『UX Insights - User Experience Leadership and Strategy』のカバーアート

UX Insights - User Experience Leadership and Strategy

UX Insights - User Experience Leadership and Strategy

著者： Paul Boag
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Need quick, actionable insights to sharpen your UX leadership and strategy? Short on time but eager to grow your influence? UX strategist Paul Boag delivers concise, practical episodes designed to enhance your strategic thinking, leadership skills, and impact in user experience. Each bite-sized podcast is just 6-10 minutes—perfect for busy UX leaders and advocates on the go.Boagworks Ltd 経済学
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  • How to handle a client who wants AI everywhere

    How to handle a client who wants AI everywhere
    2026/06/18
    I have lost count of the conversations that start the same way at the moment. Someone with a budget and a deadline leans in and says the business needs AI. Where, exactly? Everywhere. In the product, on the site, in the onboarding flow. It's not that they've no idea what they want. They usually arrive with something in mind. The trouble is it's a half-baked solution to a problem that may or may not exist. Push back and you're the difficult one, the blocker, the person who doesn't get it. Go along with it and you build a chatbot nobody asked for. Neither ending is much fun. So I stopped arguing. Now I do something that works far better. I send the whole thing to the users. Don't win the argument. Sidestep it. When someone hands me a shaky AI idea, I don't tell them it's shaky. That's a quick way to make an enemy and lose. Instead I say something like this. "That's a really interesting idea. I think there's something in it. Let me go away and test it with a few users so we build it in the right way." Often that's enough. You sound keen, not obstructive, and the stakeholder feels heard. You've quietly moved the decision out of a meeting room, where the loudest voice wins, and handed it to the only people whose opinion really counts. But sometimes they won't budge. They're so sure they've got it right that testing feels like a waste of time. When that happens, I fall back on one of two tactics. The first is to ask questions. I throw a lot of very specific ones at them about how the thing should work. What happens in this case? What about that one? Before long they start to struggle, and that's the moment to step in. It will be quicker to ask a few users than to guess our way through all of this. The second is to talk about risk. If we build this without testing, there's a real chance we go down the wrong path and waste the budget. So I ask whether they're happy to own that risk. In my experience, nobody ever is. The moment they hesitate, you've got your user research. If the idea is hollow, the users will tell you, and you get to be just as surprised as your client. No bruised egos. Just evidence. And if the idea is solid, even better. You now know it's worth building. But validation isn't a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The real prize is what you learn in those conversations. The same questions that tell you whether to build also tell you how to build. The questions worth exploring When you sit down with users, you're not just asking "would you use this?" You're working out the shape of the thing. Three questions matter most. How much control do they want? Ask people how much say they want over what the AI does on their behalf. Some will want to set it and forget it. They'd happily never see it. For them, the best answer is an invisible solution. No interface, no buttons, no chat window. The AI gets on with the work in the background and the problem quietly goes away. Others will want their hands on the wheel. They don't trust a black box making choices for them, and fair enough. The moment people want control, your invisible solution becomes a visible one, and you've got an interface to design. You only know which camp they're in because you asked. How do they want to see it? If it does need to be visible, the default everyone reaches for is text. That's usually the client or stakeholder talking, not the user, and it's rarely a deliberate choice. They land on text because it's familiar, not because it gets the point across best. This is exactly where asking the user opens things up. Ask users what they're actually trying to understand. Often a chart, a simple dashboard, or a quick visual does in a glance what a paragraph fumbles. AI is getting genuinely good at generating that sort of thing on the fly, so there's no reason to settle for a wall of prose when a graph would land faster. How do they want to interact with it? There's one last thing to ask, which is how people want to interact with it. Most will expect a conversation. Type a question, wait, read the answer, type again. For plenty of tasks that's slower and more irritating than the alternatives. A few form fields can beat a back-and-forth with a bot that keeps asking you to clarify. A dashboard can feel like the most natural way in the world to poke at data. Ask users how they'd rather do it, and many will tell you the chat box was never the point. Let the users build your case Notice what's happened here. You haven't had a single argument about whether AI belongs in the product. You've turned a turf war into a research question, and come back with answers nobody can wave away. Maybe the project dies because users don't care. Maybe it lives, but as a quiet background helper rather than the chatbot your client pictured. Either way, the decision was made by the people who'll live with it, not by whoever was most confident in the room. That's a far stronger place to design from. And it's a much easier life than being the one who's forever saying ...
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    6 分
  • The quick wins racket (and why I'm part of it)

    The quick wins racket (and why I'm part of it)
    2026/06/04
    Here is roughly how every conversion rate optimization project I take on begins. We get through introductions, I sketch out an approach, everyone nods politely, and then, usually about forty minutes in, someone leans forward and asks the question. The quick wins question. The "what can we do this quarter" question. The "what's the easy thing we can ship before the board meeting" question. I always nod sympathetically. I always say yes, of course, there are some quick wins we can target. I always deliver them. And for a long time I told myself I was being responsive to client needs, which is the polite consultant phrase for "I know what they want to buy and I'm cheerfully selling it to them." But after enough years of this, I've started to notice that the clients who fixate on quick wins don't actually win much. The ones who do best treat quick wins as the opening move and then get on with the actual work. So, awkwardly, here we are. A grudging defense of quick wins I should be careful here, because it would be very easy to read what follows as "quick wins are bad and you should feel bad for wanting them." That isn't quite the argument. What quick wins actually do well Early in an engagement, a few well-chosen tests genuinely earn their keep. They build trust with stakeholders who've spent years being told that CRO is a black art performed by people who own too many ergonomic chairs. They prove that experimentation actually moves the numbers, which is how you get budget approval for anything bigger. They drag a team through the discipline of hypothesis, test, learn, iterate, which a surprising number of teams have not actually done before. And they cough up early data you can wave at finance when you eventually ask to look at the difficult stuff. That is a perfectly reasonable amount of value. The trouble starts when "a few quick wins to get us going" quietly becomes the entire strategy, and we all agree, very politely, to pretend that's fine. Why we end up here (and yes, that includes me) Clients call us in too late There's a timing problem sitting underneath all of this, and it's worth naming first. By the time a company calls someone like me in, the conversion rate has usually been quietly underperforming for a year or more. People will tolerate a slow leak for ages and then panic the moment it becomes a flood. Of course they want quick wins at that point. They want the bleeding to stop, and they want it to stop yesterday. Which is rational, in its way. But it biases the whole engagement before it's even started. We're not having a calm conversation about long-term value. We're triaging. Stakeholders are responding to terrible incentives It's tempting to roll one's eyes at stakeholders for being short-sighted, but honestly, they're not being stupid. The problem is that their incentives are just appalling. Quarterly bonuses reward this quarter's number. Senior leadership wants to see green arrows every month. Championing a structural fix that takes nine months to land is a career risk in a way that "we lifted click-through by three percent" simply isn't. Small experiments feel politically safe. Big bets feel like the kind of thing that ends up in a LinkedIn post about your unexpected career pivot. Agencies and consultants are complicit And while I'm cheerfully pointing fingers, some of them point straight back at me. Agencies and consultants are part of the problem. We are, in fact, a substantial part of the problem. Our business model rewards short engagements, monthly reports stuffed with reassuring green ticks, and the constant low-grade panic of needing to demonstrate value inside ninety days. We are structurally set up to find things to optimize. We are not structurally set up to walk into a steering committee and say, "Look, your returns process is the actual reason your customers leave. None of us can fix that with a button test. Sorry about that." The slow, accumulating cost The trouble with an all-quick-wins strategy is that the damage compounds out of view. The easy wins run out For a start, the easy stuff gets used up. Most pages have already had their obvious tests run, so what's left tends to move the needle less and less. Diminishing returns are a real thing in CRO, and I'm always slightly amazed we don't talk about them more, given how much of our work rests on the cheerful assumption that they don't apply to us. The structural issues never get touched Meanwhile, the bigger problems never get looked at. Refund policies, product photography, page weight, customer service quality, the post-purchase experience. These are the things that actually move lifetime value, and they sit serenely untouched while we hold a fourth meeting about whether the button should say "Buy now" or "Shop now." UX debt accumulates quietly But the cost I find most uncomfortable is the slow accumulation of UX debt. Take any homepage that's been A/B tested for eighteen months and look at what's actually there. ...
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    9 分
  • Why UX Should Own Retention

    Why UX Should Own Retention
    2026/05/21
    Most of the organizations I work with are obsessed with the top of the funnel. Ads, SEO, social media, the next campaign, the next traffic spike. The marketing team has dashboards full of acquisition metrics, and the design team usually gets drafted in to support that effort. New landing pages, better hero sections, smoother sign-up flows. That's all fine as far as it goes. I've written an entire email course on campaign landing pages because I genuinely believe most of them are leaking conversions like a colander. But it does mean something important keeps getting ignored. Most organizations have no cohesive strategy at all for retention and upselling. They pour effort into getting the customer through the door, then more or less forget about them once they're inside. The numbers nobody is acting on This is strange when you stop and think about it. The economics of retention have been well known for years. Acquiring a new customer typically costs around five times more than keeping an existing one.Cross-selling or upselling to an existing customer costs roughly 24% of what it takes to win the same revenue from a new one. You don't need to convince someone who's already bought from you. You just have to not screw it up. Retention falls between the cracks So why does retention keep slipping through? In my experience, it's because nobody really owns it. Every other part of the customer journey has a clear home. Acquisition belongs to marketing.Onboarding sometimes sits with product.Support lives in customer success.Renewals end up with sales. Retention falls into the gaps between all of them, which is a polite way of saying it falls on the floor. A real opportunity for UX This is where I think UX has a genuine opportunity. Not just to help with retention, but to own it. To plant our flag and say this is our patch. I know that sounds like more work for a profession that's already stretched thin. But hear me out. UX has a chronic problem with how it's perceived inside organizations. We're seen as the people who make screens look nice. Helpful, but not strategic. The reason for that perception is partly our own fault. We've spent years talking about users when senior leaders are thinking about revenue. We've reported back on usability scores when the board is looking at MRR and churn. Nobody at the top of an organization wakes up worrying about whether the user's mental model matches the interface. They worry about lifetime customer value. They worry about monthly recurring revenue. They worry, sometimes very loudly, about churn going in the wrong direction. And yet plenty of businesses worry about those numbers without ever actively tracking them. Nobody is responsible for measuring them, so they sit in the background as a vague anxiety rather than a managed metric. If the UX team picked up that responsibility, and started tying our work to those numbers, our standing inside the business would change dramatically. We'd stop being the screen-prettifying team and start being the team that protects revenue. That's a very different conversation to have with a CFO. Why retention is a UX problem in disguise The other reason retention is such a good fit for UX is that the levers are largely ours already. Customers usually leave because something in the experience disappointed them. They couldn't find what they needed.The product didn't deliver what they expected.Support was a maze.The onboarding fizzled out before the value clicked. Every one of those is a UX problem dressed up as a business problem. The same goes for upselling. Customers buy more from companies that have nurtured them properly, where the experience has built trust over time. You can't bolt that on with a clever email campaign three months in. It has to be designed. 🎤 Free workshop: Giving Your Users a Voice in Every Decision with AI Tuesday, 9 June 2026. One hour live, plus Q&A with me. Most personas die quietly in a shared drive. I'll show you how to build AI-powered personas that focus on what users are actually trying to do, and how to make them available on demand so anyone in your organization can consult them at the moment decisions get made. Register for free What this looks like in practice A few starting points. 1. Change your KPIs If you're still reporting on task completion rates and System Usability Scale scores, you're speaking a language the business doesn't really care about. Pick one or two retention metrics and put them at the top of your dashboard. Any of these work: Churn rateRepeat purchase rateLifetime customer value 2. Audit the post-purchase experience Most organizations have spent years polishing what happens before the credit card comes out, and almost no time at all on what happens afterwards. That's where the easy wins tend to be: OnboardingThe first month of useThe renewal flowThe upgrade prompts 3. Get involved in cross-functional work Retention sits across teams, so if you wait for someone to invite you to the ...
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    6 分
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