UX Insights - User Experience Leadership and Strategy

Paul Boag

Need quick, actionable insights to sharpen your UX leadership and strategy? Short on time but eager to grow your influence? UX strategist Paul Boag delivers concise, practical episodes designed to enhance your strategic thinking, leadership skills, and impact in user experience. Each bite-sized podcast is just 6-10 minutes—perfect for busy UX leaders and advocates on the go.

  1. The quick wins racket (and why I'm part of it)

    8 hr ago

    The quick wins racket (and why I'm part of it)

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

    9 min
  2. Why UX Should Own Retention

    21 May

    Why UX Should Own Retention

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

    6 min
  3. From Doer to Director: The AI Mindset Shift

    7 May

    From Doer to Director: The AI Mindset Shift

    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 about I’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 problem But 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 parallel This 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 real There’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 start If 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.

    6 min
  4. Why UX Teams Need a Maturity Audit Right Now

    23 Apr

    Why UX Teams Need a Maturity Audit Right Now

    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 real A 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 idea The 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 covers A 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 survey An 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 start It’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.

    6 min
  5. Democratizing UX with AI

    10 Apr

    Democratizing UX with AI

    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 had For 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 picture I'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 like The 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 effect Building 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. ---- 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. ---- Where to start If 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.

    7 min
  6. Your AI Toolkit Is Your Competitive Edge

    26 Mar

    Your AI Toolkit Is Your Competitive Edge

    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.

    11 min
  7. Is your website copy faceless?

    26 Feb

    Is your website copy faceless?

    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 Copy When 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 Sounds The 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 Evidence Specificity 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 Homepage Pull 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.

    6 min
  8. It’s all interconnected

    19 Feb

    It’s all interconnected

    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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Need quick, actionable insights to sharpen your UX leadership and strategy? Short on time but eager to grow your influence? UX strategist Paul Boag delivers concise, practical episodes designed to enhance your strategic thinking, leadership skills, and impact in user experience. Each bite-sized podcast is just 6-10 minutes—perfect for busy UX leaders and advocates on the go.

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