UX Field Note

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.