『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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  • I haven't been to a conference in years. I think it's cost me.

    I haven't been to a conference in years. I think it's cost me.
    2026/10/22
    I used to go to a lot of conferences. Then COVID happened, and I just... stopped. At first it felt like a win. No early trains. No hotel breakfasts. No lanyard. I could watch the talks online in my slippers.It took me a long time to notice what I'd actually lost. And it wasn't the talks.The best part of a conference was never on stageThink back to the last good conference you went to. I bet the thing you remember isn't a slide. It's a conversation.For me, it goes back to my first conference, @media 2005. At one point they did a sort of live blogroll, asking people who wrote well-known web standards blogs to stand up. They called out PPK (Peter-Paul Koch, whose blog I read every single day) and the guy sitting next to me stood up. The poor man spent the rest of the break being peppered with questions by me.I don't remember a single talk from that day. I remember that conversation. That's what conferences gave us: the chance to turn to the person next to us and ask.Those conversations did something your colleagues can't. Your colleagues are great, if you have them. But they work in the same organization, under the same pressures, with the same blind spots. They can't tell you how things work somewhere else. And a lot of in-house UX people don't have colleagues doing what they do anyway. They're a team of one, or a team of a few.Conferences and local meetups gave us that outside view almost by accident. Now most of us don't go. Budgets got cut. Travel got harder to justify. Meetups quietly fizzled out. And nothing really replaced them.And then the job changed under our feetWhat really worries me is that this is happening at exactly the moment we need each other most.AI has changed how we work, and it's still changing. Someone senior wants everything faster. We're relearning research, design and content in real time. And there's almost no established best practice yet, because it's all so new.I'll be honest. I don't know if I'm doing it right. I'm experimenting with new ways of working all the time, and some of them are brilliant and some are a waste of an afternoon.Take prototyping. I've stopped using Figma for it and now build prototypes in code with Claude instead. It made sense at the time. But Figma has changed a lot since then, and I honestly don't know if I made the right call. I don't have time to try every new way of working. What I'd really like is to ask someone who stuck with Figma how it's going for them. And I don't have anyone to ask.I suspect you're in the same boat. That's a strange position for a whole profession to be in. Everyone reinventing the same wheel, alone, at speed.What I've learned from running a communitySince July 2024 I've run Agency Academy, a community for agency owners and freelancers. We meet on a call every week and chat in Slack between calls.What surprised me is where the useful advice comes from. It's rarely me. It's another member who solved the exact problem last month.Unsurprisingly, for a room full of agency owners and freelancers, the topic that comes up most is winning new work. I thought I had a good handle on that in my own business. Then members started sharing what was working for them. Regular meetups with old clients. Hyper-specific SEO landing pages. Ideas I'd have dismissed as a waste of time if I'd read them in a blog post.But I didn't read them in a blog post. I heard them from people in the same position as me, who'd tried them and could tell me exactly how it went. That's very hard to ignore.That's the hallway conversation, except it happens every week, not once a year.So I'm starting one for in-house peopleIt's called UX Insiders, and I'm launching it in partnership with Smashing Magazine. It's for designers, researchers, UX leads and anyone championing UX inside an organization. Universities, charities, government and companies of every size.Here's how it works:A weekly call every Tuesday, 3:30 to 4:30pm UK time. Bring a problem, a question or a win.A private Slack for the questions that can't wait until Tuesday.Every call recorded with a summary, so you can catch up when you can't make it.It's in-house only, so people can talk openly about their organization without worrying who's listening. You apply first, just so I can check you work in-house. It takes about a minute.Founder places cost £49 a month billed annually (£588 a year) + VAT, for the first 25 members. That's less than most conference tickets before you've booked a train or a hotel, and it lasts all year. It can usually come out of the same training budget too, and you can pay by invoice.Nothing is charged until we launch on Tuesday 5 January. If fewer than 15 people sign up by Friday 11 December, it doesn't go ahead and nobody pays a penny.Apply for a founder placeRun an agency or freelance?Then Agency Academy is your place. Same format: a weekly call every Thursday and a Slack full of people who get it. Members even pass work to each other, which has a habit of paying for the ...
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    8 分
  • AI adoption is a people problem (again)

    AI adoption is a people problem (again)
    2026/10/08
    We are doing it all wrong… again.I'm getting serious déjà vu at the moment as I watch organizations attempt to rollout out AI, and to be honest, it is frustrating the shit out of me.Back in 2014, I wrote a book called Digital Adaptation where I talked about the shortcomings in how organizations were approaching digital transformation. This was the time when organizations were finally waking up to the fact that their website wasn't just another brochure and that digital had become essential to all elements of their operation.Digital transformation was never really a technology problem. The technology was the easy part, and most of it was already sitting there waiting to be used. The hard part was that users had changed how they behaved, and organizations were being dragged along behind them, trying to keep up with expectations set by Amazon and Google rather than by anyone in the boardroom. Catching up meant changing culture, processes, and the way people worked, which turns out to be a lot harder than buying a new content management system.AI adoption is the same problem all over again. Yes, there is a shiny new technology involved. But, the thing that will decide whether it works in your organization is people. Not just your users, but your staff too.We appointed a chief electricity officer once, tooIn the book I compared digital teams to the "chief electricity officer" that some companies appointed when electricity first arrived. It made sense for about five minutes, until everyone realized electricity was something every part of the business used and putting one person in charge of it was a bit daft.Today organizations are busy appointing Chief AI Officers and setting up central AI committees. I understand the impulse. It feels responsible, and it gives the board someone to point at when things go wrong. But, AI is going to end up woven into almost every job in the building, and no central team understands the daily work of finance, customer service, and the warehouse well enough to decide how AI should fit into each of them.IT built it, so staff ignored itWe saw what happens when that distance exists with digital. IT designed systems for people they had never met, and when those systems did not work, staff routed around them using their own off-the-books workarounds. The same thing is happening with AI, except the workaround is now a personal ChatGPT account on a phone under the desk.The CEO has had a revelation. Everyone else hasn't.However, not everything is the same. When I wrote the book, it was really aimed at helping digital teams convince management that change was required. Now the direction has flipped. Often it is the CEO who has become the convert, and the rest of the organization is lagging behind.I spoke to the CEO of a cargo airline recently who had binned a reporting project that had been "in production" forever without ever actually being finished. That was because, within days of trying AI, the CEO had working dashboards built with Claude. That is a nice illustration of another point from the book, by the way. Big projects that try to specify everything up front rarely finish, and building, testing, and iterating beats them almost every time.Understandably, that CEO is now evangelical. The problem is that a dashboard for the CEO means nothing to the person processing shipping paperwork. Everyone needs their own revelation about their own role, and you cannot hand somebody a revelation in an all-staff email.Why your staff are right to be nervousThis is where AI differs from digital, and where I see most rollouts fall apart, because your staff are nervous about AI, and understandably so.Is this about replacing me?AI makes every individual employee wonder whether the CEO's enthusiasm is about replacing them. When leadership announces an AI initiative, a lot of staff hear "we are working out how many of you we need." Now, you can reassure them as much as you want, but they have read the same headlines you have.What's in it for me?Then there is the question of what is in it for them. If staff are still going to be sitting at their desks for eight hours but are now expected to produce more, the honest answer is nothing. They take on the learning curve and the risk, and the organization keeps the benefit. I would be reluctant too.Decades of habit don't vanish overnightWe also underestimate what we are asking when we tell people to give up ways of working they have built over decades. That procedural knowledge is a big part of how people see themselves as good at their jobs, so being told a tool can now do it is hardly a neutral message.They are already using it anywayAnd on top of all that, with some people, adoption is already happening without management permission. Plenty of staff are using AI right now to make their lives easier. With these people, the job is less about getting approval and more about catching up with what they already do and making it safe.So what do you actually...
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    12 分
  • AI and decision-making: A better future awaits

    AI and decision-making: A better future awaits
    2026/09/24
    As we all know, one of the key characteristics of somebody working in any user focused field is a fascination with people. How they think, what motivates them, how they make decisions. But that fascination should not just be focused on others, we should apply it to ourselves too.It is easy to go through life oblivious to what we are doing and why we are doing it. But as we become more self-aware, we also begin to understand more how others are likely to respond too.As an early adopter of any new technology, I have learned that what I go through when wrapping my head around a new tool is likely to be the experience of others slightly further down the road.This is why I have been particularly interested in my own use of AI, especially relating to using AI to inform my decision making.The contradiction in how I use AII have noticed a contradiction in my behavior when using AI and I suspect it is one that many of us share.When I ask AI about a subject I know little about, I have a tendency to accept its recommendations and responses without question. Meanwhile, if I talk to it about user experience design or conversion optimization, I am much more critical of its responses.I recognize its limitations such as its lack of context, its inability to pick up on subtle signals, and its fixation on one particular approach to the problem. Equally, I am much more aware of its proclivity to agree with me and to be overly confident in its responses.The conclusion is obvious. If I am not impressed by AI's responses on a subject I know deeply, I should not place too much trust in its responses on a subject I know little about. There is no reason to assume it knows more about a subject I am unfamiliar with than a subject I am an expert in.Where AI falls short in the real worldFurthermore, this shows that in truth, AI's real world knowledge is still fairly limited. Sure, it might excel at every benchmark under the sun, but when it comes to the complexities of real world human decision making, it is relatively poor.It doesn't know when to challenge and when to encourage, or when to ask for more information and when to just take action. It cannot make judgment calls or handle internal politics.It is great at presenting options, but it lacks judgment in its recommendations. It can write a set of compelling cases for a subject, but it has no idea which will sway the decision maker.But it has taken me, and I suspect all of us, time to identify the edges of what AI can and cannot do. This has been true of every new technology we have ever invented as a species. We are always exploring the edges of what is possible.Why many people are having a rough time right nowSo, why do I raise this? Well, it is to encourage you that things will get better, because at the moment many people are not having a good time.Take for example a member of the Agency Academy who was telling us about a meeting she had recently where the client was validating everything she said with Claude. Or others who have had their work picked apart by an AI.Then, of course, there is the naive belief of some executives that AI allows them to avoid recruiting or even to lay people off.Heck, I am even feeling the impact myself. The amount of coaching I have been doing has plummeted because of AI. Why hire a coach when you can just ask AI?Why I am not worriedBut I am not really worried about that. I am not worried, because I know it will pass, and it already is beginning to.Like us early adopters, who have begun to identify the edges of what AI can do, everybody will eventually come to the same understanding.In time, people will begin to trust the judgment of AI less than they trust the experts. They will realize that AI is most effective when it is used by those experts.The desktop publishing lessonApologies if you have heard me tell this story before, but when I was at university, desktop publishing became a thing. There was panic among those of us studying graphic design because suddenly anybody could create a flyer, brochure or poster. Why hire a graphic designer when you can just do it yourself?And indeed, for a while it was tough, but in time people realized that although they had an amazing new tool, it didn't replace an expert. After one too many posters with Comic Sans and clip art, people realized that they needed a graphic designer.Be patient, and watch your own hypocrisySo I would encourage you to be patient as people work out the limitations of AI, and to be aware of your own hypocrisy. You cannot get annoyed at people for using AI rather than trusting you, when you then use AI in the same way in other fields rather than asking an expert.Don't get me wrong, people won't stop using AI, and I am not expecting my coaching levels to ever return to what they were before. But I am confident that in time people will realize that AI doesn't replace human judgment, understand the complexity of a work environment, or tell you when you are the problem, which trust ...
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    5 分
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