Spotify There’s a peculiar moment in every ski rental shop where you stop being a person and become a collection of numerical guesses. Height, weight, skill level, boot size, DIN setting, preferred terrain. You’re essentially a walking spreadsheet in a puffy jacket. The experience feels like a small sociological experiment wrapped in damp carpet...
Continue readingWhat a Year It Has Been
This year did not feel incremental. It felt corrective. Across design, technology, leadership, and culture, many of the assumptions we quietly relied on finally cracked. Some collapsed under pressure. Others simply stopped working. The result was uncomfortable at times, clarifying at others, and ultimately necessary. If there is a single theme that defined this...
Continue readingThe Most Annoying UX Component: The Dropdown Menu
Spotify Every product team uses dropdowns. Every design system includes them. Every developer can implement one in their sleep. And users hate them. The dropdown menu is the most overused, under-questioned component in UX. It creates friction in almost every context, yet teams cling to it because it feels neutral, familiar, and easy to...
Continue readingThe UX Debt No One Tracks: Emotional Debt
Spotify Teams obsess over technical debt. They debate design debt. They argue about research debt. Almost no one talks about emotional debt, but understanding it can empower teams to protect trust before it’s lost. Emotional debt is the accumulated frustration, confusion, hesitation, and micro-betrayals a user experiences while interacting with your product. It’s invisible...
Continue readingProduct Fails in a Silo. Always.
Spotify Teams still cling to the fantasy that Product can operate independently. They believe a roadmap, a backlog, and a few stakeholder sessions are enough to shape something meaningful. It isn’t. Product doesn’t succeed because of Product. Product succeeds because of integration. A siloed Product team always produces the same outcomes: partial solutions, misaligned...
Continue readingSurrender to the Drift: The New UX Mandate
Spotify Companies keep telling themselves they “designed” their product. They didn’t. Their users did, through workarounds, hacks, complaints, and abandoned sessions. UX is no longer the craft of shaping an experience. It’s the discipline of detecting where users have already changed your product without your permission. This is the failure point most teams refuse...
Continue readingThe UX Problem No One Tracks: Cognitive Drift
Spotify Most teams assume UX issues come from bad flows, unclear labels, poor hierarchy, or inconsistent patterns. Those are surface-level. The deeper problem, the one almost no team measures, is cognitive drift. Cognitive drift is the gap that quietly forms between how a product used to work in the user’s mind and how it...
Continue readingWhy UX Is Never Perfect
Spotify Every team wants the perfect experience, seamless flows, flawless logic, zero friction. They chase it through redesigns, new frameworks, bigger research plans, and endless rounds of polishing. But here is the part most teams avoid admitting. UX is never perfect. It cannot be. The idea of an ideal experience is a myth that...
Continue readingThe UX Blind Spot Hidden in Team Structure
Spotify Every company claims to be user-centered. They research, build personas, map journeys, and talk about empathy. Yet most products still feel fragmented, inconsistent, and harder to use than they should be. The reason is not a lack of UX skill. The reason is organizational design. The team’s structure shapes the product’s structure. Here...
Continue readingThe UX Shortcut That Destroys Products
Spotify Every product team eventually reaches a moment where things get complicated. Deadlines tighten, roadmaps expand, and pressure rises. This is the point where teams either double down on discipline or take a shortcut. Most teams choose the shortcut. They ship features without resolving logic. They copy patterns without confirming fit. They assume users...
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