Artificial intelligence (AI) can now do many useful things, including creating images, designing user interfaces, analyzing documents, writing code, summarizing meetings, and working with large datasets. An AI can also remember context and handle multistep tasks with little human help. However, as AIs get smarter, the user experience does not always improve—even with advanced AI.

Users might not know what questions to ask. Even if they seem to get a good answer, they might have no simple way of checking whether the information is reliable. AI can save people time when it works well, but it can also create extra work if it does something unexpected. Read More

Ask a startup founder where the budget should go and talking to users first is rarely near the top of the list. UX research might seem like a delay, a line item standing between the team and the real work of building, shipping, and growing. So research gets trimmed, postponed, or skipped entirely in the name of speed. Then the bills arrive later, in messier and far more expensive forms.

This is the quiet paradox of user-centered design (UCD). On the way in, it seems like a cost, but it behaves like savings on the way out. When done well, UX research is one of the highest-return investments a product team can make. The catch is that most of the return never shows up as a number that anyone celebrates. This article is about where that hidden return on investment (ROI) actually lives and why it remains invisible until you go looking for it. Read More

A user opens the analytics dashboard on a Monday morning and the widget she needs is already at the top. Good. Then she notices the second widget, which is a churn report for a segment that she’s never looked at in this product. She did read about that segment last night, but in an email message, in a different app, on a different device. Although the dashboard is right, this awareness is also unsettling, and these two facts don’t cancel each other out.

This is the whole problem with the personalization of a screen. The useful version and the creepy version look almost identical. Both adapt the user interface to the person using it. The difference is where the signal came from and whether the user knew she was sending it. Do systems really need a surveillance-grade profile to show users the right shortcut, setting, or next step? Usually not, and products that assume otherwise pay for it in lost user trust. Read More

In this article, I’ll present a project story about designing guidance that respects user agency. In expert workflows, user agency is an important part of quality.

If you design enterprise tools, you’ll eventually get a familiar request: “Add stronger guidance. Make the preferred option harder to miss. Capture structured data so we can learn what’s happening.” While the intention is reasonable, the outcome sometimes is not.

In front-line, high-variability work, making providing guidance mandatory frequently backfires. Users under time pressure either rush through forced steps—creating checkbox theater—or avoid the tool altogether. Then the system gets worse data, lower user adoption, and more workarounds, which is the opposite of what the company built it to achieve. Read More

Most principles of visual design encourage user-interface (UI) designers to make important UI elements easy for people to see. UI designers use contrast to separate elements from their surroundings, hierarchy to establish their importance, and spacing to give them enough room to stand apart. If a label is legible, an icon is clear, or a control has sufficient contrast, we tend to assume that users will be able to recognize it. Most of the time, that assumption serves us well. But visual elements never appear on their own.

A small icon that seems perfectly clear within the context of a component library might be harder to identify when it sits among a dozen similar icons. A label that is easy to read on its own might require more effort when other text surrounds it. Nothing about the UI element itself has changed. What has changed is its visual environment. Read More

In earlier installments of this column, I’ve written about making the business case for information-architecture (IA) investment using language that stakeholders respect, as well as about conducting quarterly audits that keep an IA-governance model honest. Both of those pieces leaned on the same unstated assumption: you must actually have numbers to report at the end of the quarter. But most teams don’t. Not because the data doesn’t exist, but because nobody decided in advance which numbers should count as evidence that an IA is working rather than just feel reassuring.

This is the gap that exists between “the new navigation looks cleaner” and “the new navigation reduced task failures by twelve percent.” Only one of these statements can survive a skeptical stakeholder, and only one of them tells you whether to keep going or roll back to an earlier version. Read More

As physical artificial intelligence (AI) moves into our homes, workplaces, and public spaces, UX design must evolve from designing user interactions to designing how intelligent systems behave around people.

Last month, I stood at a crosswalk behind a sidewalk delivery robot. It rolled to the curb, sat for a second, edged forward, then stopped again. Two people stepped back from it. A third walked around it, going into the street. This robot had no screen and nothing to say. All the robot did have was its behavior, which was broadcasting that it did not know what to do next, making everyone near it feel the same way. Read More

Today, the digital market is so crowded that merely executing on UX strategy isn’t a competitive advantage anymore; it’s the bare minimum a company needs to do to survive. Scaling a product requires more than just functional stability; it demands a deep understanding of users’ cognitive load and mental models to ensure their long-term retention.

Most UX breakdowns at scale don’t happen because of bad design. They happen because digital-product teams are out of sync.

Experience Design in Practice

Experience design focuses on creating digital products that deliver meaningful, relevant interactions across workflows, user interfaces, and systems. The UX design (UXD) process covers everything from initial branding and page layouts to ensuring usability and defining core functionality. Read More

Most people have experienced a moment when they are in the middle of a transaction on their mobile phone and considered whether it is really safe. Every banking application is built on user acceptance and trust. The answer to the question of trust does not always remain the same. In response to threats that didn’t exist six months ago, the safety of this software is continually emerging and being tested, discussed, and rebuilt.

Today, user trust requires a balance between factors that usually work well together: strict protection and a seamless consumer experience. Customers want the right to access their money, but every access factor must be locked and in line with regulators. Developers are under a lot of stress to get every element just right, so sometimes get caught between the two. Read More