I was standing in the back of house during a QSR site visit, headset on, listening to the drive-thru line work. The AI was handling it cleanly. A customer pulled up to the speaker, said what they wanted — no fumbling, no repeating, no "I'm sorry, could you say that again?" The order moved through. The customer pulled forward. From where I was standing, it looked like exactly what the industry has been promising: frictionless, fast, almost elegant. Then the POS went down. What

Voice AI keeps getting smarter. It keeps sounding wrong. The problem isn’t the script — it’s the invisible layer we haven’t designed for yet. There is a particular kind of frustration that comes from sitting in a room full of smart people trying to design voice AI by feel. The engineers are capable. The dialog flows technically work. And still, something is off — the system sounds cold, or slightly robotic, or wrong in a way no one in the room can precisely name. So the conve

Unlearning the habit that quietly dissolves design's authority Once upon a time, I was a young designer in a meeting that could have been an email. The problem was straightforward: a support team covering 30,000+ knowledge base articles across 14 countries needed a better way for people to find answers to common problems. Employees couldn't find answers fast enough — losing time, making mistakes, escalating tickets that should have closed in two minutes. The proposal was clea

We had petabytes of data, a swipe-right matching system, and results that kept coming back mostly men. Here’s what happened when I wouldn’t let that go. “What If It Was Like Tinder?” The room got quiet in the way rooms get quiet when someone says something that’s either brilliant or career-ending and nobody’s sure which yet. I was a brand new design leader — still carrying an IC design workload, still figuring out what “leading” actually meant in a company this size — when th

Learning the foundations of design and practicing what is uncomfortable is about arming yourself with the freedom of choice

Bad products behave much like zombies - they destroy, decay and ultimately ruin your day if you must interact with them.

Breaking down the dynamics of design is easier if you use food. So, let's design a doughnut.

Engagement is not a "set it and forget it" aspect of team culture, but a behavior that needs to be continually cultivated and cared for as..