning to showcase AI agents’ potential, challenges remain:

• Accuracy: Like interns, AI agents sometimes need oversight to ensure quality.
• Ethical considerations: As automation expands, it’s essential to maintain a human touch where it’s most impactful.

Takeaway:

Expect to see AI agents integrated into UX processes like user interviews, research synthesis, and even persona creation—but always with a human in the loop.

AR and VR: Finally Going Mainstream?

The launch of Apple Vision Pro and advancements in Meta’s AR/VR hardware hint at a maturing market. However, widespread adoption hinges on two key factors:

• Price reduction: Current high costs remain a barrier for most users.
• Practical applications: Beyond gaming and niche professional uses, AR/VR needs broader, everyday applications to succeed.

A Pragmatic Perspective

While lightweight AR glasses with basic functionality (like the Ray-Ban Meta glasses) might gain traction, fully immersive AR/VR experiences will likely remain out of reach for the average consumer in 2025.

Takeaway:

UX designers should monitor AR/VR developments but focus on creating experiences that enhance usability without requiring users to adopt expensive new hardware.

Stabilization of the UX Job Market

The past year has been turbulent for UX professionals, with layoffs and hiring freezes creating uncertainty. However, there are signs of recovery on the horizon.

The Role of In-House Teams

Many companies are reevaluating how they implement UX, moving away from isolated roles and toward more robustly supported in-house teams. This shift offers:

• Stability: Internal teams are less vulnerable to external budget cuts.
• Opportunities for collaboration: Agencies and freelancers can play a consultative role, supporting these teams with specialized expertise.

Takeaway:

The second half of 2025 could bring renewed investment in UX, especially for in-house teams. Freelancers and agencies should position themselves as strategic partners to these growing teams.

Personalization: Moving Beyond the Basics

Personalization has been a buzzword for years, but 2025 might finally be the year it becomes accessible to more businesses. With AI’s help, personalization can:

• Dynamically adapt landing pages based on user referrals.
• Tailor headlines and content to individual preferences.

Takeaway:

Advancements in AI-driven personalization tools will allow designers to create more relevant, impactful user experiences—without the high cost or complexity of traditional methods.

Useful Apps to Enhance Your Workflow

KREA

For designers focused on precision, KREA leverages generative AI to create dynamic and highly customizable images. Whether you need visuals to guide user attention or adhere strictly to prompts, this tool is invaluable.

UI Design Tips

UI Design Tips offers a curated collection of best practices for specific UI elements. Whether you’re designing menus, modals, or login screens, this site ensures your designs follow established guidelines.

UIverse

For developers or designers seeking ready-made UI elements, UIverse provides a vast repository of open-source designs that can be easily integrated into your projects.

Must-Read Articles

The Challenges and Opportunities of Generative AI in UX Design

This balanced article examines both the potential and the pitfalls of incorporating generative AI into UX workflows. A must-read for staying ahead in 2025.

AI Features Must Solve Real User Problems

An insightful piece discussing the importance of creating AI tools that address genuine user needs rather than serving as mere technological showcases.

A Critique is Not a Review

Explore the difference between critiquing and reviewing designs, and why the former can be a powerful tool for improving creative processes and fostering collaboration.

Find The Latest Show Notes

The Problem with Traditional Tenders

Our main topic for this show is Invitations to Tenders (ITTs). We've spent years dealing with ITTs, and frankly, we're tired of a system that doesn't serve anyone well. For agencies, they're incredibly time-consuming and costly to complete, often with no guarantee of success. What's worse, sometimes you're just there to make up the numbers because procurement needs three quotes.

The limited information provided in ITTs makes accurate pricing challenging, and their rigid specifications leave little room for the flexibility digital projects need. When usability testing suggests a major change in direction, you're stuck navigating complex change control procedures instead of doing what's best for the project.

From the client perspective, you're inadvertently paying for every failed proposal agencies have ever written - those costs have to be recovered somehow. The focus on lowest price often leads to subpar outcomes, and the whole process tends to favor agencies that are good at writing proposals rather than delivering projects.

A Better Approach to Digital Project Procurement

We believe there's a better way. Start by having meaningful conversations with potential agencies before writing anything down. Evaluate their track record and capabilities through discussion rather than form-filling exercises.

Consider breaking larger projects into smaller, more manageable phases. Begin with a paid discovery phase, using a small percentage of the overall budget to properly scope the work. This approach helps mitigate risk and allows for the flexibility digital projects need.

Invitations to Tender: A Flawed System in Need of Change

Notion: The Swiss Army Knife of Digital Tools

In this show Paul also obsesses over Notion. If he could only keep one app, it would be Notion. It's become his go-to tool for everything from client project management to content creation. With its recent addition of automation and form builders, it's becoming even more powerful.

For agencies, it's particularly valuable for managing client communication, tracking projects, and storing best practices. The built-in AI functionality, combining ChatGPT and Claude, makes it even more versatile.

Treating AI as Your UX Intern

We also discuss a Nielsen Norman Group's article that suggests thinking of AI as an intern - a perspective we find particularly helpful. Like an intern, AI needs clear instructions and its work needs to be double-checked, but it can handle many routine tasks effectively.

This mental model helps frame how to integrate AI into your workflow without over-relying on it or dismissing its capabilities entirely.

Adobe's AI Revolution

Meanwhile, Adobe's latest AI developments, showcased at Adobe Max, are remarkable. In Illustrator, AI can now redraw characters from different angles while preserving style and detail. In Photoshop, it automatically matches lighting across composite images.

Rather than creating standalone tools, Adobe integrates AI directly into existing products, transforming hours-long tasks into instant operations.

The State of UX

We wrap up with a discussion about why UX seems to have lost its shine. While some blame UX professionals for overselling its benefits, we see this as part of a broader pattern where organizations half-heartedly implement new approaches without fully committing to them.

Whether it's UX, digital transformation, or AI, success requires more than just hiring one person or implementing one tool - it needs genuine organizational commitment and understanding.

How We Designers Destroyed UX (and Why No One Talks About It Anymore)

Find The Latest Show Notes

WP Engine vs WordPress: A Cautionary Tale

We kick things off with a look at the recent controversy between WP Engine and WordPress. It's a bit of a mess, to be honest. WordPress.org has banned WP Engine from accessing its resources, including plugin and theme updates. This has left a lot of WP Engine-hosted sites in a bit of a pickle.

The whole debacle seems to stem from an attempt by WordPress to extract money from WP Engine. It's a stark reminder of the dangers of building your business on someone else's platform. We've seen this happen before with companies like Tweetbot and various Amazon sellers. It's a risk that many businesses take, often without fully considering the potential consequences.

While we hope this situation resolves quickly, it's a valuable lesson for all of us in the web industry. It's crucial to have a strategy that doesn't rely entirely on a single platform or service that you don't control.

Introducing SUPA: A New Approach to Discovery Phases

Next up, we introduce our new concept: Strategic User-Driven Project Assessment, or SUPA for short. Now, Marcus isn't a fan of the acronym, but hear us out on this one.

SUPA is essentially a rebranding of the discovery phase, aimed at making it more appealing and understandable to senior management. Let's face it, "discovery phase" doesn't exactly set executives' hearts racing. But when you start talking about resource optimization, increased chances of success, and risk mitigation - well, now you're speaking their language.

The idea behind SUPA is to bring UX considerations to the table earlier in the project lifecycle. It's about validating ideas against real user needs and market demands before significant resources are invested. This approach can help prevent wasted time and money on projects that users won't embrace.

We dive into the key questions SUPA addresses, the activities involved, and how it differs from traditional market research. Whether you love or hate the acronym, we think this approach could be a game-changer for UX professionals looking to have a more strategic impact on projects.

You can learn more about SUPA here.

AI-Powered UX Reviews: Friend or Foe?

Our app of the week is Wevo Pulse, an AI tool that provides real-time feedback and analysis on websites, prototypes, and messaging. Paul's a bit conflicted about this one - it's impressive, but also a bit unsettling for those of us who do UX reviews for a living.

Wevo Pulse uses data from over a million user research participants to produce insights in minutes. It can analyze live websites, mobile apps, prototypes, and more. The tool provides a detailed assessment of what users are likely to like and dislike about a digital asset, and even generates a list of the most likely personas to gain value from the website or prototype being analyzed.

While it's not perfect and can't replace human expertise entirely, it's a powerful tool that could be particularly useful for quick initial assessments or as a way to convince management that changes are needed. It's definitely worth checking out, even if just to see how it evaluates your own website.

UX Quotes: Agree or Disagree?

We wrap up the show with a bit of fun, debating some popular UX quotes. From "A problem well stated is a problem half solved" to "Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works," we give our honest opinions on these industry soundbites.

Spoiler alert: we don't agree with all of them! It's a great reminder that even widely accepted wisdom in our field should be questioned and critically examined.

That's all for this week's episode. We hope you found it informative and maybe even a bit entertaining.

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We kick off this episode by delving into the current state of the tech industry, particularly focusing on the widespread budget cuts we're witnessing. What's driving these cuts? Is it the rise of AI, economic uncertainties, or perhaps a tech bubble bursting? We explore these possibilities and ponder whether UX might be falling out of fashion.

See Also: The Shifting Landscape of UX: What’s Really Happening?

Speaking of AI, we couldn't resist discussing a fascinating conversation between Cleo Abram and Mark Zuckerberg. It's a prime example of how some tech leaders are approaching innovation - starting with what's technologically possible rather than addressing actual user needs. This approach raises important questions about the direction of tech development and its impact on user experience.

App of the Week: Framer - More Than Just a Website Builder

This week, we're shining a spotlight on Framer. While it positions itself as a website builder, we've found it to be an incredibly useful prototyping tool. Figma users, before you roll your eyes, hear us out. Framer offers some key features that Figma's prototyping tools lack, such as breakpoints and interactive forms.

If you're looking to create high-fidelity prototypes of interactive experiences, Framer might just be the tool you've been searching for. It's especially handy when Figma's prototyping capabilities fall short.

As a bonus, we also briefly mention two other apps that caught our attention: FixKey.ai and ChatGPT Advanced Voice. The latter ties into an interesting AI customer support experience we've had recently - but you'll have to tune in to hear more about that!

The Challenges of Design Leadership: Are UX Leaders Set Up to Fail?

In this segment, we tackle a crucial issue in the UX world: the challenges faced by design leaders. We argue that many UX leaders are being set up to fail, often not given the resources they need to address UX problems at scale. As discussed in the podcast, companies might have 200 developers but only 5 UX people, which is far from ideal.

We discuss how the role of a UX leader requires a different skill set compared to that of a UX designer. These skills include:

• making business cases,
• reporting successes,
  championing your team's value,
• developing strategies,
• navigating politics,
• dealing with clashing priorities,
• and running a team.

Yet, many organizations promote designers into leadership roles without providing the necessary training or support.

See Also: Design Leadership Masterclass

We offer advice for those finding themselves in this position, including:

• Setting your own agenda and direction rather than accepting how others define your role. As a UX leader, it's crucial to take control of your role and not let others dictate your responsibilities. This means proactively defining your priorities and how you can best contribute to the organization's goals.
• Working strategically by focusing on setting standards and creating resources. Instead of getting bogged down in day-to-day tasks, concentrate on developing UX guidelines, best practices, and tools that can be used across the organization. This strategic approach helps scale your impact.
• Acting as an internal consultant and training teams on UX practices. Position yourself as a UX expert within the organization. Offer guidance and education to other teams, helping them incorporate UX principles into their work. This approach helps spread UX knowledge throughout the company.
• Being assertive about your role and responsibilities. Don't be afraid to speak up about what you and your team should be doing. Clearly communicate your role, its importance, and how it contributes to the organization's success.
• Making strategic allies within the organization. Identify and build relationships with key stakeholders who understand and value UX. As Paul suggests, "make a point of going out and finding people in the organization that get UX and appreciate UX" and "really lean into those relationships."
• Investing significant energy in promoting your team's impact. Actively showcase the value your UX team brings to the organization. As mentioned in the show, "invest significant energy in not only doing work, but in actively promoting your impact in the organization." This could involve creating case studies, presenting success stories, or demonstrating how UX improvements have positively affected key business metrics.

We also stress the importance of finding external support through coaching, training, or joining a community of design leaders. This can help combat the isolation often felt in leadership roles and provide valuable outside perspectives.

Interesting Reads of the Week

We wrap up with a few interesting articles that caught our attention:

• Workshops aren't always necessary: A thought-provoking article challenges the notion that every problem needs a workshop solution. It emphasizes the importance of using discretion when deciding whether to conduct a workshop. Sometimes, other approaches might be more effective and efficient, depending on the specific situation and goals.
• The "hot potato process" for designer-developer collaboration: Dan Mall proposes a dynamic approach to designer-developer collaboration called the "hot potato process." This method involves frequent back-and-forth interactions between designers and developers throughout the project, rather than a linear handoff. This continuous collaboration can lead to more innovative solutions and helps address potential issues early in the development process.
• Content readability impacts conversion rates: Unbounce's conversion benchmark report reveals fascinating insights about attention spans and the impact of content readability on conversion rates. The report suggests that simplifying content to a more accessible reading level can significantly improve conversion rates. This underscores the importance of clear, concise, and easy-to-understand content in digital marketing and user experience design.

Join us as we unpack these topics and more in this week's episode of the Boagworld Podcast. Whether you're a UX professional, a design leader, or just interested in the evolving tech landscape, there's something here for you!

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In this episode, we explore how UX teams can evolve from firefighters to strategic leaders, revolutionizing their impact on organizations. We also review Maze, a versatile UX testing platform, and share insightful reads of the week.

Revolutionizing UX Teams: From Firefighters to Strategic Leaders

In today's episode, we delve into the evolving role of UX teams within large organizations. We've noticed a recurring issue: UX teams are often understaffed and overwhelmed, struggling to keep up with the demands of multiple projects and numerous developers. This situation leads to a reactive approach, where UX professionals find themselves constantly putting out fires rather than driving strategic initiatives.

Redefining the UX Team's Role

We propose a shift in thinking about UX teams. Instead of viewing them as implementers who should be involved in every project, we suggest repositioning them as leaders, educators, and enablers of UX practices across the organization. This approach allows a small UX team to have a much broader impact.

Four Pillars of an Effective UX Team

Based on our experience, including recent work with Oxford University, we've identified four key areas where UX teams can focus to maximize their impact:

1. Creating Shared Resources: Develop design systems, UX playbooks, and design principles that can be used across the organization.
2. Providing Training: Offer workshops, presentations, and self-learning materials to empower others in the organization to incorporate UX practices into their work.
3. Offering Consultative Services: Provide strategic UX support through reviews, discovery sessions, and advisory roles without getting bogged down in execution.
4. Building a UX Community: Foster a network of UX advocates across the organization to share best practices and promote user-centered thinking.

Overcoming Resistance and Gaining Buy-In

We discuss the challenges of implementing this approach, including varying levels of acceptance across different departments. Our advice? Start with the enthusiastic early adopters, demonstrate success, and use these wins to encourage broader adoption.

The Benefits of a Strategic UX Team

By repositioning UX teams as strategic leaders rather than just implementers, organizations can:

• Increase the reach and impact of UX practices across the organization
• Empower more team members to consider user needs in their work
• Reduce bottlenecks in the development process
• Foster a more user-centered culture throughout the company

Conclusion: A Call for Evolution

We believe it's time for UX teams to evolve beyond their traditional roles. By focusing on leadership, education, and enablement, these teams can drive significant improvements in user experience across entire organizations, even with limited resources.

See Also: Paul’s Design Leadership Masterclass

From the Toolbox: Maze - A Versatile UX Testing Platform

In our "App of the Week" segment, we spotlight Maze, a comprehensive UX testing platform that's been gaining traction in the design community. Maze offers a range of features that make it a valuable tool for UX professionals and teams of all sizes.

Key Features of Maze

• Interview Studies: Conduct and analyze user interviews efficiently.
• Prototype Testing: Test your designs before development to catch issues early.
• Surveys: Gather quantitative data from your users.
• Card Sorting: Understand how users categorize and prioritize information.
• Tree Testing: Evaluate the effectiveness of your information architecture.
• Live Website Testing: Get feedback on existing websites.

Pricing and Accessibility

Maze offers a free tier for those looking to try it out, with paid plans starting at $99 per month. This pricing structure makes it accessible for both individual designers and larger teams.

Our Experience with Maze

We've found Maze particularly useful for its ability to provide quick, data-driven insights. The platform's automated analysis features, such as success rates and heatmaps, can save significant time in interpreting test results. However, we caution against relying solely on these metrics without diving deeper into the qualitative data.

Tips for Using Maze Effectively

• Carefully craft your test scenarios to avoid ambiguity.
• Pilot your tests before sending them out to catch any issues with instructions or tasks.
• Look beyond the surface-level metrics to understand the full user journey.
• Use Maze in conjunction with other research methods for a well-rounded understanding of your users.

Whether you're a seasoned UX professional or just starting out, Maze offers a robust set of tools to enhance your user research and testing capabilities. Give it a try and let us know how it works for you!

Interesting Reads of the Week

We've come across some thought-provoking articles this week that we'd like to share with you. Each of these pieces offers valuable insights for web professionals, from sales processes to design tools and user experience best practices.

Step-By-Step Web Design Sales Process

An article detailing a structured approach to web design sales caught our attention. While we appreciate the attempt to provide a clear framework, especially for newcomers to the industry, we caution against a one-size-fits-all approach. Every client and project is unique, and flexibility is key in building successful relationships.

That said, we did find value in the concept of the "magic email" for following up on leads. This technique, involving a direct but polite message assuming the lead has gone cold, can be effective in eliciting responses and clarifying the status of potential projects.

Tips for the New Version of Figma

With the release of Figma's latest update, designers are exploring new features and capabilities. One aspect we're particularly passionate about is the proper use of Auto Layout. This feature, when used correctly, can significantly improve the handoff process between designers and developers.

We encourage designers, especially those early in their careers, to invest time in mastering Auto Layout. Understanding how it mirrors the CSS box model can lead to more efficient workflows and better collaboration with development teams.

Explicitly State the Difference Between Options

An article from the Nielsen Norman Group reminds us of a fundamental principle in UX design: clarity is key. The piece emphasizes the importance of explicitly stating differences between options presented to users, no matter how obvious they may seem to the designer.

This advice resonates strongly with our experiences. We've seen numerous instances where assumptions about user knowledge led to confusion and poor user experiences. Remember, users are often distracted or multitasking, so it's crucial to make information as clear and accessible as possible.

Closing Thoughts

As we wrap up this episode, we want to remind you that we're excited to start a new segment: the Boagworld Agony Aunt! We're inviting you, our listeners, to send in your web design and development dilemmas. Whether you're struggling with a difficult client, wrestling with a technical challenge, or facing a career crossroads, we want to hear from you.

Send your questions to paul@boagworld.com, and we'll do our best to offer advice, share our experiences, and maybe even have a laugh or two along the way. Don't be shy – your question might just help fellow listeners facing similar challenges!

Thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Boagworld Show. We hope you found our discussions on UX team roles, Maze, and the latest industry articles helpful and thought-provoking. Remember to check out the Agency Academy if you're looking to connect with fellow agency owners and freelancers.

We'll be back in two weeks with more insights, tips, and perhaps a groan-worthy joke or two. Take care!

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Embracing User-Centric Content Creation

In this episode, we break down how to transform user questions into actionable, engaging web content. By focusing on the needs of your audience, you can ensure your content is both relevant and effective.

AI-Powered Content Drafting

Creating content that truly resonates with your audience can be challenging, especially when you're starting from a blank page. That's where AI comes in. We explore how AI tools like ChatGPT can help you streamline content creation and make the process more efficient, ultimately resulting in higher quality and more engaging web copy.

Here’s how we approach content with AI:

Start with User Questions

We begin by gathering the most pressing questions that users have. This approach keeps our content user-focused from the outset, ensuring we are addressing real concerns rather than guessing what information users might need. These questions can come from surveys, sales team insights, or even customer support tickets.

Generate an Initial Draft with AI

Once we have a list of key questions, we feed this information into ChatGPT. The AI uses these prompts to generate an initial draft of the content, aiming to create clear, informative answers that directly address user concerns. This draft can include everything from landing pages to blog post content, tailored around user needs.

The advantage here is that AI eliminates the intimidation factor of starting with a blank page. It gives you a solid foundation, which is especially helpful for clients or teams who may not be experienced copywriters. This step makes the entire content creation process faster and ensures that all essential information is covered.

Refining with AI Assistance

After creating the draft, it’s time to refine. This is where the magic happens. We often take the AI-generated content and run it through additional prompts to adjust the tone, make it skimmable, or ensure it aligns with the brand’s voice. For instance, we might ask the AI to “make the content more concise” or “make it friendlier.” Tools like Hemingway can also help simplify sentences, ensuring the final product is easy to read and accessible to a wider audience.

AI also has the power to break down content into bite-sized, skimmable blocks. This step is crucial for web content where users typically scan rather than read in depth. We instruct the AI to organize the content into digestible sections with appropriate headings, bullet points, and short paragraphs that make the content easier to navigate.

Keyword Integration and Tone Adjustment

Finally, we use AI to add a bit of polish. If the project requires SEO considerations, we prompt the AI to include specific keywords strategically throughout the copy. AI can also adjust the tone to match the brand—whether the client wants a formal, professional voice or a more casual, conversational approach. The result is content that’s not only user-friendly but also aligned with strategic goals like SEO and brand consistency.

Client Collaboration Made Easy

With the refined content draft ready, we present it to the client for feedback. Since the content is already in a solid state, clients don’t have to start from scratch. Instead, they can focus on tweaking and tailoring the copy to match their unique insights or adding details we may have missed. This collaborative process helps ensure the content reflects both user needs and business goals without the burden of starting from a blank page.

AI-powered content drafting transforms a daunting process into an efficient, collaborative, and user-centric approach. Whether you're a designer, marketer, or client, leveraging AI for initial content drafts can significantly enhance the quality and relevance of the web copy, while saving time and effort.

Hemingway App: Simplifying Web Copy

Our app of the week is Hemingway, an editing tool that simplifies your content by keeping it concise and readable. Ideal for web copy, it encourages shorter sentences, simpler language, and a lower reading level—perfect for making your site more skimmable and user-friendly.

Content Creation Hacks for Landing Pages

We share a few content tips specifically for landing pages:

• Write content that answers user questions directly: Start by identifying the key questions your target audience has and make sure your content provides clear, concise answers. Addressing user concerns directly helps build trust and relevance.
• Break up text into content blocks for readability: Use headings, bullet points, and short paragraphs to make your content easy to scan. Most users don’t read web content word for word, so structuring it into digestible pieces ensures key points stand out.
• Use AI and tools like Hemingway to speed up the process: Leverage AI tools to generate initial drafts quickly, and use editing apps like Hemingway to refine the readability of your content. AI can help overcome writer’s block and create a strong starting point, while Hemingway ensures your content is concise and accessible.
• Incorporate visuals to enhance engagement: Adding images, diagrams, or icons can break up text-heavy pages and make content more visually appealing. Visuals help convey information more effectively and keep users engaged.
• Iterate and test your content: Don’t settle for the first draft. Use tools like A/B testing to determine which content formats and approaches resonate most with your audience. Continuous iteration will help you refine your content strategy for better results.

Balancing Work Commitments and Life on the Road

This episode also featured some insights into work-life balance, especially when working remotely. Paul shared his experience traveling in an RV, using Starlink to stay connected while driving through Canada. It’s a reminder that remote work opens up opportunities for adventure, but also comes with challenges like managing meetings in different time zones.

Community and the Power of Shared Experiences

We also touched on the importance of community in the digital and agency space. Marcus and Paul discussed how initiatives like the Agency Academy have been invaluable, not just for sharing knowledge but also for feeling part of a supportive network. Being able to share frustrations, learnings, and successes helps combat the isolation that can come with freelancing or running a small agency.

Rory Sutherland: The Power of Creativity and Psychology

We also introduced Rory Sutherland, Vice Chair of Ogilvy, and discussed some of his fascinating ideas about creativity and human behavior. Rory challenges conventional thinking by emphasizing the importance of psychological insights in problem-solving and marketing. One of his key points is that the opposite of a good idea isn't necessarily a bad idea—it could be another good idea.

Rory's perspective on advertising and user experience highlights the value of making creative, sometimes non-obvious decisions that resonate on a deeper psychological level. For example, he argues that creating an enjoyable experience can be more impactful than simply making a service faster or cheaper. He also points out that sometimes the best way to chane behavior isn't through logical arguments but by tapping into human emotions and habits.

His unique take on solving problems with creativity instead of just relying on data challenges us to think beyond A/B testing and analytics. Rory's approach inspires us to consider how we can incorporate more creative, psychological-driven ideas into our UX and content strategies to create more engaging and memorable experiences for users.

Wrapping Up

That’s a wrap for this episode! If you want to transform how you approach web content and streamline your copywriting process with AI, or if you're seeking inspiration for balancing work and personal adventures, this one’s for you.

We love hearing from you! Send us your thoughts and questions at paul@boagworld.com or marcus@headscape.co.uk.

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Embracing AI

We've been exploring the world of AI. We've been experimenting with tools like Claude AI and Fathom, which have proven incredibly useful for summarizing meetings and generating action points. If you haven't tried Fathom yet, we highly recommend giving it a go. It's a game-changer for anyone who spends a lot of time in meetings!

Microsoft Clarity: A Free Analytics Powerhouse

Our app of the week is Microsoft Clarity, and it’s impressive! This free analytics tool competes well with Google Analytics. Here’s why we love it:

• It provides insights on user behavior, including dead clicks, rage clicks, and excessive scrolling.
• You can create filters to focus on specific user actions.
• It offers heat maps for visual representation of user interactions.
• The tool records sessions, allowing you to watch user behavior in real-time.
• It captures the entire DOM (Document Object Model), meaning you can track any element without adding event handlers.

What sets Microsoft Clarity apart is its ability to provide historical data on any element, even if you didn't set up tracking initially. This feature is incredibly powerful for conversion rate optimization.

If you're interested in trying it out, head over to clarity.microsoft.com. Trust us, you won't be disappointed!

Mastering the Art of Objection Handling

We dove deep into the crucial topic of objection handling in marketing websites. Here's our step-by-step approach:

1. Identify objections: Use empathy, talk to customer-facing staff, analyze social media, or conduct surveys.
2. Craft objection handling statements: Create short, positive statements addressing each concern.
3. Integrate these statements strategically: Place them at the moment users are likely to have those concerns.

Remember, it's not about whether the objections are fair - it's about addressing the perceptions your audience has. And while FAQ sections might seem like a good place for this information, we recommend integrating these statements throughout your site for maximum impact.

Want to learn how to create effective landing pages and handle objections? Sign up for our free email course.

The Future of UX Design with AI

We stumbled upon a fascinating article about the role of AI in user experience design. While we've been focusing a lot on chatbot interfaces, the potential for AI in UX goes far beyond that. Here are some exciting possibilities:

• Dynamic navigation based on user behavior
• Personalized experiences
• Intelligent A/B testing
• AI-generated accessibility features (like alt text for images)
• Behavior-based security measures
• Dynamic form updates

The article really opened our eyes to the broader potential of AI in UX design. If you're interested in reading it yourself, you can find here.

Your Questions Answered: Content Assets for Agencies

We received a great question from Paul Edwards in the Agency Academy:

"What are the most useful content assets for gaining and generating new business as an agency?"

Our perspectives on this differ slightly:

• Proposals: Well-crafted proposals can be a goldmine of content that you can repurpose for future pitches.
• Email list: Building and nurturing an email list can be an invaluable asset for reaching potential clients.
• Landing pages: Creating effective landing pages to grow your email list can be a powerful tool for lead generation.

The key is to find what works best for your agency's style and target audience.

Wrapping Up

That's all for this episode, folks! We hope you found these insights useful for your digital endeavors.

We love hearing from you, so drop us an email anytime at paul@boagworld.com or marcus@scape.co.uk. Until next time, keep innovating and creating amazing digital experiences!

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A Trip to Apple Vision Pro Land

However, I kick off the show with a little adventure I had recently. I took a detour during a shopping trip to try out the new Apple Vision Pro. Now, I need to caveat my comments by setting some expectations:

1. It's not £3000 amazing (but when has that stopped us from buying Apple products before?)
2. It's a bit heavy and can leave you feeling hot and sweaty

Despite those caveats, it's absolutely mind-blowing technology. The immersion level is unlike anything I’ve experienced before. Watching movies? Better than the cinema. Working with multiple screens? It's like being surrounded by your own personal command center.

The demo experience itself was slick, albeit a bit too "American" for my British sensibilities. But the potential? Yep, its definitely there. I’m not saying I’ll buy it right away (there may or may not be a £5 bet riding on this), but version 2? I might just be tempted.

AI Tools: Our Top Picks

Now for the app recommendations I shared in this show. There are many AI tools available, so I want to share the ones I find most useful for my work and their specific applications:

1. ChatGPT: Still a solid choice, especially for analyzing data sets. Got a bunch of usability testing results? Feed them to ChatGPT and watch it work its magic.
2. Claude AI: This one's become my go-to for most tasks. Why? It's got a massive memory (I uploaded an entire book and it only used half its capacity!) and a feature called "projects" that lets you customize its knowledge base.
3. Perplexity: Perfect for those of us who love to make sweeping generalizations without any data. Just ask it for statistics to back up your random opinions, and it'll give you references you can actually check!

Remember, these tools are great for research, brainstorming, and getting a starting point. But always double-check the results - we're not quite ready to hand over the keys to Skynet just yet.

The Perfectionism Trap: Good Enough is Good Enough

This week’s advice might be considered a bit of a hot take (as the kids say): perfectionism is overrated. Instead of constantly striving for the absolute best, we should aim for "good enough."

Why? Well, perfection is subjective and often impossible to achieve. Plus, it can lead to:

• Over-engineering
• Unnecessary costs
• Procrastination
• Inflexibility

The key is to balance quality with practicality. As long as it meets user needs and business goals effectively, it doesn't need to be any better than that. Remember, a product that's in the world is infinitely more valuable than a perfect idea that never sees the light of day.

Of course, this doesn't mean we should cut corners or produce shoddy work. It's about finding that sweet spot where the product is effective and efficient without getting bogged down in endless revisions.

Empathy: The Secret Weapon of UX Design

I stumbled upon a great article about empathy in UX design, and it really struck a chord with me. Empathy isn't just a nice-to-have skill; it's absolutely essential in our field.

Whether you're a marketer, salesperson, designer, or even a developer, the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes is crucial. It helps you:

• Understand your users better
• Connect with colleagues and stakeholders
• Create more effective products and experiences

From a career perspective, focusing on empathy is a smart move. Unlike technical skills that can become outdated, empathy is always in demand. As you move up the ladder into management roles, those "soft skills" become even more important.

So how do you improve your empathy skills? It partly comes with age and experience, but you can also:

• Interact with a diverse range of people
• Listen more than you speak
• Practice putting yourself in others' positions

Remember, being empathetic isn't just good for your career - it makes you a better person overall. And in a world that sometimes seems to be lacking in empathy, that's more important than ever.

The Importance of Human Connection

In our increasingly digital world, it's easy to forget the importance of human connection. Marcus’ has noticed a trend of "ghosting" in professional communications - people not responding to emails or messages, even when a response is expected.

This lack of basic courtesy isn't just rude; it's also short-sighted. You never know when that person you ignored might become a valuable contact in the future. A simple "thanks, but no thanks" can go a long way in maintaining professional relationships.

The same principle applies to user research. While remote testing tools are convenient, there's no substitute for face-to-face interaction with your users. It helps you build a deeper understanding and empathy for the people you're designing for.

And Finally... A Joke!

We couldn't leave you without our traditional joke. So:

What did the drummer call his twin daughters?
Anna One and Anna Two!

Ba dum tss! (See what we did there?)

That's all for this episode. Until next time, keep designing, keep empathizing, and most importantly, keep laughing at Marcus’ terrible jokes!

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Why Are We Back?

Well, to be honest, we missed hanging out with each other and chatting about the ever-evolving digital landscape. But more importantly, Marcus realized that his knowledge was getting a bit rusty without our regular podcast discussions. So, in a way, this is a selfish endeavor to keep ourselves sharp!

But don't worry, we haven't been twiddling our thumbs for the past five years. We've grown and evolved along with the industry. While we used to focus on simple web design topics back in 2010, we've now expanded the show to cover areas like:

• User experience design
• Conversion optimization
• Digital marketing
• Leading digital teams
• Running agencies and freelance businesses

So whether you're a UX specialist, marketer, content guru, team lead, or agency owner, we've got something for you!

What's New in Usability Testing?

In this episode, we dove deep into the world of usability testing. We've come a long way from the days of traditional in-person testing (remember those?). Now, we're all about embracing a variety of tools and techniques to get valuable user insights.

Types of Testing We Love

• Unfacilitated Testing: We're big fans of tools like Maze for this. It's great for getting quick insights on whether users can complete tasks, but remember – it won't tell you why they're struggling.
• Surveys: Perfect for diagnosing problems and understanding user perceptions. We like to mix these with usability tasks for a well-rounded view.
• Top Task Analysis: Essential for nailing your information architecture. Tools like UserReports are great for this.
• Card Sorting and Tree Testing: Ideal for refining your site structure. We've been loving UX Metrics for these tasks lately.
• First Click and Five Second Tests: Great for quick insights on navigation and first impressions. Lyssna is our go-to tool for these.
• Heat Maps and Session Recordings: Microsoft Clarity is a fantastic (and free!) tool for this. It's amazing for spotting issues like dead clicks and rage clicks on live sites.
• A/B Testing: While it's gotten pricier since Google Optimize bit the dust, there are still some affordable options out there.

Cool Tools We're Loving

• Lyssna: Perfect for quick tests on mockups. Great for settling debates about design effectiveness.
• UX Metrics: Our favorite for card sorting and tree testing. User-friendly and budget-friendly – what's not to love?
• Attention Insight: This AI-powered tool predicts where users will look on your designs. It's like a spell-check for designers!

Must-Read Articles

We couldn't resist sharing some articles that have caught our eye recently:

• "Why I Can't Convince Executives to Invest in UX (And Neither Can You)" by Jared Spool: A classic that reminds us to speak the language of our stakeholders.
• An article on using AI to enhance user feedback analysis: Perfect for those drowning in card sorting data or survey responses.
• My very own article in Smashing Magazine about lightweight user research and testing: I break down how to fit user testing into any project, regardless of budget or timeline.

Join Our Community!

We've got a fantastic Slack community where we chat about all things digital (and occasionally just say good morning to each other). If you want to join the fun, head over to boagworld.com/slacking and sign up. Don't be shy – we promise we're a friendly bunch!

The Return of the Dad Joke

We couldn't possibly end the show without a classic dad joke. So, here goes:

Q: What's the stupidest animal in the jungle? 
A: The polar bear!

(We know, we know. We'll work on improving our joke game for the next episode.)

And there you have it, folks! We're back, we're (slightly) wiser, and we're ready to dive into all things digital with you every two weeks. If you enjoyed the show, spread the word and help us rebuild our audience. We've missed you all, and we can't wait to chat again in two weeks!

Until then, keep designing, optimizing, and making the web a better place!

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While designers tend to focus on the big picture, developers are making hundreds of decisions every day that will affect the user experience.

In this free webinar, I share the key lessons developers need to know about the user experience and how they can make that experience better.

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You can download the slides at boag.world/marketing/

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https://boagworld.com/season/19/episode/1911/

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https://boagworld.com/season/19/episode/1905/

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https://boagworld.com/season/18/episode/1815/

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https://boagworld.com/season/18/episode/1812/

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https://boagworld.com/season/18/episode/1809/

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http://boag.me/2u94vir

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http://boag.me/2u8zV5b

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This week’s show is sponsored by Teacup Adwords and Fullstory.

View a complete transcript of the show here

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This weeks show is sponsored by Fullstory and Teacup Analytics.

You can read a complete transcript of the show here.

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