『Boagworld: UX, Design Leadership, Marketing & Conversion Optimization』のカバーアート

Boagworld: UX, Design Leadership, Marketing & Conversion Optimization

Boagworld: UX, Design Leadership, Marketing & Conversion Optimization

著者： Paul Boag Marcus Lillington
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今ならプレミアムプランが3カ月 月額99円

2026年5月12日まで。4か月目以降は月額1,500円で自動更新します。

概要

 Boagworld: The podcast where digital best practices meets a terrible sense of humor! Join us for a relaxed chat about all things digital design. We dish out practical advice and industry insights, all wrapped up in friendly conversation. Whether you're looking to improve your user experience, boost your conversion or be a better design lead, we've got something for you. With over 400 episodes, we're like the cool grandads of web design podcasts – experienced, slightly inappropriate, but always entertaining. So grab a drink, get comfy, and join us for an entertaining journey through the life of a digital professional.Boagworks Ltd 経済学
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  • From Doer to Director: The AI Mindset Shift

    From Doer to Director: The AI Mindset Shift
    2026/05/07
    There's a scene in the Steve Jobs biopic where Steve Wozniak asks Jobs what he actually does. Wozniak understood his own role clearly: he was an engineer. He wrote code. He built things. But Jobs? Jobs described himself as the conductor of an orchestra. I've been thinking about that exchange a lot lately, because I think it captures exactly where we're all heading. AI isn't turning us into supercharged doers. It's turning us into conductors, and that requires a completely different mindset. The problem nobody talks about I've been coaching a number of people on integrating AI into their workflows recently, and I keep running into the same pattern. The people who aren't getting time savings from AI aren't failing because they don't understand what it can do. They're not failing because they lack access to the right tools. They're failing because they're fundamentally disorganized. AI is only as useful as the foundation it's built on. If your work processes are messy, your context is scattered, and your task management is a loose collection of mental notes and sticky tabs, AI can't do much for you. It needs structure to work from. I hear this complaint constantly: "AI has been mis-sold to me. I'm not saving any time." But it hasn't been mis-sold. It's just that AI can only deliver on its promise if there's an organized workflow underneath it. Build that first, and the time savings follow. That's why I've written before about building AI playbooks and developing proper AI skills. These aren't nice-to-haves. They're the infrastructure that lets AI actually work. The conductor problem But here's the deeper shift, the one that's genuinely harder to adapt to. When you're doing tactical work, you're usually focused on one or two tasks at a time. You go deep, you finish a thing, you move on. It's cognitively manageable. A conductor doesn't work like that. A conductor holds the entire orchestra in mind simultaneously: what the strings are doing, where the brass comes in, what the percussion is building toward. They're not playing any of the instruments. They're managing the relationships between all of them. In a world of AI agents, we're going to be managing multiple projects running in parallel, all moving faster than any human team would. We're task-switching constantly. We're accountable for outputs we didn't directly produce. And we have to resist the urge to dive in and do the work ourselves, because that's precisely where we get bogged down. The design leader parallel This isn't a new challenge, as it happens. Design leaders face exactly this transition when they move from senior practitioner to managing a team. I've watched a lot of talented designers struggle with that shift. They get promoted because they're brilliant at the work, and then they spend the next year quietly sneaking back into Figma because they can't let go of doing. They micromanage their reports. They redesign things that were already fine. They can't operate at the level of abstraction that leadership requires. Working with AI agents is going to feel very similar. The temptation to wrestle with the AI until it produces exactly the output you had in your head, rather than accepting a good result and moving on, is going to be real. Learning to let go of that control is a skill in itself. The good news is that unlike a team of designers, you can't upset an AI agent by micromanaging it. But you can waste enormous amounts of time doing it, and that defeats the whole point. AI burnout is already real There's one more aspect of this I want to flag, because I don't think it gets talked about enough. When you're managing a team of agents all moving at AI speed, the cognitive load is significant. You're context-switching constantly across multiple workstreams. Things are completing faster than you can review them. It's relentless in a way that managing a human team simply isn't. This is what's increasingly being called AI burnout. Learning to pace yourself, to batch your reviews, to build in breathing room: these are the organizational skills that will separate people who thrive in an AI-augmented world from those who burn out in it. Where to start If I had to distill this to one practical thing: start building the habits of a manager now, before the agents fully take over. Get organized. Build the infrastructure that AI needs to work from. Practice delegating, even to imperfect tools, rather than doing everything yourself. Work on your ability to hold multiple projects in your head without losing the thread on any of them. If you want help working through that transition, I offer coaching specifically for this. It's something I'm increasingly focused on, because I think it's one of the most valuable things I can help people with right now. I'm also running a workshop with Smashing Magazine in July. Modern UX Practitioner covers a lot of this ground in a more structured way, if that's more your style. The shift from doer to conductor is coming ...
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    6 分
  • Why UX Teams Need a Maturity Audit Right Now

    Why UX Teams Need a Maturity Audit Right Now
    2026/04/23
    UX is under pressure. A proactive maturity audit gives you a voice before leadership makes decisions about your team without you. Something uncomfortable is happening in organizations right now. UX teams are being quietly reassessed. AI has disrupted the field, leadership expectations have gone unmet, and there's a growing sense that UX hasn't delivered what it promised. The conversations are happening, but often not with the people who actually do UX work. If you're in a UX role, decisions about your team's future might be forming in rooms you're not in. That's the situation I've been thinking about lately, and it's why I want to talk about UX maturity audits. Not as a defensive measure or a tick-box exercise, but as a genuinely useful tool for getting ahead of a conversation that's already underway. The expectation gap is real A lot of the cynicism toward UX right now traces back to one thing: overselling. Leadership was told UX would deliver a hundredfold return on every dollar spent. That figure gets thrown around a lot, and someone took it seriously enough to hire one UX person and wait for the magic to happen. It didn't. That disappointment is partly our industry's fault, though it's not something we often admit openly. We've marketed UX with promises that assume a level of organizational change nobody warned leadership they'd have to make. Hiring one person doesn't transform an organization into a user-centric one. It never did. There's a certain naivety in the idea that a single hire will magically produce amazing experiences, without understanding the breadth of change required for an organization to truly become user-focused. But plenty of people implied it would. The result is a leadership team that feels, not unreasonably, like they were sold something that didn't arrive. Why waiting is a bad idea The natural response to this situation is to keep your head down and hope things settle. Understandable, but a mistake. If leadership is already souring on UX, the absence of any structured conversation about what UX is actually delivering gives that skepticism room to grow unchallenged. Decisions start getting made. Quietly, and without much input from the people who understand what's actually happening. A proactive UX maturity audit changes that dynamic. Instead of waiting to be judged, you're shaping the conversation. You're the one bringing evidence, framing the questions, and defining what success looks like. That's a considerably better position to be in. And it's not just damage control. Even mature, well-functioning UX teams benefit from this kind of review. There's always a next stage. Whether it's wider adoption, better integration with product teams, or moving toward something more democratized, an audit helps you see where you are and decide where to go. What a solid audit covers A UX maturity audit should cover five areas. Not exhaustively, but enough to give you a real picture. Strategy and leadership. Does UX have a seat at the table? Is there genuine sponsorship from someone with budget and influence, or is UX being practiced in a corner while real decisions happen elsewhere?Culture and capability. How widely does the organization understand what UX actually involves? Are there training pathways and career development? Or is it just a job title a few people happen to have?Research and design processes. Is UX practice consistent, or does it depend entirely on who's available? Are designers and researchers involved early, or called in after the big decisions are already made?Outcomes and measurement. Can the team point to specific improvements in user outcomes? Are there agreed definitions of what success looks like, and is anyone actually tracking it?Cross-functional integration. Is UX embedded across teams, or sitting in its own silo waiting for people to come to it? None of these are particularly complicated questions. The hard part is being honest about the answers. The difference between a real audit and a survey An audit that just collects opinions tells you what people think, which is interesting but not necessarily accurate. A good audit looks for evidence. That means checking whether research plans actually exist. Whether findings get used or disappear into a folder. Whether design systems are maintained or quietly falling apart. Whether the team can point to specific recent changes that improved user outcomes rather than just shipped features. But the more revealing question is often why these things aren't happening, because the answer usually points straight to the organizational problems that stop UX from gaining traction in the first place. A missing research plan isn't just an admin gap. It's often a signal that no one with authority has made space for it, or that the team has learned it wouldn't be taken seriously anyway. The questions worth asking aren't simply "how good is our UX?" They're "how well is UX supported here? How consistently is it practiced? What would ...
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    6 分
  • AI Is Showing UI Designers the Door

    AI Is Showing UI Designers the Door
    2026/04/21
    So this month Marcus and I get into a slightly uncomfortable question. If AI can knock out decent interfaces from a text prompt, where does that leave the people whose day job is opening Figma and making screens look nice? We start with Google Stitch, which has been getting a lot of attention lately. Then we zoom out into something I have become mildly obsessed with, which is building AI skills. Not prompt snippets, but reusable, documented processes that let you get consistent work out of AI without drowning it in context. App of the Month This month’s tool is Google Stitch (v2), Google’s AI UI generator. You describe what you want, it produces an interface, and you can do some light manual tweaking. It is not a full replacement for Figma. The editing controls are basic. The bigger story is what it represents. We are now at the point where a decent, usable UI can be generated fast enough that the real value shifts from "can you draw the screens" to "can you judge what good looks like." That is where experience, and yes, taste, starts to matter. If you want to compare approaches, I mentioned Figr again, which I still prefer for the quality of what it produces. Are UI Designers Becoming Vinyl? The question Stitch raises is not "can AI design interfaces". It clearly can. The question is what happens to the job market when "good enough" becomes cheap, fast, and widely available. I found myself telling 2 different clients recently that they could probably skip hiring a UI designer. They had tight budgets, tight timelines, and already had solid brand guidelines or a design system. In those situations, I could push the work through AI, iterate it a bit, and get something perfectly serviceable. That line of advice made me feel a bit grubby. Not because it was wrong for those clients, but because it hints at a bigger shift. My worry is that UI design becomes like vinyl records. Most people will not need it. A small number will care deeply and pay for it. The middle ground shrinks. Marcus made the important caveat here. Some designers will still be in demand because they bring something AI cannot easily fake. A distinctive visual style. Creative judgment. Brand thinking. The ability to make something feel like it came from a real point of view, not a model averaging the internet. We also talked about where UI designers can expand their value, because "I make pretty screens" is not a great long-term career plan. Broaden into UX and problem solving. Look past the interface and into the business problem, user needs, and research.Own the stuff between screens. AI still tends to think screen by screen. Humans are better at flows, journeys, and the messy reality of how people actually get from A to B.Lean into information architecture. For websites especially, the structure and content model matter as much as the visual design. We used a music analogy that will probably annoy some people, which makes it perfect. AI tools can generate "background" output that is fine for low-stakes use. They will not replace great musicians. But they will reduce the number of gigs available. AI Skills As a Career Asset After we finished terrifying UI designers, we moved on to something more useful. I think a lot of roles are going to need an AI toolkit. Not a handful of clever prompts, but a proper library of reusable skills. When I say "AI skills," I mean documented processes that an AI can follow reliably. Think SOPs you can run repeatedly, not prompt snippets you copy and paste. I now have around 60 skills in my library, and it is growing constantly. Outside of the Boagworld website, it might be the most valuable business asset I have. The reason is consistency and context management. AI can produce terrible output when you dump too much information on it at once. Skills let you break work into focused chunks and chain them. We talked about 3 levels of skills: Company-level skills Standard processes that keep things consistent. Proposals. Expense claims. Holiday booking. The sort of stuff that should not depend on one person remembering every step. Team or discipline skills For example, UX teams can create skills for personas, journey mapping, surveys, and top task analysis. That helps remove bottlenecks and lets colleagues do decent work without reinventing the wheel. Individual skills This is where it gets interesting for your career. These are the skills that capture how you do something, including all the weird little bits you have learned over the years. A key point here is that the value is not only in having the skill. It is in creating it. Writing down a process forces you to surface assumptions and explain what "good" looks like. We also got into AI agents. If you describe your skills well, an agent can chain them to complete bigger jobs. I gave a sales example where a meeting transcript can be turned into a CRM entry, follow-up tasks, company research, and a draft proposal with very little manual effort. That is ...
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    53 分
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