Afleveringen
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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 boardDon'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 showsMost 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 youI'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 landClients 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 itYou 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 don't need a big research budget for it. A couple of cheap, practical checks will tell you most of what you need to know:
A semantic differential survey, to see whether the brand actually communicates the values you think it does rather than the ones you hope it does. Accessibility and readability testing, to see whether it genuinely works on a screen rather than just in a presentation.Then push for one slightly braver conversation. Ask whether the brand was ever really designed for the screen, or just retrofitted onto it. If the honest answer is the second one, you've got a case for a proper digital-first refresh rather than another round of polishing something that doesn't work.
And if you're the one clutching the brand guidelines like a holy relic, I'd gently suggest having a word with yourself. I've been that person. The brand is meant to serve the business, not the other way around. The moment it starts costing you customers, it's stopped doing its job, however nice it looks in a style guide.
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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 exploringWhen 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 caseNotice 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 no.
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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 winsI 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 wellEarly 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 lateThere'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 incentivesIt'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 complicitAnd 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 costThe trouble with an all-quick-wins strategy is that the damage compounds out of view.
The easy wins run outFor 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 touchedMeanwhile, 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 quietlyBut 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. Urgency timers. Exit-intent popups. Social proof badges. Micro-copy nudges. A polite little chatbot that won't go away. Each test won in isolation. The cumulative effect is a confused, faintly manipulative mess that erodes the trust we are theoretically there to build.
Nobody owns the whole picture, because nobody's job is the whole picture. Which is, when you think about it, a slightly concerning way to run the customer experience.
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What I'm trying to do insteadI am not suggesting anyone walk into a stakeholder meeting and declare that quick wins are dead. That's a great way to lose friends and influence nobody.
In practice, I've found a few framings work better.
1. Treat quick wins as proof of conceptsA homepage test isn't a strategy. It's a small piece of evidence that experimentation works, which is the foundation for asking to test something harder. Once you have that, you can start asking the bigger questions. Slowly. Politely. Ideally with biscuits.
2. Be honest about the ceilingBe honest, early and often, about the limited ceiling of small tests. Stakeholders can handle the news that a button-color test won't double revenue. They are grown adults. What they cannot handle, quite reasonably, is being sold a quiet fantasy and then watching it underdeliver in a steering committee six months later.
3. Bank the trust and plan the bigger workUse the trust that quick wins buy you to map out the bigger projects and actually agree timelines for them. People find it surprisingly easy to commit to a meaningful piece of work three or six months out. The trick is to get the commitment while the goodwill is fresh, not after the quick wins have run dry.
4. Challenge the metricsThis is the hardest one. Take aim at the metrics that produced the quick-win mindset in the first place. Lifetime value, repeat purchase rate, referrals. These are the metrics that reward long-term thinking.
I want to be honest about this one. Lifetime value is easy to name and a complete nightmare to track cleanly. You will need a rough proxy, like a six- or twelve-month value estimate, rather than the perfect formula nobody has ever actually built. The goal isn't perfection. It's getting one metric in the room that points the conversation somewhere other than this quarter.
The honest versionIf I'm being really honest about my own work, the engagements I'm proudest of are not the ones where I delivered a thick deck of green-ticked tests. They are the ones where, twelve months in, the client and I sat down and noticed we'd actually changed something structural. The returns flow. The way support tickets feed back into product. The post-purchase experience. The boring, expensive, slow stuff.
None of that came from a quick win. But quick wins bought the trust that bought the room to do the real work, which is, I think, the only honest case for them.
That's the version of CRO I'm trying to do more of. Not quick wins versus big bets. Just quick wins in their proper place, which is at the start of a much longer, much more interesting conversation.
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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 onThis 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 cracksSo 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 UXThis 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 disguiseThe 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.
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What this looks like in practiceA few starting points.
1. Change your KPIsIf 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 rate Repeat purchase rate Lifetime customer value2. Audit the post-purchase experienceMost 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:
Onboarding The first month of use The renewal flow The upgrade prompts3. Get involved in cross-functional workRetention sits across teams, so if you wait for someone to invite you to the retention conversation, you'll be waiting a long time. Volunteer for the onboarding redesign. Sit in on the customer success reviews. Make yourself useful where the conversations are actually happening.
A flag worth plantingAcquisition will always be glamorous. There's a reason it gets the budget and the attention. But it's also crowded. Marketers, performance specialists, growth teams, ad platforms, they all already own a piece of it. Retention is sitting there, largely unclaimed, and it happens to be where most of the long-term revenue actually comes from.
That feels like a reasonable place for UX to plant its flag.
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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 aboutI’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 problemBut 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 parallelThis 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 realThere’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 startIf 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 whether we prepare for it or not. The people who handle it best will be the ones who start thinking like managers now.
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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 realA 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 ideaThe 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 coversA 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 surveyAn 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 move us forward?”
This shifts the audit from a performance review to a diagnostic tool. Diagnostics are much easier to have productive conversations about.
Where to startIt’s worth being honest about one thing before you dive in: this isn’t something you can do half-heartedly. A UX maturity audit that gets treated as a side project, or squeezed into the gaps between real work, tends to produce polite summaries that nobody acts on. It needs management buy-in from the outset, not as an afterthought once the findings are ready.
There’s also a strong argument for bringing in someone external to run it. Not because your internal team lacks the ability, but because independence matters here. People will say different things to an outsider. And an external reviewer is less likely to be seen as someone with a stake in the outcome, which means their conclusions carry more weight when they land on a senior leader’s desk.
The right person for this isn’t someone who will sit in judgment of the UX team’s output. The question isn’t whether the work is good. The question is whether the organization has created the conditions for good work to be possible. That’s a different kind of assessment, and it requires someone who understands enough about how UX actually functions to read the environment accurately rather than just counting deliverables.
The question isn’t whether the work is good. The question is whether the organization has created the conditions for good work to be possible.
Given where things are right now, that feels like a fairly important prerequisite.
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I've spent a lot of years arguing that most organizations have the wrong mental model of what a UX team is for.
In the vast majority of organizations, UX is dramatically underinvested. You have one UX person, or at most a small team, supporting an organization with dozens of developers, product managers, and business analysts. Or a small digital team made up of a variety of disciplines and generalists, supposed to raise the quality of every digital touchpoint across an organization of several thousand.
In that environment, expecting UX to own and shape the entire user experience is not a strategy. It is wishful thinking dressed up as one.
The only approach that actually makes sense is democratization. Instead of trying to do everything yourselves, your job is to spread the capability: set the standards, train people, and give everyone who touches digital the knowledge and tools to apply UX best practice on their own.
I've written about this for years, and most UX professionals I talk to agree with the principle. The problem has always been the execution.
The playbook was the best answer we hadFor the past decade or so, the most sensible response to this challenge has been the digital playbook.
A playbook, in this context, is a collection of policies, principles, standard operating procedures, and training material that documents how the organization should approach digital work. Done well, it does several things at once: it educates people who don't have a UX background, it standardizes how work gets done, and it gives the UX or digital team something to point at when a stakeholder wants to skip testing or cram twelve things onto a homepage.
The UK Government Digital Service manual is probably the best public example of this. Comprehensive, well-structured, and genuinely useful. It also took a significant amount of work to produce, and presumably even more work to get people to actually use.
The UK Government Digital Service Manual is probably the best example of a digital playbook.
That last part is the problem with most playbooks. They ask a lot of the people you want to reach. If a product manager wants to run a quick survey to inform a decision, they now need to find the right section of the playbook, absorb methodology they've never thought about before, learn to apply it to their specific situation, and avoid the dozen ways this kind of thing typically goes wrong. That is a reasonable request if surveys are their job. It is a significant ask if they have three other priorities and a deadline on Friday.
The playbook shifts the burden of UX knowledge from the UX team onto everyone else. In theory, fine. In practice, people are busy, and busy people take shortcuts.
I say this having spent years advocating for playbooks, so make of that what you will.
What AI changes about this pictureI've been building out a library of AI skills for my own consulting practice over the past year or so, and somewhere along the way I realized these are doing the same job as a playbook, just in a radically different form.
An AI skill, if you haven't come across the term, is a reusable standard operating procedure that an AI can follow on demand. You write it once, document the process in enough detail that an AI can apply it reliably, and from that point on anyone can use it without needing to understand the underlying methodology.
This is what makes them interesting at an organizational level. A well-designed AI skills library doesn't ask your product manager to read the playbook before running a survey. It lets them say, "I need to design a survey to find out why users are dropping off at checkout," and have an AI walk them through the process, applying your organization's standards as it goes. The best practice is embedded in the skill. The person using it doesn't need to have absorbed it first.
That is a qualitatively different proposition from anything a static playbook can offer.
What an organizational AI skills library actually looks likeThe specific skills worth building will vary depending on the organization. But for a UX or digital team trying to extend their influence, the candidates tend to cluster around the tasks that non-specialists most often get wrong.
Survey design is an obvious one. Writing questions that don't inadvertently bias the answers is harder than it looks, and most people who aren't researchers have no idea how their phrasing is leading respondents astray. A skill that guides someone through question design, flags leading language, and checks for common structural problems would save a lot of quietly-useless survey data from being collected.
Prototype testing is another. The basics of a usability test, what to observe, what to ask, how to avoid putting words in a participant's mouth, are genuinely learnable. The problem is that someone needs to learn them before running the test, not during it.
You could build skills for
writing user stories that capture real intent rather than implementation detail. conducting a heuristic review of an interface. analyzing the results of an A/B test without drawing confident conclusions from a sample size of 40. assessing whether a proposed feature maps to an actual user need or is just something that sounded good in a meeting.Each of these represents expertise that currently lives in the heads of a few specialists and gets applied only when those specialists have capacity and are directly involved. An AI skills library changes that dynamic. The expertise is no longer gated by headcount or availability. It is available whenever someone in the organization needs it, in a form they can actually use.
The compounding effectBuilding a skills library at an organizational level is different from building one for yourself. You're not just creating tools that save you time. You're creating tools that let anyone in the organization apply a consistent standard, without needing to be a specialist first. The UX team's influence is no longer bounded by their headcount.
And this is still relatively early days. Most organizations haven't started thinking about AI skills at that level. The teams that build these libraries now will have a head start that gets harder to close over time.
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Running an agency or working freelance? This is worth thinking about for your own practice too. A well-built skills library makes your service more consistent, helps you bring junior team members up to speed faster, and gives clients a reason to see you as something more than a pair of hands.
If this is the kind of thing you'd like to work through alongside other freelancers and agency owners, my Agency Academy is probably the right place. It's a group coaching community where we get into exactly these kinds of challenges. £28 a month, cancel whenever.
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Where to startIf you're thinking about this for your own organization, the most practical starting point is to identify the five tasks that non-specialists most often get wrong, and that cause the most friction or quality problems when they do.
For each one, document how it should actually be done, in as much detail as you can. What does the process involve? What are the most common errors? What does good output look like? Then work with an AI to turn that documentation into a skill, test it against real examples, and refine it based on what it gets wrong. The goal isn't perfection on the first pass. The goal is something good enough to use, that improves each time you use it.
That is a manageable starting point, and one that tends to produce visible results quickly enough that people want to keep going.
If you're working through this and would like a thinking partner, or if your organization is seriously considering building out an AI skills library and wants some help thinking through what that looks like, I'd genuinely enjoy that conversation. Book some time here and let's explore it.
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TL;DR: AI skills are reusable, chainable instructions that tell AI exactly how to complete a specific task your way. Building your own library of them now gives you a compounding advantage that will only grow over time. This post explains what they are, why they matter, and how to start building yours.
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I was halfway through writing an article about generic website copy when something uncomfortable occurred to me. I should probably check my own website.
My headline at the time read: "Helping You and Your Users Succeed."
On the face of it, that doesn't sound terrible. It's positive, it's benefit-focused, and it sounds like exactly the kind of thing a UX consultant should say. The problem is that it also sounds like exactly the kind of thing every other UX consultant says. And their accountant. And possibly even their office cleaner!
Generic copy is one of the most common problems I encounter doing conversion rate optimization work, and like a doctor who ignores their own symptoms, I had been sitting on a headline that failed every test I apply to client websites. So let's talk about how to spot problems and how to fix them.
Three Questions That Will Expose Weak CopyWhen I'm reviewing website copy with clients, I use 3 simple questions to find out whether a value proposition is doing any real work.
Could this statement apply to other products or services?A value proposition should be specific enough that it only makes sense in your context. “Help you and your users succeed” could work just as well on a SaaS website or on the site of a user researcher. If it can work on a different kind of website, it isn't a proposition at all. It's just a sentence.
Could a competitor make this claim?If your direct competitors could copy-paste your headline and it would work just as well for them, it isn't differentiating you. It's just noise.
Would the opposite statement be ridiculous?This is my favorite test, because it exposes just how empty a claim can be. If no company would ever say "We're helping your users fail" or "We provide terrible customer service," then the positive version isn't telling anyone anything. You're essentially saying "We are not actively terrible," which is not much of a selling point.
Apply those 3 questions to my old headline. "Helping You and Your Users Succeed."
Could it apply to other services? Absolutely. A web developer, a copywriter, and a business coach could all put it on their homepage without anyone raising an eyebrow. Could competitors claim it? Every UX consultant on the planet already does. Would the opposite be valid? No company would ever say "Helping You and Your Users Fail," which means the positive version communicates precisely nothing.It fails all 3 tests, which was enough to make me start over.
Being Specific Is Harder Than It SoundsThe fix sounds simple. Just be more specific. But that's where most people get stuck, because specificity requires you to actually commit to a position. Vague copy is often a symptom of vague thinking about what you offer and why it matters, and confronting that is a bit uncomfortable.
In my case, getting specific meant being honest about what I actually do and why it's different. I work across 3 disciplines that most consultants treat as entirely separate.
Conversion rate optimization is about improving customer acquisition. UX strategy is about improving retention once customers arrive. Design leadership is about getting the organizational buy-in to implement changes at all.Most consultants offer one of those. I work across all three.
That led to a new headline: "Your Digital Funnel Leaks in 3 Ways. I Fix Them All."
It passes the first 2 tests cleanly. It couldn't apply to a web developer or a copywriter, and a pure CRO specialist or a pure UX designer couldn't honestly claim it.
The third test is more nuanced. If you literally flip it, "Your digital funnel works perfectly, and I'll make it worse" is clearly absurd. But a specialist could legitimately say "Your funnel leaks in one place, and that's what I fix," which is a valid positioning rather than a ridiculous one.
That's worth being aware of: the third test is good at catching empty aspirational claims, but specific copy can still be outflanked by variations rather than direct opposites. The real differentiating work happens in tests 1 and 2.
Back Up Your Claims With EvidenceSpecificity is a strong start, but evidence makes claims even harder to ignore. The more proof you can attach to a statement, the more credible it becomes.
"We provide great customer service" is vague. "Our clients rate us 4.9 out of 5 for responsiveness" is specific and verifiable. "We're experienced professionals" is empty. "We've delivered over 200 UX audits for organizations ranging from NHS trusts to e-commerce startups" gives the reader something real to hold onto.
I won't pretend I always have perfect statistics to hand. Often I don't, and in those cases I try to ground claims in specific outcomes or named examples rather than numbers. But any evidence is better than a confident assertion with nothing behind it.
Try This on Your Own HomepagePull up your website's homepage right now and read your headline and opening paragraph. Then apply those 3 questions. If your copy could live comfortably on a competitor's site, or would work equally well for a plumber and a UX consultant, it's time to be more specific about what you actually do and who you actually do it for.
The good news is that this doesn't have to take as long as you might expect, especially if you work alongside an AI tool. Give it the 3 questions from this newsletter, tell it what you actually do and who you do it for, and ask it to generate a dozen variations. It will produce far more options than you'd come up with alone, and far faster. Your job then is to apply the tests and pick the one that passes. The thinking is yours. The writing of dozens of variations doesn't have to be.
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If you work in conversion optimization, user experience design, or design leadership, you probably think of these as separate disciplines. Different skill sets, different tools, different conversations.
But treating them as separate is precisely what limits your impact.
These three areas are deeply interconnected, and they build on top of one another in ways that make each more effective. If you're only working in one of these areas without considering the others, you're solving the wrong problems, or at best, only solving part of the right problem.
I know this because my work spans all three, which makes me sound like I'm either a confused generalist or cobbling together random consulting gigs.
People often ask what I actually do, because it doesn't fit neatly into a single box. When I list the three areas, I can see the confusion on their faces. I sometimes feel like that conspiracy theorist from the meme, standing in front of a pin board covered in red string, ranting about how it's all connected.
But it is all connected. And if you work in any of these fields, you should be taking this holistic, interconnected approach as well.
Let me walk you through how this actually works in practice, and why you should be thinking this way too.
It starts with conversionUltimately, the goal of almost every project I take on is to improve a company's conversion rate through their website or app. Sometimes that means acquiring new customers, sometimes it means retaining existing ones, but the end goal is always the same: make the company more profitable through digital channels.
In straightforward cases, I can achieve that with traditional conversion optimization techniques:
A/B testingInterface design improvementsRefined copy and messagingThese are the tools you'd expect from anyone doing CRO work, and often they're enough to move the needle.
But more often than I'd like to admit, those surface-level fixes aren't sufficient. The conversion problem runs deeper than a poorly worded call-to-action or a confusing checkout flow. When that happens, I need to look at the entire user experience, which means examining usability issues, carrying out proper user research, mapping out all the other touchpoints where customers interact with the brand, and understanding the full journey they're on.
That's where the user experience design and strategy work comes into play.
When UX goes beyond the screenHowever, sometimes even comprehensive user experience work isn't enough, because the real problems exist beyond the screen entirely.
I once worked with a company that sold frozen ready meals to elderly customers. They wanted me to improve their website conversion rates, which seemed like a straightforward brief. We carried out user research and discovered that the elderly audience was nervous about multiple aspects of the experience, none of which had anything to do with the website design itself:
Entering credit card details online because of fraud and scamsA strange delivery driver they didn't know turning up at their houseUnloading heavy trays of frozen products into their freezersNow, in most companies, a user experience designer would hit a wall at this point. You can't redesign a website to make someone feel safer about delivery drivers or less anxious about lifting heavy boxes. The best you could do would be to make the existing service as palatable as possible through clever messaging and reassurance copy.
But in a company with a strong culture of design leadership, a UX designer can be instrumental in shaping solutions to these kinds of problems. Solutions that go way beyond polishing existing products to fundamentally reshaping the service itself.
This is where the design leadership coaching aspect of my work becomes essential.
Design leadership changes what's possibleIn that frozen meal company, we didn't just optimize the website. We fundamentally changed the offering based on what we learned from users:
Customers got the same delivery driver every time, and when that wasn't possible, they'd be notified in advance and shown a photo of their driverAll drivers were police-checked so customers could feel confident about safetyThe driver didn't just dump the products and leave but actually unpacked everything into the customer's freezerCustomers could even reorder directly from their driver if they didn't want to use the website and enter card details onlineThe user experience shaped the product, and by extension, delivered the improved conversion rate the client originally asked for.
You can see how these three areas that appear unrelated are actually deeply entwined. This interconnected approach is much more representative of what real user experience design should be about, rather than just pushing pixels around a screen.
What this means for your workIf you're working in conversion optimization: Start asking deeper questions about the user experience.If you're doing UX work: Understand how it connects to business outcomes and conversion.If you're in design leadership: Recognize that your influence should extend beyond the screen to reshape products and services based on what users actually need.Because at the end of the day, conversion optimization teaches you what matters to the business, user experience design teaches you what matters to customers, and design leadership gives you the organizational influence to actually do something meaningful about both.
And once you start seeing those connections, you can't unsee them.
If you're thinking about how to bring these different elements together in your own work, drop me an email. I'm always happy to chat it through.
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I have been thinking a lot about AI lately, and specifically about whether we should be worried about our over-reliance on it. Because if I am being completely honest with myself, I use AI for absolutely everything now. Every email that comes in gets pasted into Claude for analysis. Every project brief gets discussed with it. Every piece of writing gets shaped by it. When Claude goes down, my entire workflow grinds to a halt.
So should I be worried about this dependency? Should you?
After spending the last few weeks working through this question, I have landed somewhere that might be useful to share. Because I think the conversation about AI is happening right now in organizations everywhere, and the dividing line between those who embrace it and those who resist it matters more than most people realize.
The dependency questionWhen I first noticed how reliant I had become on AI, my immediate reaction was concern. I started thinking about all the things that could go wrong. What if Claude disappeared tomorrow? What if I was outsourcing too much of my thinking? What if I was losing critical skills?
But then I started looking at all the other dependencies in my working life:
If the internet goes down, work stopsIf the power goes off, my life stops.If AWS servers fail (which seems to happen every other week), half the tools I rely on become uselessIf Figma stops working, design work haltsJust one more dependency
We have built our entire professional lives on top of dependencies we barely think about anymore. AI is just one more in that stack.
The question is not really whether we should be dependent on it, because that ship has already sailed for most of us. The question is what kind of dependency we are building.
The thinking questionThe more interesting concern for me is whether AI makes us stop thinking. I have heard this worry from a lot of people, and I understand where it comes from. Because when you watch someone paste a problem into ChatGPT and blindly implement whatever comes back, it does look like they have outsourced their brain.
But I think this misunderstands what most of us are actually doing with AI.
Three layers of thinking
There are different levels of thinking that happen in any given day:
Strategic thinking about project direction, what problems need solving, what approach makes senseAnalytical thinking about whether an idea is sound, whether evidence supports a conclusion, whether a design solves the actual problemMundane thinking about how to word an email, how to structure a document, how to format a proposalAI as a thinking partner
What I have found is that AI handles that bottom layer beautifully. When a client sends me a long rambling email with five different questions buried in three paragraphs of context, I no longer spend mental energy untangling it. I paste it into Claude and say, "Summarize the key questions here." Then I think about my answers. I tell Claude what I think about each point. Sometimes I ask for its perspective on one or two where I am genuinely uncertain, not because I cannot think through it myself, but because having a sounding board helps me think better.
When I worked in an agency, I had colleagues for this. I would turn to Marcus or Chris and say, "What do you think about this?" I do not have that anymore. AI fills that gap. It does not replace my thinking. It helps me think more clearly by taking away the low-level cognitive load and giving me something to bounce ideas against.
The value questionWhere this gets really interesting is in what it lets me deliver to clients.
The landing page playbook example
I worked on a project recently where a client wanted to improve the conversion rate of their landing pages. They had a budget that, in the past, would have stretched to maybe three or four sample landing pages and a conversation about why I built them that way. That would have been useful, but limited. They would have had some examples to work from, but not much guidance on how to replicate the approach themselves.
With AI, I was able to create an entire playbook. Detailed guidelines for every component. Design principles explained with examples. A system they could use again and again. I delivered probably four times the value in about a third of the time it would have taken me before. The strategic thinking was all mine. The understanding of what makes landing pages convert came from 30 years of doing this work. But the documentation, the articulation, the packaging of that knowledge into something comprehensive and usable came from working with AI.
Why clients still need expertise
Most of my clients will not do this work themselves, even with AI:
They do not know what questions to askThey do not have the pattern recognition that comes from seeing hundreds of projectsThey cannot evaluate whether the output is actually good or just sounds convincingThey haven’t the time to review and iterate upon the output to improve things.That is what they are paying me for. AI does not replace that expertise. It amplifies what I can do with it.
The real conversationI think what bothers me most about the anti-AI sentiment I see is that it misses the point. People post about "AI slop" and declare they are "AI-free" as if that is some kind of badge of honor.
The conversation should not be about whether to use AI. That question has already been answered by the market. The conversation should be about how to use it well. How to maintain the strategic thinking while leveraging the tool. How to keep the human insight while letting the machine handle the grunt work. How to deliver more value in less time without sacrificing quality.
Because in my experience, the people who need UX professionals are not suddenly going to do it themselves just because AI exists. They still do not have the time. They still do not know what questions to ask. They still cannot evaluate quality. What changes is that the UX professionals who embrace AI can deliver significantly more value than those who resist it.
The symbiosis advantage
I am not threatened by AI. I am empowered by it:
It lets me hold far more complexity in my head than I could beforeIt lets me process larger amounts of informationIt lets me deliver more refined, more thorough, more valuable workAll the things AI does badly (high-level strategy, judging quality, understanding human needs, driving projects forward) are exactly the things clients need me for.
So I am leaning into this dependency. Deliberately. Because it allows me to deliver more value in less time. My clients get better work, delivered faster, for the same investment. That is why I am in business. AI has become another tool in my arsenal, like Figma or analytics platforms or any of the other things I rely on to do my job well.
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I had a conversation recently with a web team at a college who were stuck in a painfully familiar trap. They had a sprawling, chaotic website that had grown like an untended garden over the years. They knew it was letting users down. They had plenty of ideas for how to make it better. And yet, every time they tried to improve things, they hit a wall.
Sound familiar? I suspect it might.
The team had been there for years, and they had developed what I call "institutional scar tissue." Every suggestion was met with an internal voice saying "we tried that once and it didn't work" or "I don't have the power to change that." They had been worn down by years of small defeats until the only option that felt possible was incremental improvement to what already existed.
And incremental improvement, when applied to something fundamentally broken, is a bit like repainting a house with a crumbling foundation. Sure, it looks nicer from the street, but you're still one bad storm away from serious structural failure.
The trap of fixing what existsWhen you try to fix an existing website, you inherit all the reasons it became broken in the first place. Every stakeholder who fought for their pet page is still there. Every "but we've always had that section" is still lurking. Every technical limitation that forced an awkward compromise is still constraining your options.
Worse, you're starting from a position of defense. You have to justify why something should be removed or changed. The burden of proof is on you to explain why the current state is wrong, rather than on stakeholders to explain why their content deserves to exist.
This is exhausting work. And it rarely produces genuinely transformative results.
Wait, haven't I said the opposite?Now, if you've been reading my stuff for a while, you might be thinking "hang on, Paul. Haven't you spent years telling people not to do periodic website redesigns?" And you'd be right. I have. I've written at length about how the boom-bust cycle of website redesigns is damaging. How you end up with a shiny new site that slowly decays until someone throws a tantrum and the whole thing gets rebuilt from scratch.
Incremental improvement is almost always the better path. Small, continuous changes based on real user data. No big-bang launches. No throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
So why am I now suggesting we do exactly what I've warned against?
Because sometimes the rot runs too deep. When you're dealing with thousands of pages of redundant, outdated, and trivial content, when every attempt at incremental change gets blocked by institutional politics, when the team has been so beaten down that they can't imagine anything better, you need a different approach. Not a traditional redesign where you migrate all the old problems into a new template. Something more radical.
You need to imagine what you would build if you were starting from nothing.
Start from nothingThe approach I suggested to this team was counterintuitive: stop trying to fix the website. Instead, imagine you're building from scratch.
If you were launching this college's online presence tomorrow with no existing site, what would you build? What are the actual tasks people need to accomplish? What questions do they have at each stage of their journey? Strip away all the accumulated cruft and think about what a prospective student genuinely needs.
For a college focused on student recruitment, it might be shockingly simple. Someone needs to find a course, understand if they can afford it, and apply. That's perhaps 200 pages of genuinely useful content. Not the thousands that currently exist.
Frame it as a thought experimentDon't announce that you're redesigning the website. That triggers immediate defensiveness. Every stakeholder starts worrying about their territory. Before you've finished your sentence, half the room is already composing their objection.
Instead, frame the whole exercise as a thought experiment. "We're not proposing anything. We're just imagining what perfect could look like. What would we build if we had no constraints? If we were starting fresh tomorrow?"
This framing is disarming. People stop defending and start dreaming. They can engage with the vision without feeling threatened, because it's explicitly hypothetical. No one's being asked to commit to anything yet. It's like asking someone what they'd do if they won the lottery. They'll tell you all sorts of things they'd never admit to wanting otherwise.
Make it a collective visionBut, don't do this thought experiment alone.
Bring in a few trusted people from other departments early in the process. Ask them what excites them about what better could look like. Let them shape the vision alongside you.
When you do this, something important shifts. It stops being "the web team's idea" and becomes a collective vision. Those collaborators become invested. They'll defend it in meetings you're not in. They'll sell it to their own teams. And if one of those collaborators happens to be a senior executive, you've just gained a powerful champion who can clear obstacles you couldn't even see.
Think of it like rolling a boulder down a hill. The hardest part is getting it moving at all. You're pushing and straining and it barely budges. But once you've got a few people pushing with you, momentum builds. Energy creates more energy. Excitement spreads. What started as a small team's thought experiment becomes something the whole organization wants to see happen.
Turn it into a prototypeThe output of all this imagining should be something tangible. Not a document. Documents don't generate momentum. Prototypes do.
You can write the most beautifully reasoned strategy document in the world, and everyone who reads it will walk away with a slightly different interpretation of what it actually means. But show people a clickable prototype where they can move through the experience from beginning to end, and suddenly everyone is on the same page. There's no ambiguity. They can see it, click through it, and imagine themselves using it.
I often recommend teams create what I call a "shiny thing." This is a functional prototype of the ideal experience, built quickly and without worrying about all the practical constraints. It's not meant to be launched. It's meant to excite.
The UK Government Digital Service did exactly this when they were trying to transform government websites. They got a small budget to build a prototype of what better could look like, ignoring all the legacy systems and political constraints. When they published it and got public feedback, everyone loved it. That enthusiasm created the momentum to push through all the obstacles that had previously seemed insurmountable.
Watch the burden of proof flipOnce you've got people excited about this collective vision, something interesting happens. You flip the burden of proof. Anyone who objects is now the one ruining the party.
"Our CMS can't support that" stops being a conversation-ender and becomes a question: why not? Shouldn't our systems be flexible enough to deliver what users actually need? "But we've always had it" no longer works as an argument either. If it doesn't serve the vision everyone now wants, it's the thing that needs justifying.
Remember COVID? Working from home was impossible before 2020. Absolutely out of the question. IT couldn't support it, security was a nightmare, productivity would collapse. Then suddenly it wasn't impossible at all, because there was enough momentum and desire to make it happen. Organizations can change dramatically when they really want to. Your job is to make them want to.
Separate everythingOne final piece of advice: keep your projects small and separate.
When you're trying to create a new vision, scope creep is your enemy. Someone will point out that you also need to consider existing students. Someone else will mention that the CMS is being replaced next year. Another person will want to tie in the new CRM system. Before you know it, your focused vision has become a massive, unwieldy initiative that will take years and satisfy no one.
When people try to expand the scope, don't fight them. Simply agree that their concern is important and deserves its own dedicated project. "You're absolutely right, existing student retention deserves as much attention as recruitment. We'll run that as a separate project and link the two together later."
This way, you can actually make progress on one thing instead of being paralyzed by trying to solve everything at once. Perfect is the enemy of good, and "comprehensive" is the enemy of "actually getting shipped."
Breaking freeIf you're stuck maintaining a website that feels like a lost cause, I'd encourage you to try this approach. Stop asking "how do we fix this?" and start asking "what would we build if we were starting fresh?"
Map out what users actually need. Create a prototype of that ideal experience. Get stakeholders excited about the vision. Then, and only then, start figuring out how to make it real.
The constraints that feel immovable today might prove surprisingly flexible once people genuinely want what you're proposing. The trick is giving them something worth wanting.
If you're an in-house digital leader trying to drive this kind of change and finding the organizational politics overwhelming, I offer one-to-one coaching to help you build influence and lead with more confidence. Sometimes having someone in your corner who has navigated these waters before makes all the difference.
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I had a client come to me recently with a familiar problem. Their landing pages were converting at less than 1%, and the industry standard for their sector sits somewhere between 2% and 5%. Not great.
Their first instinct was to find someone who could sweep in, move some buttons around, tweak a few headlines, and magically fix everything. I've seen this expectation so many times now that I've lost count. And I understand the appeal. A quick fix sounds wonderful when your numbers look that bad.
But if you want serious improvements to your conversion rate, shuffling UI elements around will only scratch the surface. It's like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic while ignoring the rather sizeable hole in the hull.
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The Three Layers of Conversion OptimizationI think of effective conversion work as having three distinct layers, and UI changes sit right at the bottom.
Layer 1: User InterfaceYes, the order and presentation of information matters. Yes, you can make improvements here. But this level has the smallest overall impact on conversion. It's where most agencies focus because it's visible and easy to point to, but it rarely moves the needle in a meaningful way.
Layer 2: ContentThis is where things start to get more substantial. You simply cannot improve conversion without addressing the content on your pages.
When I mention this to clients, I often hear, "But we don't produce the content. That's the content team." And therein lies the problem. Content teams are usually subject matter experts, not web writers. They understand their products inside out, but they don't necessarily understand how people scan web pages. They tend to focus on what the company wants to say rather than what the audience actually wants to know.
Good conversion-focused content needs to:
Address your users' pain points and the goals they want to achieveExplain the benefits you provide and how your features deliver themHandle objections before they become reasons to leaveBuild trust through social proof, case studies, awards, and certificationsWithout these elements, no amount of button-moving will save you.
Layer 3: Organizational IssuesThis is the deepest and often most impactful layer, and it's also the hardest to fix because it goes beyond the website entirely.
Organizational constraints regularly damage conversion rates in ways that are invisible from the outside.
Legal requirements might force your copy to read like a compliance document.Your forms might have twelve fields because someone in sales wants to "validate" every inquiry.Your product offering might genuinely be wrong for your audience.Or your advertising might be driving bottom-of-funnel users to top-of-funnel pages (or vice versa).These are problems that no UI optimization can solve. They require conversations with stakeholders, changes to internal processes, and sometimes difficult decisions about how the business operates.
You Can't Just Set and ForgetEven after you've addressed all three layers, you cannot just design your landing pages and walk away. Effective conversion optimization requires an ongoing program of continuous A/B testing and user research.
And yet, I regularly encounter clients who want all of this but refuse to let me anywhere near their customers. Surveys? Too intrusive. User interviews? What if we upset someone? It's a bit like asking a doctor to diagnose you while refusing to let them take your temperature. If you want to understand what your users need, you have to actually talk to them. There's no way around it.
And yes, I know what you're thinking. Can't we just A/B test our way to better results? A/B testing matters, but it can only tell you what works and what doesn't. It gives you no insight into why. And it certainly doesn't give you inspiration for what's worth trying in the first place. You need to talk to actual humans to get that.
The vast majority of meaningful improvements come from continual testing and iteration, not from some expert arriving, waving a magic wand, and disappearing into the sunset. When clients come to me wanting a quick fix, what they actually need is a long-term commitment to understanding their users and optimizing systematically.
So if you're struggling with conversion, by all means start with the UI. But don't stop there. Look at your content. Look at your organization. And commit to the ongoing work of understanding what your users actually need.
Because moving buttons around might feel productive, but it's rarely where the real improvements are hiding.
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If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you'll have noticed I tend to focus on the big-picture stuff: organizational change, building design culture, getting stakeholder buy-in. This week I'm doing something different and getting into the weeds on generative imagery, a tool that's become part of my daily workflow. I'm genuinely curious whether you prefer the strategic content, the practical how-to pieces, or a mix of both. Hit reply and let me know.
Generative imagery is quickly becoming an essential tool in the modern designer's toolkit. Whether you're a UI designer crafting interfaces, a UX designer building prototypes, or a marketer creating campaign visuals, the ability to generate exactly the image you need (rather than settling for whatever stock libraries happen to have) is genuinely useful.
The Ethical DimensionThere's an ethical dimension here that makes me uncomfortable. Using generative imagery does, in theory, take work away from illustrators and photographers. I don't love that. But I also recognize that this is a pattern we've seen throughout history. Technology has consistently made certain professions more niche rather than making them disappear entirely. Blacksmiths still exist. Vinyl records still sell. And I suspect custom photography and illustration will follow the same path, becoming more specialized rather than vanishing completely.
Besides, if we're being realistic, most of us weren't commissioning custom photography for every project anyway. We were pulling images from stock libraries, and I can't say I'll miss spending 45 minutes searching for a photo that almost works but has the person looking in the wrong direction.
So with that acknowledged, let's get into the practical side of things.
When to Avoid Generative ImageryBefore diving into how to use these tools well, it's worth noting when you shouldn't use them at all. Generative imagery has no place when you need to represent real people or real events. If you're showing your actual team, documenting a real conference, or depicting genuine customer stories, you need real photography. Anything else would be misleading, and your audience will likely spot it anyway.
Why It Beats Stock LibrariesFor everything else, though, generative imagery offers some serious advantages over traditional stock. You can get exactly the pose you want, in exactly the style you need, matching your specific color palette. No more "this photo would be perfect if only the person was looking left instead of right" compromises.
This matters more than you might think. Research suggests that users form initial impressions of a website in roughly 50 milliseconds. That's not enough time to read anything. Those snap judgments are based almost entirely on imagery, layout, color, and typography. The right image doesn't just look nice; it shapes how users feel about your entire site before they've processed a single word.
Imagery also gives you a powerful tool for directing attention. A well-chosen image can guide users toward your key content or call to action in ways that feel natural rather than pushy.
The right image composition can draw attention to critical calls to action.
Copyright and Commercial UseBefore you start generating images for client work, you need to understand the legal landscape. And yes, it's a bit murky.
The short version: most major AI image generators allow commercial use of the images you create, but the terms vary. Midjourney allows commercial use for paid subscribers. Adobe Firefly positions itself as "commercially safe" because it was trained on licensed content and Adobe Stock images. Google's Nano Banana Pro (accessible through Gemini) also permits commercial use.
The murkier issue is around training data. Several ongoing lawsuits are challenging whether AI companies had the right to train their models on copyrighted images in the first place. These cases haven't been resolved yet, and depending on how they play out, the landscape could shift.
For now, my practical advice is this: use reputable tools with clear commercial terms, avoid generating images that deliberately mimic a specific artist's recognizable style, and keep an eye on how the legal situation develops. For most standard commercial work (website imagery, marketing materials, UI mockups), you should be fine.
Choosing the Right Tool: Style vs. InstructionsWhen selecting which AI model to use, you're essentially balancing two considerations: stylistic output and instructional accuracy.
Stylistic OutputEvery model has its own aesthetic fingerprint. No matter how specific your prompts are, Midjourney images have a certain look, and Nano Banana images have a different one. You need to find a model whose default aesthetic works for your project.
Instructional AccuracyThe other consideration is how well the model follows detailed instructions. If you need a specific composition (person on the left, looking right, holding a coffee cup, with a window behind them), some models handle that brilliantly while others will give you something that vaguely resembles your request but took creative liberties you didn't ask for.
Use Multiple ModulesThe frustrating reality is that you rarely get both. The models with the most pleasing aesthetics tend to be worse at following precise instructions, and vice versa.
This is why I often move between multiple models in a single workflow. I'll generate the initial image in Midjourney to get an aesthetic I like, then bring that image into Nano Banana Pro as a reference and use its stronger instruction-following capabilities to refine specific details. It's an extra step, but it gets you the best of both worlds.
Tool RecommendationsThere are plenty of tools out there, but here are three I'd recommend depending on your needs and experience level.
MidjourneyMidjourney produces what I consider the most aesthetically pleasing results, particularly for images of people and anything photographic. It's what I use on my own website. The downside is that Midjourney is terrible at following detailed instructions. Ask for something specific and you'll get something beautiful that bears only a passing resemblance to what you requested. It's also only available through its own website, so you can't access it through multi-model platforms.
Nano Banana ProNano Banana Pro (Google's model, accessible through Gemini) is the opposite of Midjourney. It's remarkably good at following detailed prompts. You can specify gaze direction, facial expressions, items held, and positioning, and it will actually deliver something close to what you asked for. It can also produce transparent PNGs, which is genuinely useful for UI work where you need to overlay images on colored backgrounds. The aesthetic isn't quite as refined as Midjourney, but for many projects that trade-off is worth it.
KreaKrea is where I'd recommend starting if you're new to all this. It gives you access to multiple models, letting you experiment and find which one works best for your particular needs. You can try different approaches without committing to a single tool's subscription. Unfortunately, Krea doesn't include Midjourney (since Midjourney doesn't make its model available to third parties), but it's still a great way to explore the landscape.
Krea is great for beginners allowing you to experiment with different models to find which works best for you.
Prompting StrategiesHow you write your prompts depends largely on which model you're using.
For instruction-following models like Nano Banana Pro, you can be quite detailed. Describe the composition, the subject's position, their expression, what they're holding, the lighting, the background. The model will make a genuine attempt to deliver all of it. You won't get perfection every time, but you'll get something workable more often than not.
For aesthetic-focused models like Midjourney, simpler prompts often work better. Focus on the overall mood, style, and subject matter rather than precise positioning. Fighting against the model's creative tendencies usually produces worse results than working with them.
Reference Imagery for ConsistencyOne of the most useful techniques, particularly with models that struggle to follow detailed instructions, is using reference imagery.
Most tools allow you to upload an "image prompt," which is an existing image that contains elements you want. The model will attempt to recreate those elements in whatever style you've specified, incorporating any changes you've requested. It's a way of showing the model what you want rather than trying to describe it in words.
Even more valuable is the style reference feature. If you need to produce multiple images that all share a consistent visual identity (which you almost certainly do for any real project), create one image that nails the style you're after. Then use that image as a style reference for every subsequent generation. This keeps your visuals cohesive rather than having each image feel like it came from a different designer.
I use a style reference image to keep my website illustrations consistent.
Getting StartedIf you haven't experimented with generative imagery yet, now is a good time to start. Sign up for Krea, generate a few images for a project you're working on, and compare them to what you would have found in a stock library. You'll probably find that some results are worse, some are surprisingly good, and you'll start developing an intuition for what these tools can and can't do.
That intuition is valuable. Generative imagery isn't going away, and the designers who learn to use it well will have a genuine advantage over those who don't. Not because AI replaces skill, but because it gives skilled designers another tool to work with.
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If you are having a rough time in the industry right now, you are not alone.
I keep hearing the same two stories.
People applying for job after job and hearing nothing back.
Freelancers and agency owners finding that work is not arriving the way it used to.
It is tempting to blame the economy, AI, or whatever headline is currently doing the rounds. Sometimes those things are genuinely part of the story.
However, one factor we can control is whether people outside our immediate team know who we are, what we are good at, and what we care about.
Be a contributor, not a lurkerMost opportunities come through people.
Clients often hire because somebody they trust says, “Talk to them.” Hiring managers do the same thing, tending to hire via friends of friends.
Even if you are not looking for a new job or chasing new clients, your reputation still matters. It shapes your credibility in the role you are in right now.
If colleagues can see that you are respected outside your organization, and they see you sharing your expertise in public (even quietly), it tends to raise your internal credibility too.
That does not mean you need to become an internet personality. It means you want to be findable and referable.
The easiest place to start is simply showing upWhen people hear “build your personal brand,” they often picture loud self-promotion, forced networking, and a never-ending content treadmill.
No wonder it makes so many people feel uncomfortable.
A lot of the resistance comes from perfectly reasonable places:
Self-promotion feels awkward.Networking can feel fake.Impostor syndrome whispers that you have nothing to offer.Fortunately, there is a gentler route. You can build a reputation by being useful, consistently.
That can look like:
Posting thoughtful experiences and ideas on social networks, and then sticking around to engage with the responses.Helping organize a local meetup.Chipping in regularly in Slack groups, forums, or Discord communities.Being active on LinkedIn by commenting thoughtfully on other people’s posts, and occasionally having a quiet chat in DMs.The point is not volume. The point is being present.
“But I do not have anything worth saying”If you have ever thought that, welcome to the club.
A simple reframe helps.
Instead of trying to share “best practice,” share experience.
You can write things like:
“In a client meeting this week, we ran into this problem. Here is how we handled it.”“We tried this approach and it did not work. Here is what we would do differently next time.”“A stakeholder pushed back on research. This argument helped.”Nobody can reasonably attack you for reporting what happened and what you learned. You are not claiming to be the all-knowing oracle of UX. You are just being a person doing the work.
In fact, the stuff you struggle with can be just as useful as the stuff you have mastered. People are often far kinder than your brain predicts, especially when you share what you learned the hard way.
You can mine your day job for content (without making it weird)A lot of what I share online comes straight out of conversations.
Like most people, I record many meetings. Then I grab the transcript and ask an AI tool to identify a few themes that might make useful posts.
It is surprising how often a “boring meeting” contains an insight that would help somebody else.
If you do this, be sensible about confidentiality. Strip out client details. Keep it focused on the pattern, not the organization.
Contributing helps you thinkThere is another benefit that gets overlooked.
When you share an idea, even one that is half-formed, you are forced to clarify what you mean, find the edges of your thinking, and learn faster because you are teaching.
Writing is basically thinking with friction. It is annoying, but it works.
Do not let AI turn you into a spectatorAI makes it easy to get answers.
That is useful, but there is a risk. If all we do is consume, we slowly lose the community spirit that made the early web so valuable.
So if you want a simple goal for 2026, try being a little less of a spectator and a little more of a participant.
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Every year around this time, I start seeing the prediction pieces roll in. "The year of X!" they declare. "Y will change everything!" And every year, I find myself wincing a little, because most of these predictions age about as well as milk left on a radiator.
So rather than trying to predict the future (I learned my lesson after confidently declaring QR codes were dead in 2019), I want to talk about what I'm seeing among the UX professionals I work with, and what I think it means for 2026.
The uncomfortable realityLet me start with the bit nobody wants to hear. UX is on the corporate chopping block again. If you've been in this industry long enough, you'll recognize the pattern. We saw it after the dot-com bust. We saw hints of it during various economic downturns. And we're seeing it now.
Some folks think rebranding will save us. We tried that before, remember? We went from "usability" to "UX" and it bought us some time. But slapping a new label on the tin doesn't change what's inside.
The interesting thing is that the World Economic Forum still lists UX as a growth area. So what's going on? I think we're seeing a split forming between two very different types of UX work: the shallow, template-driven kind that AI can increasingly handle, and the messy, human-centered kind that requires judgment, taste, and the ability to navigate complex organizational dynamics.
The shallow end is drainingTemplates and processes won't cut it anymore. If your approach to UX is downloading frameworks and following checklists without much critical thinking, 2026 is going to feel uncomfortable. Because AI can do that now. And it does it faster.
The UX professionals who thrive will be the ones with uniquely human skills. Critical thinking. Taste (yes, that subjective, hard-to-define thing your design school professor tried to explain). The ability to navigate messy organizational dynamics without making enemies. These soft skills are becoming more valuable than knowing your way around Figma.
I've watched people who can facilitate a difficult stakeholder workshop bring more value to a project than someone with impeccable wireframing skills. Because the wireframes don't matter if nobody in the organization trusts them.
AI is growing up (finally)The frantic "add AI for AI's sake" phase is mercifully winding down. I've lost count of how many product features I saw last year that felt like someone had desperately searched for a place to stick a chatbot, found nowhere sensible, and stuck it there anyway.
Now we're moving into what I'd call the implementation phase. Organizations are finally asking "What problem does this actually solve?" rather than "How can we say we have AI?" This is genuinely good news for UX people. Because that question, that focus on real user needs, is exactly where we add value.
This is our chance to demonstrate what we bring to the table. Not by fighting AI, but by being the people who understand how to apply it thoughtfully.
What you might consider doing about all thisI've been thinking about what separates the UX people who feel energized right now from the ones who feel anxious. A few patterns keep emerging.
Get comfortable with messUX work has always been messy, but I think some of us (myself included, at times) got a bit too attached to neat processes. Context matters more than frameworks. A template is a starting point, not a destination. If you find yourself downloading more frameworks than talking to actual users, it might be worth recalibrating.
I've come to think of UX methods as a toolkit rather than a linear process. Instead of pushing every project through the same sequence of steps, you assess what the situation actually needs and reach for the right tool. Sometimes that's a full discovery phase. Sometimes it's a quick guerrilla test. The skill is knowing which to use when, not memorizing a fixed sequence.
The people who seem to thrive actually enjoy that messiness. They see ambiguity as interesting rather than threatening.
Wear more hatsThe boundaries between UX and other disciplines are blurring fast. I've been encouraging people to pick up knowledge in adjacent areas: systems thinking, data modeling, business strategy, even marketing. Not to become experts in everything (impossible), but to speak enough of the language to collaborate effectively.
AI actually makes this more achievable than ever. You don't need to be an experienced developer to build a quick demo anymore. If you have a basic understanding of how development works, AI can help you create functional prototypes that would have required a developer's time before. The same applies to data analysis, content strategy, even basic marketing automation. A little knowledge, combined with the right AI tools, goes a surprisingly long way.
Take control of your AI storyI wrote about this recently on Smashing Magazine, but it bears repeating. Take control of how AI shapes your job. Don't wait for someone else to do it for you, because they will, and you probably won't like their version.
Challenge the way you approach every task by asking how AI might change it. I'm particularly excited about how AI can reshape the way we communicate user research. There are fascinating possibilities around virtual personas that give users a voice in meetings they'll never attend. And the opportunities for rapid iteration are genuinely exciting. Faster development means more freedom to take creative risks.
I'm running a workshop soon on AI and interface design if you want to dig deeper into the practical applications.
The new frontierOne thing that genuinely excites me: conversational experiences are becoming a legitimate UX specialism. Not chatbots-as-FAQ (please, no more of those), but thoughtful conversational interfaces that genuinely improve how people interact with systems. It's a new field, which means the rules aren't written yet. That's either terrifying or thrilling, depending on your disposition.
Why I'm optimistic (despite everything)I realize I've painted a somewhat challenging picture. But I'm genuinely optimistic about 2026. Change has always been where the interesting work happens. The UX people who adapt, who stay curious, who focus on outcomes over outputs, are going to have fascinating careers.
The fact that AI is opening up new possibilities for experimentation and iteration makes this a genuinely exciting time. We can work collaboratively with AI to evolve design concepts in ways that would have taken weeks just a few years ago.
Is it comfortable? Not always. But comfortable and interesting rarely overlap.
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Well, here we are. The UX Strategy and Leadership course has wrapped up, and I am officially putting down my digital pen until January 8th.
I know. Try not to weep. 😭
Before I disappear into a haze of mince pies and questionable Christmas jumpers, I wanted to take a moment to say thank you. Genuinely. You read what I write, you tolerate my rambling, and some of you have been doing this for years. That means more to me than I usually let on.
I hope your Christmas is wonderful. I hope you get some proper time off. And I really hope the next few days of "urgent" requests, last-minute deadlines, and "can we just squeeze this in before the holidays?" meetings don't completely crush your soul before you get there.
You deserve a break. Go take one.
Now, About That Gift...Traditionally, this is the part where I'd offer you some sort of Christmas freebie. A template, a checklist, maybe a festive PDF with snowflakes on it.
But I'm not going to do that.
Instead, I have a favor to ask. I know, I know. The audacity!
You've followed my work, read my articles, listened to my podcast, and taken my advice on UX and conversion optimization. Hopefully it has helped. Well, now the bill has come due! After all, I have never asked for anything in return. Well, except for buying my books, attending my workshops, and hiring me for projects. BUT, other than that I have never asked for anything! 😜
If you have appreciated what I've shared over the years, I'm hoping you might support something that matters deeply to my wife, Catherine, and me.
Why This Charity Is Personal to UsMy wife and I both work with a small UK charity called Hope of Bethesda, which supports a school doing education work in rural Tamil Nadu, India. A few years ago, we traveled out to visit the school ourselves.
It's amazing what they're doing with nearly nothing. They are giving quality education in one of the poorest parts of India. Education that helps everybody, but especially the girls.
Girls often don't get the same level of education as boys in rural India, and without that education they often end up getting married very young and facing a life of domestic work.
But this community-led school changes all of that, allowing girls to go on to further education and successful careers.
What Your Donation Makes PossibleThe school has grown to around 400 students who travel from miles around because it provides the best education available in the region.
Donations support:
Education from early childhood through college. Many students are supported from age 4 through 19+. Right now, 10 girls are in college.Safe accommodation during term time. For many girls, this provides not just education but a stable place to live so they can attend and thrive.Holistic support. Academic learning, extracurricular activities, and well-being support that other schools don't provide.And it goes beyond immediate education. A child born to a mother who can read (which is not as common as you might think in rural India) is 50% more likely to live beyond age five. Education doesn't just change one life. It changes entire communities for generations.
Why I'm Asking YouHope of Bethesda is tiny. There's no fundraising team, no advertising budget, no government support, and no major donors. The charity is completely reliant on individual supporters like you.
Your donation isn't a drop in the ocean. For a charity this size, one person's giving genuinely makes all the difference.
Look, you've been generous with your time and attention over the years, reading what I write and listening to what I say. If my work has helped you in any way, and if you have room in your Christmas giving, I'd be grateful if you'd consider supporting Hope of Bethesda.
Give What Feels RightThere's no minimum. Give what feels right to you.
Whether that's £10 or £100, your support will help provide education, safety, and opportunity to girls who would otherwise have none of these things.
Donate Now Via Stripe
or learn more about Hope of Bethesda
Thank YouThank you for even considering this.
Your willingness to support something that matters to my family means more than I can say. Whether you're able to give this Christmas or not, I'm grateful for your continued support of my work and for being part of this community.
Have a wonderful Christmas. Rest up. Eat too much. And I'll see you on January 8th, ready to dive back in.
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And so we've reached the end of the course on UX leadership and strategy (but not the end of my emails), and I want to leave you with some final thoughts and encouragement for the journey ahead.
Being a design leader within an organization is challenging, and you will find yourself coming up against many roadblocks and difficulties along the way. I want to leave you with a quote from Winston Churchill that I absolutely love: "Success is going from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm."
As you look forward and begin to work out how you're going to define your role within the organization and how you're going to begin to shift the culture to be more user-centric, I would very much encourage you to keep that quote in mind. Why? Because making these kinds of big organizational changes is a marathon, not a sprint. You won't transform your company's approach to UX overnight. There will be setbacks, resistance, and moments when you feel like you're not making progress. But if you maintain your enthusiasm through those failures and keep pushing forward, you will gradually see change take hold.
What we've coveredLet me give you a quick recap of what we've covered in this course.
Start by taking control of your role. Define your vision of what user experience is within the organization and what the role of your team is. Don't allow others to define that for you.
Step back from day-to-day implementation work as much as you possibly can so that you can have a bigger impact across the organization on more digital projects. Do this by becoming an advisor, a consultant, but more importantly, somebody who provides resources, education, and tools for other people to use.
Work at building relationships with your colleagues across the organization, teaching them and empowering them to start adopting user experience best practices themselves and to become UX practitioners. Ultimately, it all comes back to that well-known phrase: don't give a man a fish, but teach him how to fish. If you teach people how to do UX, they're going to be much more successful over the long term and in many more projects than if you just do it for them.
Spend some time working on culture hacking, changing the organization as a whole. I'll be honest with you, that's going to be the hardest part of all of this and probably the one that you come to slightly later, once you've built some momentum. But certainly look at promoting yourself within the organization so that people are aware of what you do and your impact. Think about those guerrilla marketing tactics that I taught you about earlier in the course.
Find your own wayIf you do all of that, you will be heading in the right direction. However, everything that I've talked about in this course will have to be translated for your organization and your circumstances. Not all of it will apply, and don't feel that you have to do things the way that I've taught you. You need to find your own way, but I hope that the things I've shared here will at least point you in the right direction.
Outie's AsideIf you're a freelancer or agency working with client organizations, these principles apply to you too. Your challenge is helping your clients build internal UX capability without making yourself redundant.
Focus on being the guide who teaches their team to fish rather than the person who catches all the fish for them. Position your engagements as building capability, not just delivering outputs. Create documentation, run workshops, and leave behind tools and resources that empower their teams after you've gone.
Because the clients who learn from you become your best advocates and bring you back for bigger, more strategic work.
I'm here if you need meFinally, I would encourage you to reach out to me anytime, and I mean this. You might be reading this years after I've produced it, but still feel free to reach out. Just hit reply to this email and I'll get back to you. I'm happy to answer any questions that you have because I know how difficult it can be being a UX design lead in organizations today.
Although this is the end of the course, it's not the end of what I have to share. You will continue to receive emails on everything from conversion optimization, user experience design, UX leadership, user research, and the role of AI in our jobs.
Thank you very much for sticking with me right to the end. It is hugely appreciated and I hope you found it useful.
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Last week I talked about marketing UX within your organization and how you can use internal marketing strategies to build awareness and executive support. This week, I want to dig into a more hands-on approach: getting your stakeholders directly involved in UX activities.
If all my talk about guerrilla marketing and PR stunts felt a bit overwhelming, this is a simpler path. The more you can expose stakeholders and colleagues across the organization to real users, the more user-centered their thinking will become. It really is that simple.
Why bother getting them involved?I know what you might be thinking. Do I really want stakeholders hovering around during user research? What if they derail everything with their opinions?
Fair concerns. But here is what happens when you do invite them in.
It builds support. The more stakeholders are involved, the more invested they become. And the more likely they are to support UX initiatives when it matters.It builds empathy. When stakeholders interact with users, even indirectly, they begin to empathize with their frustrations and genuinely want to improve the experience.It builds relationships. By involving your stakeholders, you get to better understand their motivations and needs. And what will actually influence them to be more user-centered.Start with the basicsAt the most basic level, you can get stakeholders trying UX activities themselves. Sit with them and let them experience what card sorting feels like. Or walk them through a usability test as an observer.
Then you can teach them how to run these processes on their own. I have done this countless times, and watching someone run their first usability test is genuinely rewarding.
While this may seem obvious, remember that we are looking at how to influence others and change the culture. Getting hands-on experience is powerful.
Expose them to real usersOne technique I use constantly is recording sessions I run with users and then creating short videos afterwards.
Low-light videos (sometimes called horror videos) are 90-second compilations of all the frustrations and irritations a user has had with an experience. Watching someone struggle, get confused, or openly curse at your interface is deeply uncomfortable. And deeply effective at building empathy.
Highlight videos are the opposite. I use these when I want to show stakeholders how improvements we made to the system really do work. There is something very powerful about allowing stakeholders to see real users interacting with the system and actually succeeding.
Both types of videos work because they make the user real. Not a persona slide or a data point, but an actual human being trying to get something done. Circulate these videos to stakeholders and watch how quickly conversations change.
You can also invite stakeholders to attend live usability sessions. Provide lunch as an incentive. Steve Krug's book "Rocket Surgery Made Easy" describes a brilliant approach: run three morning usability testing sessions that stakeholders observe, followed by a lunch meeting where you brainstorm improvements based on what everyone just witnessed.
Another option is including users in stakeholder workshops. Pay users to attend and provide their perspectives during planning sessions. This creates situations where stakeholders interact with customers in ways they may never have before.
Think about it. Many people in organizations rarely have face-to-face time with customers. Marketers, senior executives, compliance officers, developers... they operate based on assumptions and secondhand information. Any direct exposure to users can fundamentally shift their thinking.
Turn engagement into advocacyOnce stakeholders are interacting with users and believing in the process, they can become advocates. People who influence others in their departments and across the organization.
Build communities of people who care about UX. Provide them with tools to promote it, such as branded materials or how-to guides they can share with their teams.
And remember to reward their advocacy. Celebrate those who promote UX best practices. Invest time in making them feel valued. I try to publicly recognize people who are championing user-centered thinking, even in small ways. It reinforces the behavior and signals to others that this matters.
In essence, we need to involve our colleagues across the organization to help them understand users and become user advocates. Getting people hands-on with real users changes everything.
Next week, I will look at how to break down business silos that often hinder user experience and limit the kind of cultural change we have been discussing.
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Last week, I talked about building credibility by looking outside your organization for validation. External benchmarking, expert opinions, and industry recognition all help shift internal perception. But validation only works if people understand the actual value you're delivering. That brings us to today's topic: measuring and communicating UX success in ways that resonate with stakeholders.
Because, unless you can demonstrate value clearly, the rest of the organization won't recognize it.
Fortunately, decision makers across your company have an inherent need to improve the metrics they see. By establishing the right metrics, you'll influence their behavior. It's a weird phenomenon, but if you give people something to measure, they will want to improve that thing.
Two ways to quantify successThere are basically two ways to demonstrate the benefit of what you're doing.
Qualitative data can be incredibly powerful. A compelling story generates empathy among stakeholders in ways that raw numbers sometimes can't. Testimonials, videos, and user feedback help people understand the human impact of your work.
But quantitative data is even more powerful because people believe in hard numbers in a way they don't believe anything else. Ideally, this data should tie to some kind of financial return for the organization.
There is something about hard data and having hard numbers you can track that really resonates with people and makes them want to start moving that needle.
Deciding on your metricsThe first step is to have metrics based around organizational goals. Right back at the beginning of this course, I talked about getting that company strategy and identifying the organizational goals. Now we need to translate those into something measurable.
Depending on what kinds of products and digital services your organization offers will impact how you go about doing this. Essentially, you're taking the company objectives and translating those to the website, app, or digital service that you're running. For example, "increase revenue" might be a company goal for the year, so your website's role might be to generate more leads. Then you need to get specific about key performance indicators. What metric are we going to measure? Maybe we're measuring the number of people completing an online form or visiting a contact page. You need to make those metrics very tangible because otherwise, you can't track them easily.
Vary your metricsHowever, be careful. Many organizations end up focusing on a single metric like conversion, which often ends up undermining their long-term success. For example, if you only care about conversion, you end up using pop-up overlays and attention-grabbing things, especially if you're thinking about conversion over the next quarter rather than longer term. You'll do anything to meet that target for that particular month. But what you're also doing is alienating people who won't come back because your website is hard to use or annoying.
It's much better to have a variety of metrics that you measure rather than focusing on just one area so that you approach things in a more rounded way.
I typically try to have metrics in three broad areas:
Engagement metrics assess if users find your design delightful, if the content is interesting, and if it's relevant to their needs. You might put out a quarterly survey on the website or measure dwell time (although sometimes that can be a sign that people are lost on the website) or track how much of a video they watch.Usability metrics answer whether users can find answers to their questions and use features effectively. Periodic usability testing can bring those metrics in. You can measure things like task success rate, time to complete tasks, error rates, and the system usability scale I mentioned earlier.Conversion metrics show whether the right users take action on the site and what the financial value of those actions is. You've got the conversion rate, average order value, average lifetime value, number of repeat customers, and so on.Tie metrics to dollar valueThe most important thing is to try and tie these metrics to a dollar value if possible. Let me give you an example of how powerful this can be.
I was at a restaurant called Pizza Express here in the UK. My wife and I were sitting there when the server came over to take our order. However, they took forever to input the order into an iPhone app. I glanced at my wife, who immediately rolled her eyes at me because she knew exactly what I was thinking. That the app had a bad user experience and needed improvement. The server went away, and my poor wife had to listen to me go on about how annoying these apps can be. I then became obsessed and ruined our lunch by starting some calculations.
I calculated that if we could save 10 seconds per order, with about 350 orders placed per day in an average restaurant, that would save 58 minutes every day. Pizza Express is open about 364 days a year, meaning we could save 351 hours per year per restaurant. With 450 restaurants worldwide, that equates to nearly 158,000 hours that could be saved by fixing this app. According to ChatGPT, the average server in the UK earns about £9.90 per hour, so fixing the app could save the company over £1.5 million a year.
Now, you might think I made up these numbers, and that would be the kind of feedback you'd get if you did something similar. You're right. People will say the numbers are made up, and yes, I did make them up. But it shows the potential. You can use that as a case to run a proof of concept project to work out the real cost savings. It's okay to make educated guesses, and the power of linking a usability or user experience problem to a financial value cannot be overstated. That is where you'll really get people's attention and begin to show the organization the value you can provide.
If you want to make similar calculations, I've created a UX ROI calculator on my website that helps you work out the financial impact of UX improvements. Whether you're trying to increase your conversion rate, improve user retention and engagement, or boost productivity and efficiency, it walks you through the math and gives you numbers you can take to stakeholders.
Report your successHowever, we can't just calculate these numbers. We also need to report them back. There are several techniques I use for demonstrating this value across the organization.
I use storytelling quite a lot. Creating an engaging story that demonstrates how UX enhancements can address issues and achieve measurable business results. That's where your qualitative feedback becomes valuable because you've got all these stories of different users and their experiences. I could have just given you the hard numbers about the Pizza Express example, but by telling you how I ruined our lunch and alienated my wife, I made that story more interesting.
I'm also a great fan of dashboards. Providing UX metrics in a dashboard will demonstrate how changes in the user experience help meet business objectives in a very tangible, visual way that people can instantly understand.
I also produce impact reports either quarterly, half-yearly, or annually which report back to the organization about the impact that user experience changes have had on the long-term goals of the business.
And then there are demos. Host demo days to showcase recent successes, what you changed, what it was like before and after, and the tangible difference that made.
Reporting success is really an important part of the equation, and that means you need to be measuring success and tying that back to a financial benefit if you possibly can.
Outie's AsideIf you're a freelancer or agency working with clients, demonstrating value becomes even more critical. Your client relationships depend on proving ROI.
When you start a project, agree on the metrics you'll track upfront. Don't wait until the end to figure out how you'll demonstrate success. Build measurement into your proposal. If your client says "increase conversions," get specific about which conversions, by how much, and over what timeframe.
Document the baseline before you start work. Take screenshots, record the current metrics, and note the user complaints. This gives you a clear before state to compare against.
During the project, create a simple dashboard that your client can check anytime. Share wins as they happen. Don't save everything for the final report.
When you're calculating potential value, be conservative. Underpromise and overdeliver. If your rough calculation suggests £100,000 in savings, present it as "potentially £50,000 or more." This protects you from overpromising while still showing meaningful impact.
Finally, make your impact reports visual. Before-and-after screenshots, simple charts showing metric improvements, and short video clips of users struggling with the old design versus succeeding with the new one. These make your case far more compelling than a spreadsheet full of numbers.
So that is it for this time. Next week, I'll wrap up this course with some final thoughts and a summary of everything we've covered. I'll pull together the key lessons and give you a framework for moving forward with confidence.
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