On empathy in customer service

We did some research recently. We asked participants to recount a particularly frustrating experience with customer service. Almost every single one said, “I felt like they didn’t listen.” and something in the vein of, “I need to know that they…

Why does technology suck all of a sudden?

I discovered a beautiful new word today: Enshittification First used by Cory Doctorow in a blog post in 2022 [1], it describes the decay in quality of digital platforms over time as companies chase “growth at all costs”. This puts…

About synthetic users

Can we talk about synthetic users? We, experience designers (or researchers; HCD is a big umbrella), all know they’re a bad idea… but why? And how do we convince our business colleagues without sounding like the whole field is in…

AI Experience Score

I’ve been working on something fun that I want to share with the design community. A ‘quick and dirty’ usability score for AI I’m calling the AI Experience Score (AES)—not to be confused with the Advanced Encryption Standard, the name…