UX Insights - User Experience Leadership and Strategy

As we all know, one of the key characteristics of somebody working in any user focused field is a fascination with people. How they think, what motivates them, how they make decisions. But that fascination should not just be focused on others, we should apply it to ourselves too.

It is easy to go through life oblivious to what we are doing and why we are doing it. But as we become more self-aware, we also begin to understand more how others are likely to respond too.

As an early adopter of any new technology, I have learned that what I go through when wrapping my head around a new tool is likely to be the experience of others slightly further down the road.

This is why I have been particularly interested in my own use of AI, especially relating to using AI to inform my decision making.

I have noticed a contradiction in my behavior when using AI and I suspect it is one that many of us share.

When I ask AI about a subject I know little about, I have a tendency to accept its recommendations and responses without question. Meanwhile, if I talk to it about user experience design or conversion optimization, I am much more critical of its responses.

I recognize its limitations such as its lack of context, its inability to pick up on subtle signals, and its fixation on one particular approach to the problem. Equally, I am much more aware of its proclivity to agree with me and to be overly confident in its responses.

The conclusion is obvious. If I am not impressed by AI's responses on a subject I know deeply, I should not place too much trust in its responses on a subject I know little about. There is no reason to assume it knows more about a subject I am unfamiliar with than a subject I am an expert in.

Furthermore, this shows that in truth, AI's real world knowledge is still fairly limited. Sure, it might excel at every benchmark under the sun, but when it comes to the complexities of real world human decision making, it is relatively poor.

It doesn't know when to challenge and when to encourage, or when to ask for more information and when to just take action. It cannot make judgment calls or handle internal politics.

It is great at presenting options, but it lacks judgment in its recommendations. It can write a set of compelling cases for a subject, but it has no idea which will sway the decision maker.

But it has taken me, and I suspect all of us, time to identify the edges of what AI can and cannot do. This has been true of every new technology we have ever invented as a species. We are always exploring the edges of what is possible.

So, why do I raise this? Well, it is to encourage you that things will get better, because at the moment many people are not having a good time.

Take for example a member of the Agency Academy who was telling us about a meeting she had recently where the client was validating everything she said with Claude. Or others who have had their work picked apart by an AI.

Then, of course, there is the naive belief of some executives that AI allows them to avoid recruiting or even to lay people off.

Heck, I am even feeling the impact myself. The amount of coaching I have been doing has plummeted because of AI. Why hire a coach when you can just ask AI?

But I am not really worried about that. I am not worried, because I know it will pass, and it already is beginning to.

Like us early adopters, who have begun to identify the edges of what AI can do, everybody will eventually come to the same understanding.

In time, people will begin to trust the judgment of AI less than they trust the experts. They will realize that AI is most effective when it is used by those experts.

Apologies if you have heard me tell this story before, but when I was at university, desktop publishing became a thing. There was panic among those of us studying graphic design because suddenly anybody could create a flyer, brochure or poster. Why hire a graphic designer when you can just do it yourself?

And indeed, for a while it was tough, but in time people realized that although they had an amazing new tool, it didn't replace an expert. After one too many posters with Comic Sans and clip art, people realized that they needed a graphic designer.

So I would encourage you to be patient as people work out the limitations of AI, and to be aware of your own hypocrisy. You cannot get annoyed at people for using AI rather than trusting you, when you then use AI in the same way in other fields rather than asking an expert.

Don't get me wrong, people won't stop using AI, and I am not expecting my coaching levels to ever return to what they were before. But I am confident that in time people will realize that AI doesn't replace human judgment, understand the complexity of a work environment, or tell you when you are the problem, which trust me, I will do.

Most of my clients come to me with a problem. These can be wide ranging from “we are seeing large churn in our app” to “we cannot get stakeholders to sign off on vital UX work”. They are sometimes expressed as a user need such as “we need to make it easier for users to do X” or as a business need such as “we need to increase the number of users who sign up for our demo”. Or sometimes just a scream of frustration! Whatever the case, the ability to diagnose the root causes of these problems and address them is a core part of my role and, I would argue, the role of anybody who is working in digital.

Whether you are a product manager, UX designer, developer, marketer or business owner, the ability to troubleshoot these kinds of challenges is essential to being successful in your role.

Fortunately, no matter the trouble that needs ‘shooting’, there is an approach you can use to resolve the challenge. Admittedly, it takes practice, experience and nuances that are far beyond what I can cover here. However, hopefully I can at least point you in the right direction.

So, let’s take a real challenge that I often encounter and work through the process I use to troubleshoot and resolve it.

There are so many possible challenges I could use, but let’s pick one I hear all the time from marketing teams. They are running ad campaigns and yet they are seeing low conversion rates. They want me to help them understand why users are not acting and work out how to fix it.

Well, whatever the challenge is, the first step is to diagnose the problem.

Obviously that is easier said than done. But, normally I start by brainstorming a list of possible causes. For example, in this case, I might consider the following:

• The ads are targeting the wrong audience.
• The ad copy is not compelling enough.
• The landing page is not converting.
• Conversions are not being properly tracked.
• The post landing page experience is flawed in some way.

The list could go on, but you get the idea.

Next we need to identify which of the possible causes is the most likely to be the primary issue. Of course, it could be a combination of a few, so we need to bear that in mind. Problems are rarely black and white.

We can do this with good old fashioned research. We might look at the analytics data, carry out user testing or run a survey. The idea is to find supporting evidence that the problem is real and that it is the right one.

Once we are fairly confident that we have the right diagnosis, we need to zoom in on exactly the nature of the problem.

Let’s say for example that the problem turns out to be the landing page experience. Ads are well targeted, but the conversion rate on the landing page is low.

Well, what exactly is the problem with the landing page experience? Is it the design, the copy, the call to action or something else?

Identifying this might be done through years of experience, research or user testing. However we do it, we need a specific diagnosis before we proceed.

Now, at this point, most people will jump into fixing the problem, but that would be a mistake. Before doing that we need to ask, why that problem exists in the first place.

I mean think about it. Is there a marketer on the planet who doesn’t know that a campaign will underperform if the landing page experience is poor?

It’s easy to assume that the cause is incompetence, but that is rarely the case. Often there are underlying issues that have prevented the problem being addressed.

For example, the solution might be to have customized landing pages for each campaign. But there are often barriers that prevent this. Barriers like:

• A lack of design and development capacity.
• No template that can be used.
• An overly restrictive template that cannot be customized for a specific campaign.
• A lack of time to produce multiple landing pages.
• Technological limitations.
• Legal or compliance issues.

Again, I could go on.

**Identifying these blockers is the most important part of troubleshooting. **Giving them a new beautiful landing page will not fix the problem if they cannot use it. Your solution has to be practical within the constraints of the real world or you need to at least be able to make a compelling case for why these barriers have to be addressed.

This is where you need to get creative. Ideally you want to circumvent the barriers, rather than try to overcome them. This will prove far more successful and faster to do.

For example, it is not going to be easy to get more design and development capacity or replace the tech stack.

Instead, you need to look for workarounds that will get people 80% of the way there, even if it is not perfect. In the case of our landing pages, that might be to create a landing page playbook that teaches AI and marketers how to easily create high converting landing pages in minutes. A playbook that takes into account the constraints within which the organization operates.

In fact, this is such a common scenario I have a packaged approach to do exactly this. This is so much more effective than some report telling people everything that is wrong or a prototype showing best practice, because they don’t address the underlying barriers.

Of course, you cannot always circumvent the barriers. Sometimes they need to be overcome.

I came across this scenario recently. I recommended to a large charity that they needed customized landing pages for their fundraising campaigns. Unfortunately, their tech stack just didn’t allow for it without significant development investment and it just wasn’t a priority.

My job therefore was to make it a priority. I had to build them a business case that showed this was a job that should be done and done soon.

Step one was to gather evidence that the limitations of their tech stack were causing the organization real damage. We did that by running a test campaign with a custom landing page that did not use their tech stack.

This was easy enough to spin up with the help of AI, despite still plugging into the existing tech stack for the actual donation.

We tracked the number of people entering the donation flow and compared it to the numbers from previous campaigns. The uplift was significant.

Despite poor tracking of average donation amounts, and lifetime value of donors, we were able to make some estimates about the financial impact of the improved landing page. Or put another way, we were able to estimate how much the barrier (existing tech stack) was costing the organization for each and every campaign they ran.

These figures, alongside our proof of concept test, could be rolled into a business case alongside a small ask that the fundraising team be allowed to create landing pages separately from the existing tech stack, until resources were available to fix the issue.

Notice I didn’t suggest the whole tech stack should be replaced. Neither did I demand development resources should be allocated immediately. Instead I suggested a small, temporary solution that would allow the organization to recover the money lost to the tech stack.

So, you have a solution that survives contact with the real world. But, that is not the end of the job.

Yes, this is the point where everybody wants to move on, and I understand why. The fix has shipped, the pressure is off, and there is always another problem waiting. But, if nobody goes back to look at the numbers, you have no way of knowing whether you diagnosed the problem correctly or simply got lucky. You also throw away the evidence that would have made your next business case much easier to win. So, agree up front what you are going to measure and when you are going to look at it again.

In our landing page example that might be the conversion rate per campaign, the point where people abandon the page, or the number of campaign pages the team manages to produce in a month. Pick 1 or 2 numbers, write down where they sit today, and put a date in the diary to revisit them. If the numbers have not moved, you have not solved the problem, you have only relocated it.

If you take nothing else from this, take the order of the questions.

1. What do we think the problem is?
2. What evidence do we have that it is the real problem?
3. What exactly about it is broken?
4. Why has nobody fixed it already?
5. Can we go around that barrier, or do we have to knock it down?
6. How will we know whether it worked?

Yes, most of us can answer question one in our sleep. But, the value sits in questions four and five, and those are the two it is easy to skip on the way to a nice slide deck of recommendations.

I am not going to pretend this is quicker than firing over a list of improvements. It isn’t. It involves awkward conversations about why the obvious fix has been sitting undone for 3 years, and those conversations are rarely fun.

But, advice that nobody can act on is just an expensive opinion, and I have written more of those than I care to admit.

It is also difficult when you work in-house. There are politics and hierarchies to navigate. That is where getting some outside help can make a difference. They sit outside of those structures and tend to be seen as more impartial.

So if you are struggling with a barrier that needs to be circumvented or a problem that you just cannot solve, give me a shout.

I've sat through plenty of meetings where someone made a genuinely good case for UX work and got precisely nowhere. On more than one occasion in the past that someone was me. I have found myself standing in front of a slide covered in personas while the finance director quietly lost the will to live. The work was solid, my arguments were rubbish. But over the years I have learned.

You see, most in-house teams lose this argument because they make the case for UX in the language of UX, to an audience that has never once been rewarded for caring about it. So senior managers nod politely, agree that it all sounds very interesting, and then fund the project that turned up with a number attached to it.

So I want to walk through how you build a business case for UX work based on my years of mistakes. I am not necessarily talking about a formal document with a cover sheet and an approvals matrix, but any argument solid enough to get the work you need signed off.

And why would they? You don't care about health and safety, and you'd glaze over inside 30 seconds if the accounts team started walking you through their reconciliation process, however lovely their diagram. Everybody has their own patch and defends their own patch, and UX happens to be yours, which means the translating is your job rather than theirs.

That means selling UX rarely involves talking about users at all, which I admit feels like a small betrayal of everything we bang on about at conferences. Yes, talking about users is how we do the work. But, talking about business risk and opportunity is how you get permission to do the work in the first place.

A good business case leads with the risks and opportunities your proposal addresses, and the framing you pick depends enormously on the mood of the organization you happen to work for.

If you're in a big, established, comfortable business, the risk of doing nothing is your strongest card, because these organizations have plenty to lose and a deep institutional fear of losing it. Talk about customers drifting to competitors with a better signup process, or support costs climbing because the website can't answer a simple question.

If the business is newer and hungrier, flip it around and sell the upside, because nobody in a fast-growing company is lying awake worrying about protecting what they already have. There the conversation is about the sales you could win, the markets you could reach, and the growth currently leaking out of a checkout nobody has looked at properly.

Before you write a word, get clear on whose signature you need, what that specific person is measured on, and how your proposal makes their year easier. Business goals are useful, but personal goals are what get budget released, and the person approving your work has targets, a boss, and a nagging worry of their own.

The emphasis shifts depending on where you work, and in my experience it breaks down roughly like this:

But, cost savings work almost everywhere, and they're badly underused by UX people who would rather talk about delight. Fewer support calls, less staff time spent on manual workarounds, and fewer expensive rebuilds are all things a CFO understands without any translation from you.

Wherever you can, tie your case to hard figures, and don't let the fact that they're estimates stop you. Be honest that they're estimates, explain the assumptions behind them, and offer to do a more detailed analysis if the decision hinges on it. A rough number invites a conversation, while no number invites a polite no.

If the maths makes you nervous, I built an ROI calculator that does the heavy lifting for you, so you can walk in with something more persuasive than a strong feeling.

Beyond the numbers, get people excited about what's possible, because approval is an emotional decision dressed up in a spreadsheet. Vibe code a rough prototype, mock up the improved journey, or build something shiny that stakeholders can see and immediately want. I've watched a scrappy 2 day prototype do more for a business case than 40 pages of analysis ever managed.

Strip away the formatting and every decent business case answers the same handful of questions:

Those last two points are where most business cases die, usually because they ask for too much in one go. Focus on reallocating resources you already have rather than requesting new money, especially at the start, because moving a designer onto a project for 3 weeks is a much smaller decision than approving a budget line.

Don't ask anyone to sign off on the whole plan either. Build momentum with a small first step, whether that's a prototype, a limited pilot, or a focused piece of research, and make sure it's something you can deliver quickly so people see progress while they still remember agreeing to it.

Then define, up front, what results would justify committing to the rest, so the next conversation becomes a matter of pointing at evidence everyone already agreed would be convincing.

None of this is as satisfying as being handed budget because the work is obviously the right thing to do, and I spent years waiting for that to happen. It never did, so I learned to talk about money instead, and the UX work finally started getting approved.

If you've got a case to make and no idea where to start with the figures, I can actually help with the process. You can learn more here.

I spent a good chunk of my career insisting that proper UX work should only be done by proper UX people, and I told myself that was about protecting quality, when honestly a fair amount of it was about protecting my own job description. I would sit in a meeting, watch a product owner sketch a screen on a whiteboard, and feel a small internal wince, as if they had wandered into my kitchen and started rearranging the crockery. It felt professional at the time. It was territorial, and it has not aged well.

These days I find myself telling clients something that would have horrified younger me. If you want better digital products, the answer probably isn't sending more work through your UX team. It's changing what you employ them to do.

You have almost certainly seen this happening inside your own organization. Somebody without design in their job title describes an idea to an AI tool and comes back a few hours later with a clickable prototype, realistic content, passable copy, and a flow that mostly hangs together. Developers are generating interface options before the ticket is even refined. Marketers are building and testing their own landing pages. Product owners are turning a rough thought into something demonstrable over a lunch break.

Some of that work is genuinely good. Some of it is a small mountain of plausible looking rubbish that nobody has the expertise to spot. All of it is happening whether the design team blesses it or not, and it happens fast, which means it usually arrives before anyone thinks to involve them.

I understand the temptation. The team is expensive, the tooling has made production cheap, and somebody senior is asking what the return on all that research actually is. So the headcount that leaves doesn't get replaced, the budget line gets trimmed, and the design team's seat at the table quietly becomes an invitation to comment on decisions after they have been made.

What you lose in that trade is judgment, and it shows up about two quarters later. Every team invents its own version of the same pattern, so the product starts to feel like it was assembled from three different companies. Accessibility problems accumulate because generated interfaces look fine and fail quietly. Decisions get made on assumption rather than evidence, so you build things nobody wanted and only find out after launch. Rework becomes the largest hidden line in your delivery costs, and nobody attributes it to the design cut that caused it.

The organizations getting this right aren't the ones with the biggest design teams. They are the ones who moved their design people upstream, away from producing every screen and toward setting the conditions in which everybody else produces decent ones.

The version of this role that earns its keep looks less like a traditional designer and more like a conductor. Rather than routing all design work through a small team and watching a queue form, you fund that team to build the tools, standards, and guidance everyone else needs. Quality gets protected through what you hand people, rather than through gatekeeping that colleagues will route around anyway.

In practice that means investing in a handful of assets.

Alongside those assets, the team offers services rather than delivery. Open office hours for anyone about to build something, quick audits of work in progress, coaching for the team that keeps getting it wrong, training for the people who want to get it right. They still take on the genuinely hard, high risk design problems, but they stop being the only route to a wireframe.

None of this survives contact with the existing performance conversation, because most design teams are still measured on throughput. If you judge them on how many screens and tickets they got through, they will keep behaving like a production line and the queue will reappear within a month. Measure adoption of the design system instead, along with reuse of existing research, and the quality of what non-designers are shipping without help.

The hiring mix shifts too. You need fewer people whose main strength is producing polished interfaces, and more who can think about systems, standards, research operations, and how to influence colleagues who don't report to them. Give them the authority to set standards that hold across teams, and get them into decisions early enough to shape what gets built rather than tidy it afterward.

Ask whoever runs design for you what people keep coming to them for, week after week. Not what they think colleagues should want, the requests that genuinely keep landing. Then fund turning one of those into something the rest of the business can use without them. One playbook, one documented pattern, one persona people can question. See what it does to the queue, and do the next one.

The uncomfortable part is that a team working this way looks less busy for a while, and busy has been our proxy for valuable for about two decades. That freed up time is the whole point, because it's where the strategic work finally happens.

There is considerably more to it than I can fit in an email, which is why I have put together a free course on exactly this. Fourteen short lessons on shifting from doing the work to directing it, with the workshop slides thrown in. You can sign up here, and it's worth forwarding to whoever leads design for you. If you think I've got any of this wrong, hit reply and tell me, because I'm still working out how much of it I have.

Every website and app I’ve worked on has eventually developed the same problem. It accumulates content, features, navigation options, and stakeholder requests until everything is apparently important.

Top task analysis identifies the tasks, questions, and features your audience values most. Rather than asking people whether they like a particular idea, it forces them to prioritize what matters.

Top task analysis adds prioritization. Participants choose the 5 tasks that matter most to them and then rank those choices. That gives you a clearer picture of relative importance rather than a pile of individually reasonable requests.

It is 100% free, and I intend to keep it that way.

The app will collect and organize the evidence, but it won’t decide what your interface should become. You still need to interpret the results, balance competing needs, and make sensible design choices.

I’m also launching the app on Product Hunt today, complete with a short video showing how it works. If you have a moment, please take a look at the launch and let me know what you think there.

View the app on Product Hunt

One of the most dangerous mistakes I see people make with their websites is fixating on what the competition is doing.

Don't get me wrong. Competitive analysis is a valuable part of any digital strategy, but there's a fine line between being aware of the competition's strengths and weaknesses and letting them dictate your own direction.

That's the danger here. Very quickly you can go from a healthy interest in your competition to essentially copying them every step. And if you fall into that trap, the inevitable result is that you're always going to be one step behind them.

Not that anybody ever sets out to copy their competition, but it's insidious and it can happen without you even noticing. It starts out with a competitive review and then quickly moves to "Well, none of our competitors do that," or "Everybody has this kind of information architecture, so we should too," and before you know it, you've created a clone of your competitors.

But this isn't just the worry of being one step behind your competition. There are two other considerations here as well.

First, you quickly find that in some sectors all the companies end up looking the same, as they all copy one another, and so your site does nothing to stand out from the crowd, making it largely redundant.

Secondly, and in my opinion more importantly, there's a false premise behind the desire to copy the competition. That's the belief that your competitors somehow know how to do things properly and that we should learn from them. There's an assumption that they've done their research, that they've made good decisions, which in my experience is simply not true.

Now I know what you might be thinking. "Our competition is much bigger than us. They've got more resources and more time, so surely they're making good decisions based on real data, and we can learn from that." However, that's rarely the case. I've worked with many large enterprise organizations, and to be frank they're just as disorganized, inefficient and over-stretched as their much smaller competitors.

And then, of course, there's the fact that you are not your competitors. Although you may be very similar, every organization is unique and needs to approach the market in a different way. If your competitors really are bigger than you, then you're not going to have the same success adopting their tactics.

However, in many ways, all of this is a distraction from the real reason that most people want to copy their competition. That's the fact that you don't get in trouble for doing what your competitors have done. They give you a point of reference that you can point at and say, "Well, they did this and it obviously worked for them." Of course, the chances are that's not actually true, and the very feature you're copying could well be underperforming for your competitors. Nevertheless, you have a justification for your actions.

But copying the competition is not the only justification you can use. Far better is to carry out your own research into user needs and behavior and base your decisions on that. Even if that research is just desk research, carried out online using the help of AI deep research tools like Perplexity.

And if you really need to see a particular approach working in the real world, then I'd encourage you to look outside of your sector, where there are ample opportunities for you to find ideas that could be truly innovative in your own.

So the next time you find yourself tempted to reject an idea because a competitor hasn't adopted that approach, or to implement a feature you've seen on a competitor's website, I'd encourage you to think twice. Because the best that approach can ever deliver is mediocrity.

I have had enough. I've spent a good chunk of my career nodding politely while a brand guideline told me to do something daft. Excessive use of all caps, color combinations that are unreadable and a complete lack of visual hierarchy in typography. I have seen all kinds of horrors and for a long time I went along with it, because questioning the brand felt a bit like questioning someone's child.

Lately, though, I've run out of patience.

I keep meeting people who use their brand as a reason not to change anything. The logo is sacred. The colors are locked. The fonts came down from a mountain on stone tablets. So the brand ends up quietly undermining the business completely untouched, because nobody wants to open that particular Pandora's box.

Don't get me wrong, I think branding matters enormously. Get your visual identity right, and it can shape whether an organization sinks or swims. I'm not one of those people who thinks design is decoration you sprinkle on at the end.

But a good brand has to earn its keep. It has to work in the real world, on a real phone, for a real person squinting at the screen in bright sunlight. Looking pretty isn't the job. Looking pretty while also being legible, scannable, and accessible is what matters.

This is where a lot of brands fall down. Somebody picked a color palette in a quiet studio on a lovely big monitor. It looked gorgeous. Then it hit the website, where it has to convince a distracted human to actually do something, and it fell apart.

Most branding is now seen online. That's where the majority of people meet your brand. Yet most branding agencies I come across still don't approach the work with a digital-first mindset.

Oh sure, they'll tell you they know about digital. They might even include the odd mock-up for a website or a social media platform. But they're not specialists in usability or conversion, and the gaps in their knowledge shine through. And they do zero testing, despite having access to all the same testing tools the rest of us in UX use every day.

They design for the brochure, the business card, and the launch presentation. The website is treated as one more place to paste the logo. So you get text baked into images, type that's beautiful at poster size and unreadable on mobile, and a palette that looks confident on a wall and washed out on a screen.

It's a slightly depressing way to build something that lives mostly online.

I've had two clients recently where the visual branding was genuinely not fit for purpose.

In one case it failed on accessibility. It flunked the legal tests, sure, but it also let people down in a simpler way. They just couldn't read it easily.

In the other, the brand was all over the place. It may well have started life as a decent identity, but years of inconsistent use had distorted it beyond recognition. Different rules on every page, no hierarchy, and nothing to guide the eye.

The symptoms are always familiar. There are walls of capital letters, which have been shown to cut readability by as much as 20%. There are color combinations that make body copy hard work. There's no typographic hierarchy, so headlines and sections blur together. And there are no visual containers, so the whole page becomes a soup of elements with nothing pulling your attention anywhere.

None of these feels like a disaster on its own. Stack them up and you get a page that quietly repels the very people you spent a fortune attracting.

Clients don't always take my word for this, which is fair enough. So recently I ran two versions of a homepage through an AI attention tool. The current brand-compliant design, and a tweaked version of mine.

The numbers were uncomfortable for the brand identity and the existing website. Clarity and focus both climbed by around 20% in the new version. Predicted engagement with the main call to action jumped by more than 80%.

Same content, same offer. The only real difference was loosening the grip of a brand that was fighting the reader instead of helping them.

That's the conversation I would encourage you to have. Not "is the brand sacred," but "is the brand costing us more than it benefits us." At some point you have to decide which matters more. Honoring a set of brand assets that were never designed for the web, or actually converting the people who land on your site.

You don't need to burn the brand to the ground. That's rarely the answer, and it's rarely on the table anyway.

Start small. Look at where the brand and basic readability are openly at war. Look for restrictive layouts, poor image choice, low-contrast text, and headlines you can't tell apart from the body copy. Fix those first, and you'll usually claw back most of the benefit without getting into a complete rebranding exercise.

While you're at it, do the testing those branding agencies never bother with. You don't need a big research budget for it. A couple of cheap, practical checks will tell you most of what you need to know:

Then push for one slightly braver conversation. Ask whether the brand was ever really designed for the screen, or just retrofitted onto it. If the honest answer is the second one, you've got a case for a proper digital-first refresh rather than another round of polishing something that doesn't work.

And if you're the one clutching the brand guidelines like a holy relic, I'd gently suggest having a word with yourself. I've been that person. The brand is meant to serve the business, not the other way around. The moment it starts costing you customers, it's stopped doing its job, however nice it looks in a style guide.

I have lost count of the conversations that start the same way at the moment. Someone with a budget and a deadline leans in and says the business needs AI. Where, exactly? Everywhere. In the product, on the site, in the onboarding flow.

It's not that they've no idea what they want. They usually arrive with something in mind. The trouble is it's a half-baked solution to a problem that may or may not exist.

Push back and you're the difficult one, the blocker, the person who doesn't get it. Go along with it and you build a chatbot nobody asked for. Neither ending is much fun.

So I stopped arguing. Now I do something that works far better. I send the whole thing to the users.

When someone hands me a shaky AI idea, I don't tell them it's shaky. That's a quick way to make an enemy and lose. Instead I say something like this.

"That's a really interesting idea. I think there's something in it. Let me go away and test it with a few users so we build it in the right way."

Often that's enough. You sound keen, not obstructive, and the stakeholder feels heard. You've quietly moved the decision out of a meeting room, where the loudest voice wins, and handed it to the only people whose opinion really counts.

But sometimes they won't budge. They're so sure they've got it right that testing feels like a waste of time. When that happens, I fall back on one of two tactics.

The first is to ask questions. I throw a lot of very specific ones at them about how the thing should work. What happens in this case? What about that one? Before long they start to struggle, and that's the moment to step in. It will be quicker to ask a few users than to guess our way through all of this.

The second is to talk about risk. If we build this without testing, there's a real chance we go down the wrong path and waste the budget. So I ask whether they're happy to own that risk. In my experience, nobody ever is. The moment they hesitate, you've got your user research.

If the idea is hollow, the users will tell you, and you get to be just as surprised as your client. No bruised egos. Just evidence. And if the idea is solid, even better. You now know it's worth building.

But validation isn't a thumbs up or a thumbs down. The real prize is what you learn in those conversations. The same questions that tell you whether to build also tell you how to build.

When you sit down with users, you're not just asking "would you use this?" You're working out the shape of the thing. Three questions matter most.

Ask people how much say they want over what the AI does on their behalf.

Some will want to set it and forget it. They'd happily never see it. For them, the best answer is an invisible solution. No interface, no buttons, no chat window. The AI gets on with the work in the background and the problem quietly goes away.

Others will want their hands on the wheel. They don't trust a black box making choices for them, and fair enough. The moment people want control, your invisible solution becomes a visible one, and you've got an interface to design. You only know which camp they're in because you asked.

If it does need to be visible, the default everyone reaches for is text. That's usually the client or stakeholder talking, not the user, and it's rarely a deliberate choice. They land on text because it's familiar, not because it gets the point across best. This is exactly where asking the user opens things up.

Ask users what they're actually trying to understand. Often a chart, a simple dashboard, or a quick visual does in a glance what a paragraph fumbles. AI is getting genuinely good at generating that sort of thing on the fly, so there's no reason to settle for a wall of prose when a graph would land faster.

There's one last thing to ask, which is how people want to interact with it. Most will expect a conversation. Type a question, wait, read the answer, type again.

For plenty of tasks that's slower and more irritating than the alternatives. A few form fields can beat a back-and-forth with a bot that keeps asking you to clarify. A dashboard can feel like the most natural way in the world to poke at data. Ask users how they'd rather do it, and many will tell you the chat box was never the point.

Notice what's happened here. You haven't had a single argument about whether AI belongs in the product. You've turned a turf war into a research question, and come back with answers nobody can wave away.

Maybe the project dies because users don't care. Maybe it lives, but as a quiet background helper rather than the chatbot your client pictured. Either way, the decision was made by the people who'll live with it, not by whoever was most confident in the room.

That's a far stronger place to design from. And it's a much easier life than being the one who's forever saying no.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 trouble with an all-quick-wins strategy is that the damage compounds out of view.

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.

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."

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is strange when you stop and think about it. The economics of retention have been well known for years.

You don't need to convince someone who's already bought from you. You just have to not screw it up.

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.

Retention falls into the gaps between all of them, which is a polite way of saying it falls on the floor.

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.

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.

Every one of those is a UX problem dressed up as a business problem.

The same goes for upselling. Customers buy more from companies that have nurtured them properly, where the experience has built trust over time. You can't bolt that on with a clever email campaign three months in. It has to be designed.

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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.

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A few starting points.

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:

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:

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.

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.