Category: Field Note
Brief essays and conceptual sketches that don’t fit elsewhere. Often unfinished, always interpretive — these pieces hold tension, surface contradiction, and offer a space to think around the edges of UX practice.
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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.
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AI, Authorship & Discomfort
AI-generated writing often provokes stronger unease than AI images or music. This essay explores why: the Western legacy of authorship and originality, the role of authenticity in different art forms, and how cultural traditions shape our tolerance for machine-made creativity.
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AI, Language Gaps, and Equity
AI translation tools promise to undo the Tower of Babel, but performance gaps and cultural bias reveal a fragile unity. This piece explores how multilingual AI privileges dominant languages, risks erasing minority voices, and raises urgent questions of linguistic equity.
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Ethnographic Methods in UX
A single pause during shift handover revealed more than any usability test. This piece explores what ethnographic research in UX can uncover — not through more data, but through deeper presence. When rituals, silence, and space become part of the method, even small gestures resist easy translation.
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Heuristics as Reflective Practice
What if the heuristic is right, but the interface still fails? This article explores how evaluative tools can obscure as much as they reveal, and why reflection, not rule-following, is the real work of UX research.
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Silent Data: What We Don’t Capture
What if the most human parts of user behaviour don’t show up in the data? This article explores what pauses, silences, and gestures can teach us, and how analogue methods help us notice what digital tools often miss.
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Writing UX Research for Humans
Many UX research reports feel unreadable not because the findings are unclear, but because the writing flattens them. This piece explores how phrasing, tone, and narrative shape what gets heard — and what gets lost.
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UX Research and Sensemaking
When user findings conflict, it’s tempting to resolve the tension quickly. But what if contradiction isn’t a problem to fix, but a pattern to follow? This article explores sensemaking in UX research as a patient, interpretive process — one that holds ambiguity long enough for structure to emerge.