Field Notes
Field Notes
Essays, reflections, and working notes from research, strategy, accessibility, and design practice.
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The Material of Teaching
Teaching UX Research Through Practice I teach UX research as a practical discipline, not as a list of methods. The work starts before the framework, with a person trying to understand a page, complete a task, compare options, trust a service, or decide whether to continue. Sometimes the problem is explained clearly; more often, the…
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The Material of Desgin
Design is not only what appears on the screen. It is the behaviour a system produces, the decisions it encourages, the assumptions it hides, and the work it transfers to the user. This is why I think of UX research as a material practice — not only a process for collecting evidence, but a way…
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Agentic AI Reading Instrument
This experiment helps inspect short ideas about agentic AI through fixed critical lenses. Rather than simulating an assistant, it reads where delegation compresses context, assumes capability, and leaves hidden recovery work behind.
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EU Consumer Law and UX: The Consumer as Ecosystem
The law requires withdrawal to be as easy as purchase. The footer link fails this test on every dimension. The withdrawal button is a legal actor. When absent, the right cannot be exercised. When present with a deadline counter, it performs the law’s symmetry requirement on behalf of the consumer, making the safe action the…
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Rethinking Users as Ecosystems: My take
The central tension Youngblood and Chesluk’s framework exposes here is that holding the phone is not irrational from within the ecosystem — it’s the path of least resistance, it enacts social intimacy, and the body’s motor habit reinforces it.
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Interpreting Intent: When Agents Decide for Users
In planning meetings, it now comes up almost casually. Someone reports that a task is done, the agent took care of it, and the conversation moves on. Later, when the decision is questioned, there is a pause. No one remembers why that option was chosen. There is no error to point to, no rule that…
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From Chat to Control: Why AI Interfaces Need Symbols, Not Sentences
I was reading a short post by Jakob Nielsen when something clicked uncomfortably into place. His argument was clean. As AI agents mature, traditional user interfaces dissolve. Users stop navigating. They instruct. Screens become temporary. In some cases, they disappear. That claim is directionally correct. But it leaves a gap that matters in practice. If…
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Three Diagnostic Prompts for UX Research
The conflict: Speed of synthesis vs integrity of thinking LLMs are good at producing answers. They are not good at knowing whether a question deserves to be answered yet. In UX research, that distinction matters. Most failures do not come from bad solutions. They come from premature coherence: problems that sound right, outcomes that feel…
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The Self-Referential Loop
Self-referential loops give the illusion of progress but only circle back on themselves. In UX research, the challenge is to spot when insights are truly expanding outward, like a golden ratio spiral, and when they are simply repeating. Drawing on Umberto Eco’s semiotics, this essay explores how to break the cycle and keep discovery open.