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. 1D AGO

    Stuck in a Website Fixing Loop? Try This.

    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.

    9 min

  2. JAN 29

    Why Moving Buttons Won't Fix Your Conversion Rate

    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. --- Free Webinar: Stop Lurking. Start Getting Known. On February 4th, I'm running a free 75-minute webinar on building your LinkedIn reputation without turning it into a second job. You'll get a simple weekly system, practical templates, and a way to stay visible that doesn't rely on willpower. Sign up here. --- 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.

    5 min

  3. JAN 22

    Generative Imagery: Stop Settling for Stock

    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.

    10 min

  4. JAN 15

    Be a contributor, not a lurker

    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.

    5 min

  5. JAN 8

    What I'm seeing for UX as we move into 2026

    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.

    8 min

  6. 12/11/2025

    Your Christmas Shakedown!

    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.

    5 min

  7. 12/04/2025

    Your Path Forward as a UX Leader

    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.

    4 min

  8. 11/27/2025

    Quantifying UX Success and Proving Value

    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.

    8 min
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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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