On UX, immersive technology, and the terrifying freedom of designing without a frame. Spotify For thirty years, UX designers had a container. It was called the screen. It had edges. It had a top and a bottom. It had pixels you could count and buttons you could place and a scroll direction that everyone...
Continue readingUX Is No Longer a Job Title. It’s a Way of Thinking the World Desperately Needs.
Spotify On what happens when the discipline outgrows the discipline. There is a conversation happening right now in design circles, in boardrooms, in hospital corridors and government offices and climate labs, and most of the people having it don’t know they’re having the same conversation. It goes something like this: why does this feel...
Continue readingUnboxing UX: What Nobody Tells You About Designing for Real Humans
Spotify Everyone talks about UX like it’s a box you can open, follow the instructions, and assemble perfectly. It’s not. After 10+ years designing digital products — from scrappy startups to Fortune 500 companies — I’ve learned that the most dangerous thing in this industry isn’t a bad design. It’s the illusion of a...
Continue readingLululemon Didn’t Lose a Market. It Lost a Religion.
And here’s exactly how I’d bring the congregation back. Spotify There is a very specific kind of corporate tragedy that doesn’t announce itself with a bang. It arrives quietly. In a spreadsheet. In a PowerPoint titled “Expanding Our Addressable Market.” In a board meeting where someone says the words “broader appeal” and nobody in...
Continue readingYou Are Not a Designer. You Are Ingredients in a Blender.
Or: How UX design is basically controlled chaos with a ‘smooth’ setting nobody uses. Spotify Nobody tells you this in bootcamp. Nobody stitches it on the onboarding welcome kit. But somewhere between your first stakeholder review and your fortieth “can we just make it pop more,” you realize the truth: UX design is not...
Continue readingYour AI Feature Has Terrible UX. Here’s the Receipt.
There’s a pattern I keep seeing across every SaaS product that shipped an AI feature in the last 18 months. A text box. A blinking cursor. A placeholder that says “Ask me anything.” And then nothing. No rails. No suggestion. No signal that the user is doing it right. Just a void, and the...
Continue readingUX Leaders Make Better C-Suite Leaders
Spotify Fast Company recently made a point that hit hard: the traits that often get designers labeled as “difficult” inside companies are the same traits that make them strong entrepreneurs. Systems thinking, comfort with ambiguity, challenging assumptions, and refusing to accept shallow briefs are not flaws. They are leadership skills in the wrong environment....
Continue readingDesigning for the Machine: When AI Agents Become the User
For most of my career, the user was clear. A person, on a screen, is trying to get something done. That assumption is starting to break. We are entering a phase where designers are no longer optimizing interfaces only for humans, but for AI agents that act on behalf of humans. And that changes...
Continue readingPick One and Build: Navigating the Explosion of AI Design Tools
Spotify If you’re waiting for the “right” AI design tool, you’re going to be waiting a long time. Over the past 18 months, we’ve gone from a handful of capable tools to an overwhelming ecosystem. Assistants embedded in design software, standalone generators, prompt-to-UI builders, research summarizers, code copilots, prototyping engines. Every week, something new...
Continue readingOne User, Right Now
Spotify The idea of a “target audience” is starting to break. For most of my career, everything in UX, product, and marketing was built around segments. Personas. Demographics. Behavioral groupings. We simplified the world into categories so we could design, build, and ship at scale. It worked. Until it didn’t. Because the reality is,...
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