The ambient intelligence system your product team is struggling to build has been running perfectly behind a bar counter since before any of us had a job title. Spotify There is a person who reads emotional context in real time, adjusts their behavior without being asked, anticipates your needs before you articulate them, knows...
Continue readingBuilding the Cost of Inaction Feature: The Hardest Predictive UX Problem I Have Worked On
Most features show users what is happening. This one had to show users what happens if they do nothing. Bridging the gap between a data scientist’s model and a user’s decision required a collaboration I did not fully anticipate and a design philosophy I had to build from scratch. Spotify The brief sounded straightforward....
Continue readingExplainable AI and Trust Design: The Most Important Interface Problem Nobody Is Solving Correctly
Spotify Your AI explained its decision. The user trusted it. The explanation was wrong, the decision was wrong, and the trust made everything worse. This is not a hypothetical. It is the central failure mode of XAI in production, and the design industry is building directly toward it. The Problem With Explaining Yourself Explainable...
Continue readingDelegative UI
Spotify You have been designing for the wrong user. The next interface you build will not wait for instructions. It will take them. That single shift changes everything the UX discipline thought it understood about control, trust, feedback, and what a designer is actually responsible for. The Shift Jakob Nielsen Named and Most Designers...
Continue readingYou Still Have to Know How to Design After You Build Something in AI
Spotify AI did not give you design instincts. It gave you a faster way to expose that you never had them. The prototype looks great. The thinking behind it is hollow. And everyone in the room can tell. The New Confidence Problem There is a specific kind of energy in product reviews right now...
Continue readingThe Next UX Boom Is Coming, But Not Like You Think
UX Strategy & Futures · May 2026 · 10 min read Spotify You are not behind on AI features. You are not behind on design systems, component libraries, or accessibility audits. You are behind on something far more fundamental, and by the time the rest of the industry catches up, the window for being...
Continue readingTwo UX designers walk into a ring. The one with AI wins.
Spotify This isn’t a prediction. It’s already happening. Same brief. Same deadline. Same client. One designer opens Figma and starts sketching wireframes from scratch. The other opens Figma, and also Claude, Midjourney, and a custom GPT trained on their design system. Three hours later, one has 4 screens. The other has 40, a full...
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 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...
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