UX Murder Mystery

Brian Crowley and Eve Eden
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Design
  • Weekly

Where do true crime, business and technology intersect? When another product has been found dead. The cause? UX failure. We investigate what's killing your customer experience. Think true crime, but for failed designs. We dig into the real stories behind UX disasters. LinkedIn's algorithm nightmare. Paywalls that killed communities. Corporate decisions that poison good design. Every case has clues. Every problem has a solution. Coming soon. Got a UX horror story? Send us your evidence.

  1. 2d ago

    Walmart Greeters, AI Interviews, and Who Gets the Pie

    AI agents interviewing AI agents. Zillow cuts 500. A DesignOps team cut to the bone. Older workers behind the register for insurance. The FIRE movement meets the layoff wave. And a pie chart on wealth that explains the rest. Eve and Brian connect it. Eve Eden and Brian Crowley open with the AI job interview parodies and ask what happens when an agent interviews an agent. Recruiters cannot tell fake candidates from real ones. Applicants send agents of their own. Auto-apply tools fire off resumes by the hundreds. Then the layoffs. Brian's former employer cut the small design operations team he was on, then cut it again. Zillow dropped just over 500 people in August. Peter Merholz's point from last week: layoffs rarely deliver what companies promise. A generation told to job-hop, chase a FIRE number, and never trust a company now watches that plan meet a market that did not keep its side of the deal. The bill lands on everyone else. Older workers at Walmart and Kroger to keep health insurance. Medicare and Medicaid getting harder to hold onto. The CBS This Morning pie demonstration on wealth that left shoppers stunned. Savings accounts that used to pay, 401(k)s that replaced them, RSUs that look like ownership, and a shareholder vote that means little when one founder holds control. Whose grandmother is that at the door? The hosts say it is all of ours. Sources: CBS This Morning, "Americans know wealth inequality is a problem, but what does it look like?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DANUXO-GQwU and "Income inequality: $0.01 for average American family is $11,700 for Jeff Bezos" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrsiYZ19n2k. GeekWire on the Zillow layoffs, August 4, 2026: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/zillow-cuts-more-than-500-jobs-in-its-largest-layoff-of-the-year/ Send questions, news articles, and counterpoints: questions@uxmurdermystery.com

  2. 2d ago ·  Bonus

    You Might Also Like: The Oprah Podcast

    Introducing Oprah Looks Back at Her Best Surprises from The Oprah Podcast. Follow the show: The Oprah Podcast Surprise! Oprah is looking back on some of her favorite surprises from 25 years of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah shares how when she was surprised by her idol Mary Tyler Moore it sent her into the ugly cry. The time she’ll never forget surprising Tom Cruise’s biggest fan while standing in her robe, no makeup and her hair soaking wet from the shower. More surprises include Mariah Carey’s biggest fans, the iconic car giveaway - “you get a car, you get a car” - and the moment she surprised an entire audience they were all “going to Australia!” When The Oprah Show ended in 2011 she allowed her staff to surprise her over and over again at a star-studded event at the United Center in Chicago. 00:00:00 - Oprah on loving to surprise people on The Oprah Winfrey Show 00:02:15 - Oprah was surprised by Mary Tyler Moore 00:08:14 - The Tom Cruise Surprise 00:12:49 - The Weight Loss Surprise 00:16:10 - The Will and Grace surprise 00:18:36 - The Family surprise 00:20:50 - The Mariah surprise 00:24:00 - The You Get a Car surprise 00:29:20 - The biggest fans surprise 00:33:58 - The Surprise Trip 00:39:30 - Oprah’s 25 year surprise show Follow Oprah Winfrey on Social: https://www.instagram.com/oprahpodcast/ https://www.facebook.com/oprahpodcast/ https://www.instagram.com/oprah/?hl=en https://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfrey/ Listen to the full podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/0tEVrfNp92a7lbjDe6GMLI https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-oprah-podcast/id1782960381 DISCLAIMER: Please note, this is an independent podcast episode not affiliated with, endorsed by, or produced in conjunction with the host podcast feed or any of its media entities. The views and opinions expressed in this episode are solely those of the creators and guests. For any concerns, please reach out to team@podroll.fm.

    You Might Also Like: The Oprah Podcast

  3. Oct 29

    Why Is UX Director the Most Miserable Job in Tech? Peter Merholz

    Designers once decided what to build. Now they are told what to "draw." Brian and Eve sit down with Peter Merholz, co-founder of Adaptive Path, co-author of Org Design for Design Orgs, and co-host of the Finding Our Way podcast, to open a case the industry keeps arguing about and never closes: what happened to design? Five questions drive the investigation. What happened to "Big D" design, and who turned a strategic discipline into production support? Where did designers' verve go? Why is the UX Director so often the hardest seat in tech? What happens to the design role when anyone can do any part of it? And why will no one hire entry-level designers? The suspects include agile transformations, management consultants, CFOs, and product managers. The evidence runs from the org chart to the hiring queue. Show notes: Peter Merholz: https://www.petermerholz.com/ Org Design for Design Orgs: https://www.petermerholz.com/org-design-for-design-orgs/ Finding Our Way podcast: https://findingourway.design/ For informational/entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies/individuals use publicly available info for critique and education. Not factual assertions about motives or intentions. Creators disclaim liability for damages from reliance on content. Events may be dramatized for illustrative purposes. Hosted by Brian J. Crowley & Eve Eden Edited by Kelsey Smith Intro Animation & Logo Design by Brian J. Crowley Music by Nicolas Lee A joint production of EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories ©2026 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden questions@UXmurdermystery.com Thank you for watching and or listening! UX Murder Mystery, true crime for design, Peter Merholz, Adaptive Path, Org Design for Design Orgs, UX design, design leadership, UX director, design org, entry-level designers, design careers, product design, product management, agile, design jobs

  4. Oct 22

    Eddie Bauer: 20 Years of Rewards, Zero Purchase History

    Twenty years of rewards. Zero purchase history. Brian takes a parka with a broken zipper to a closing Eddie Bauer store. He has no receipt, but he has a rewards account he has held for almost twenty years. The system says he has never bought anything from Eddie Bauer. Nobody at the counter can override it. From there, Brian and Eve trace how a brand built on a lifetime guarantee got to that counter. In Clark v. Eddie Bauer, an Oregon outlet shopper alleges the outlet stores ran a permanent sale against "list prices" the goods were never actually sold at, then swapped the tags to an unexplained "Comparable Value." In February 2026, the company running the stores filed for Chapter 11, Eddie Bauer's third bankruptcy, and nearly 200 stores closed. The brand itself never went bankrupt. Authentic Brands Group owns the name, and a week before the filing, the website moved to a different operator. Brian and Eve walk through a string of owners, a sale that taught customers to wait, and a licensing structure that split one brand across separate companies with separate systems. They also hear out the operator's explanation: falling sales, supply chain costs, and tariffs that hit the whole sector. And they look at what Patagonia and American Giant do differently. The question at the end: what brand do you still trust, and is it the same company that earned that trust? Sources cited in this episode: Retail Dive, Business Insider, RetailWire, NPR, and the Ninth Circuit and Oregon Supreme Court opinions in Clark v. Eddie Bauer. Hosted by Brian J. Crowley & Eve Eden / Edited by Kelsey Smith / Intro Animation & Logo Design by Brian J. Crowley / Music by Nicolas Lee / A joint production of EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories / ©2025 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden / questions@UXmurdermystery.com / "Thank you for watching and or listening!" For informational and entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies and individuals use publicly available information for critique and education. Not factual assertions about motives or intentions. Creators disclaim liability for damages from reliance on content. Events may be dramatized for illustrative purposes.

  5. Oct 15 ·  Bonus

    UX 101

    Brian Crowley goes solo to talk UX 101

  6. Oct 8

    The AI Got Out: A Correction, a Breakout, and a Government Portal

    Well there's egg on our face. In the last episode Brian asserted that the AIs had been contained and it was just a test. That was completely wrong AND we've learned that the extent of the hacks has gone much further than we initially knew, which leads Eve and Brian to ask... what don't we know now? Here's what we do know. An OpenAI agent got out of its test sandbox, exploited a zero-day, and spent two and a half days inside Hugging Face trying to steal the answers to its own exam. Another one got into an Australian government health portal in June. OpenAI found out in August and told the government in September, by email, to a public inbox. There are now dozens of organizations on the notification list, including US government sites. And the same week all of this came out, every AI CEO in the country went to the White House, agreed to police themselves, and renamed the whole thing "super intelligence." Brian and Eve go through the accord layer by layer and explain why "independent" auditors picked by the companies are not independent, why self-governance has never once produced accountability, and why Nvidia's CEO saying he hopes this is "an engineering challenge" is not as reassuring as it sounds. Then it gets bigger. The three-month gap between a breach and anyone hearing about it. The money behind every pause announcement. What a crypto documentary taught Brian about who gets left holding the bag. Eve on why automation is eating the local middle class. AI-generated product photos, fake newspapers, the fake highway pileup video Eve's dad sent her. An unverified claim that a loose agent seeded itself across the internet, and what that would even mean. We don't have the answers. We're pretty sure the people who say they do don't either. Disclosure: we prep this show with Claude, which is made by Anthropic, one of the labs in this story. Everything here comes from outside reporting.

  7. Sep 30

    Meta Pays $17 Billion, Apple Folds, and an AI Researcher Walks Out

    Hook. Hold. Harvest. Hide. That is how state attorneys general described Meta's business model before the company agreed to a reported $17 billion child safety settlement whose remedy reads like a design spec: default time limits, an overnight block, no cosmetic filters for minors. Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden work through the month in tech and the design decisions underneath each story. Apple's foldable iPhone Duo and a keynote engineered to avoid live failure. Dating apps losing paying users while a CEO calls swipe velocity the problem. Rideshare prices that look like willingness-to-pay algorithms, and driver streaks that look like manipulation. Grok's nonconsensual image generation and the case for building safety into the experience itself. Jacob Coxon's resignation from Anthropic, followed by a real argument between the hosts: is a 10% extinction estimate measurable, were the lab incidents contained, and is the Robot God story a marketing plan ahead of the IPOs? Brian argues LLMs work more like cold reading than intelligence. Eve describes her "wisdom council" method for making AI useful. The episode closes with the fall wave of tech documentaries, including a Musk film that replaced its subject with an AI avatar. Disclosure: the hosts prep this show with Claude, which is made by Anthropic. The Anthropic segment is built from outside reporting. For informational/entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies/individuals use publicly available info for critique and education. Not factual assertions about motives or intentions. Creators disclaim liability for damages from reliance on content. Events may be dramatized for illustrative purposes. Hosted by Brian J. Crowley & Eve Eden Edited by Kelsey Smith Intro Animation & Logo Design by Brian J. Crowley Music by Nicolas Lee A joint production of EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories ©2026 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden questions@UXmurdermystery.com

  8. Sep 17

    Stop Selling Change: Why Transformation Keeps Failing (ft. Erin Stadler)

    Deloitte invented another word for how organizations should be: changefulness. Erin Stadler read it and laughed out loud. Brian Crowley and Eve Eden investigate why organizational change keeps failing with someone who stopped consulting on it and built the alternative instead. Erin spent 13 years as a founder and COO at Boomtown testing one question: if people actually adopt these practices, does it create an adaptable organization? It did. People who joined said they could never go back to a traditional company. Erin breaks down why transformations bomb at scale, the principles layer most rollouts skip, how her team created more change by never saying the word change, and why she thinks change management needs to go away as a concept. She gives her honest read on SAFe as one of the first certified SAFe consultants, and on the "is agile dead" debate. Then the AI turn: companies grew access to AI 50% in a year, fewer than 60% of people who have it use it daily, and 84% never redesigned a single workflow around it. Erin's diagnosis: AI is exposing how poorly organizations design the way they work. The episode closes with why everyone in your company is now a product manager, what Netflix's CPTO gets right about systems thinkers, and one question to ask about your standup this week. Erin Stadler: https://www.erinstadler.com/ Netflix CPTO Elizabeth Stone on Lenny's Podcast: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/netflix-cpto-on-ai-and-the-future Hosted by Brian J. Crowley & Eve Eden Edited by Kelsey Smith Intro Animation & Logo Design by Brian J. Crowley Music by Nicolas Lee A joint production of EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories ©2026 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden questions@UXmurdermystery.com Thank you for watching and or listening! For informational/entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies/individuals use publicly available info for critique and education. Not factual assertions about motives or intentions. Creators disclaim liability for damages from reliance on content. Events may be dramatized for illustrative purposes.

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5
out of 5
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About

Where do true crime, business and technology intersect? When another product has been found dead. The cause? UX failure. We investigate what's killing your customer experience. Think true crime, but for failed designs. We dig into the real stories behind UX disasters. LinkedIn's algorithm nightmare. Paywalls that killed communities. Corporate decisions that poison good design. Every case has clues. Every problem has a solution. Coming soon. Got a UX horror story? Send us your evidence.

Information

  • Creator
    Brian Crowley and Eve Eden
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    51
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025
  • Show Website
    UX Murder Mystery