『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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  • Stop Copying Your Competitors

    Stop Copying Your Competitors
    2026/07/16

    One of the most dangerous mistakes I see people make with their websites is fixating on what the competition is doing.

    Don't get me wrong. Competitive analysis is a valuable part of any digital strategy, but there's a fine line between being aware of the competition's strengths and weaknesses and letting them dictate your own direction.

    The slow slide into copying

    That's the danger here. Very quickly you can go from a healthy interest in your competition to essentially copying them every step. And if you fall into that trap, the inevitable result is that you're always going to be one step behind them.

    Not that anybody ever sets out to copy their competition, but it's insidious and it can happen without you even noticing. It starts out with a competitive review and then quickly moves to "Well, none of our competitors do that," or "Everybody has this kind of information architecture, so we should too," and before you know it, you've created a clone of your competitors.

    It's not only about being one step behind

    But this isn't just the worry of being one step behind your competition. There are two other considerations here as well.

    First, you quickly find that in some sectors all the companies end up looking the same, as they all copy one another, and so your site does nothing to stand out from the crowd, making it largely redundant.

    Secondly, and in my opinion more importantly, there's a false premise behind the desire to copy the competition. That's the belief that your competitors somehow know how to do things properly and that we should learn from them. There's an assumption that they've done their research, that they've made good decisions, which in my experience is simply not true.

    But they're bigger than us, surely they know what they're doing?

    Now I know what you might be thinking. "Our competition is much bigger than us. They've got more resources and more time, so surely they're making good decisions based on real data, and we can learn from that." However, that's rarely the case. I've worked with many large enterprise organizations, and to be frank they're just as disorganized, inefficient and over-stretched as their much smaller competitors.

    You are not your competitors

    And then, of course, there's the fact that you are not your competitors. Although you may be very similar, every organization is unique and needs to approach the market in a different way. If your competitors really are bigger than you, then you're not going to have the same success adopting their tactics.

    The real reason we copy

    However, in many ways, all of this is a distraction from the real reason that most people want to copy their competition. That's the fact that you don't get in trouble for doing what your competitors have done. They give you a point of reference that you can point at and say, "Well, they did this and it obviously worked for them." Of course, the chances are that's not actually true, and the very feature you're copying could well be underperforming for your competitors. Nevertheless, you have a justification for your actions.

    Do your own research instead

    But copying the competition is not the only justification you can use. Far better is to carry out your own research into user needs and behavior and base your decisions on that. Even if that research is just desk research, carried out online using the help of AI deep research tools like Perplexity.

    And if you really need to see a particular approach working in the real world, then I'd encourage you to look outside of your sector, where there are ample opportunities for you to find ideas that could be truly innovative in your own.

    So the next time you find yourself tempted to reject an idea because a competitor hasn't adopted that approach, or to implement a feature you've seen on a competitor's website, I'd encourage you to think twice. Because the best that approach can ever deliver is mediocrity.
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    4 分
  • When Brand Guidelines Ruin Your Website (And How to Fix It)

    When Brand Guidelines Ruin Your Website (And How to Fix It)
    2026/07/02
    I have had enough. I've spent a good chunk of my career nodding politely while a brand guideline told me to do something daft. Excessive use of all caps, color combinations that are unreadable and a complete lack of visual hierarchy in typography. I have seen all kinds of horrors and for a long time I went along with it, because questioning the brand felt a bit like questioning someone's child. Lately, though, I've run out of patience. I keep meeting people who use their brand as a reason not to change anything. The logo is sacred. The colors are locked. The fonts came down from a mountain on stone tablets. So the brand ends up quietly undermining the business completely untouched, because nobody wants to open that particular Pandora's box. A brand is not a mood board Don't get me wrong, I think branding matters enormously. Get your visual identity right, and it can shape whether an organization sinks or swims. I'm not one of those people who thinks design is decoration you sprinkle on at the end. But a good brand has to earn its keep. It has to work in the real world, on a real phone, for a real person squinting at the screen in bright sunlight. Looking pretty isn't the job. Looking pretty while also being legible, scannable, and accessible is what matters. This is where a lot of brands fall down. Somebody picked a color palette in a quiet studio on a lovely big monitor. It looked gorgeous. Then it hit the website, where it has to convince a distracted human to actually do something, and it fell apart. The web is an afterthought, and it shows Most branding is now seen online. That's where the majority of people meet your brand. Yet most branding agencies I come across still don't approach the work with a digital-first mindset. Oh sure, they'll tell you they know about digital. They might even include the odd mock-up for a website or a social media platform. But they're not specialists in usability or conversion, and the gaps in their knowledge shine through. And they do zero testing, despite having access to all the same testing tools the rest of us in UX use every day. They design for the brochure, the business card, and the launch presentation. The website is treated as one more place to paste the logo. So you get text baked into images, type that's beautiful at poster size and unreadable on mobile, and a palette that looks confident on a wall and washed out on a screen. It's a slightly depressing way to build something that lives mostly online. What this actually costs you I've had two clients recently where the visual branding was genuinely not fit for purpose. In one case it failed on accessibility. It flunked the legal tests, sure, but it also let people down in a simpler way. They just couldn't read it easily. In the other, the brand was all over the place. It may well have started life as a decent identity, but years of inconsistent use had distorted it beyond recognition. Different rules on every page, no hierarchy, and nothing to guide the eye. The symptoms are always familiar. There are walls of capital letters, which have been shown to cut readability by as much as 20%. There are color combinations that make body copy hard work. There's no typographic hierarchy, so headlines and sections blur together. And there are no visual containers, so the whole page becomes a soup of elements with nothing pulling your attention anywhere. None of these feels like a disaster on its own. Stack them up and you get a page that quietly repels the very people you spent a fortune attracting. The bit that tends to land Clients don't always take my word for this, which is fair enough. So recently I ran two versions of a homepage through an AI attention tool. The current brand-compliant design, and a tweaked version of mine. The numbers were uncomfortable for the brand identity and the existing website. Clarity and focus both climbed by around 20% in the new version. Predicted engagement with the main call to action jumped by more than 80%. Same content, same offer. The only real difference was loosening the grip of a brand that was fighting the reader instead of helping them. That's the conversation I would encourage you to have. Not "is the brand sacred," but "is the brand costing us more than it benefits us." At some point you have to decide which matters more. Honoring a set of brand assets that were never designed for the web, or actually converting the people who land on your site. What to do about it You don't need to burn the brand to the ground. That's rarely the answer, and it's rarely on the table anyway. Start small. Look at where the brand and basic readability are openly at war. Look for restrictive layouts, poor image choice, low-contrast text, and headlines you can't tell apart from the body copy. Fix those first, and you'll usually claw back most of the benefit without getting into a complete rebranding exercise. While you're at it, do the testing those branding agencies never bother with. You ...
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    7 分
  • 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
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