Insights on Product Development

Sometimes the Best Chart Is No Chart: Designing Data Visualization for Generative AI

Ask an AI chatbot about your sleep and you will usually get a wall of text. As Kent Eisenhuth, Staff Product Designer at Waymo, put it in his UXDX USA 2026 talk, chatbots are “fairly verbose. They like to talk. They like to produce a lot of text.” Charts seem like an obvious solution. But Kent’s research found something more interesting: sometimes adding a chart actually made an insight harder to understand. During his time with the Google Fitbit team, now Google Health, Kent explored when vis

Simplifying Journeys Across Exploding Channels

Simplifying Journeys Across Exploding Channels Customers no longer begin their journey where brands expect them to. They might discover a product through ChatGPT, validate it through a creator, compare it through search, buy it in an app and pick it up in store. In her talk at UXDX USA this year, Sneha Narahalli, SVP, Head of Product & UX at Sephora explained why the next era of commerce is not about adding more channels. It's about making complexity invisible by designing around intent. When

How ITVX Turned Complexity into Cross-Functional Alignment

Design systems are often imagined as clean libraries, neat components and perfectly governed tokens. But inside large organisations, the real work is rarely that tidy. In her talk at UXDX EMEA 2026, Marianne Ashton-Booth, Head of Product Design and Design Systems at ITV, showed how ITVX learned to treat its design system not as a design library, but as an organisational operating system that helps fragmented teams move with shared purpose. The design system is not the hard part When people ta

Zero-Blocker Delivery: Closing the Design–Engineering Gap

“Gavin wasn’t trying to block the work. He was essentially trying to protect the team from uncertainty.” - Marcus Knight, Head of UX at N26 Most handoff problems do not start when engineering opens the file. They start much earlier, when design decisions are left implicit, edge cases are skipped and “ready for dev” means something different to everyone involved. In his talk at UXDX EMEA 2026, Marcus Knight, Head of UX at N26, showed how his team moved from tense design handoffs to a clearer, c

One Look, Many Stacks: How Siemens Keeps Hundreds of Products Recognisable.

"I have a really deep desire to combine those two design systems, but I can't do that in a way that alienates the very people who I depend on using it to meet my primary goal, which is products that are 100% recognizable." - David Sward, Chief Design Officer, Siemens That is not what most design system talks sound like. It is the Chief Design Officer of Siemens admitting that the designer in him wants one system and the business leader in him won't allow it. Most design system advice starts fr

How Allied Solutions Built a UX Team That Earned Influence

"How are we going to earn trust and gain influence throughout the organization so that we can help solve some of Allied's biggest digital problems?" That was the real question Ben Hewett's team had to answer, not the one they expected. When Allied Solutions started building its UX practice in 2018, Ben assumed the hard part would be redesigning a mountain of legacy software for the finance and insurance industry. He was wrong. The software problems were solvable. The harder problem was organis

If AI Can Build Products, What Are The Humans For?

AI can now write code, generate prototypes and ship functional products at a speed that would have seemed unrealistic even a year ago. But faster output does not answer the harder question: should this product exist at all? In his UXDX talk, Rory Madden, Founder of UXDX, explored where AI is already changing product development, where it still falls short, and why the future of human work may be less about producing outputs and more about owning outcomes. The uncomfortable question behind AI p

Designing for Agent Experience: Why AI Is Collapsing UX and DX

A lot of product development friction hides in plain sight. Someone has an idea, but before they can test it, they have to understand the tooling. They need to know where the work lives, how the deployment process works, what an error message means, who owns the system, and which undocumented rule they are about to break. For experienced teams, this can feel like the normal cost of building software. For everyone else, it can stop an idea before it starts. That was the tension Dana Lawson, CTO

Building the Next Generation of Software

AI does not just add a new feature to software but it changes what software is, how it is built and how fast teams are expected to move. In his talk at UXDX, Des Traynor, Co-Founder of Fin, shared the story of how Intercom rebuilt itself around AI, became Fin, and learned a hard lesson for every SaaS company: the next generation of software will not be won by better screens alone, but by deeper AI, faster teams and the courage to change everything. The company that had to change or die In Aug

How Pinterest Builds Visual Experiences That Connect

AI can generate endless answers, but inspiration is not the same as connection. In her talk at UXDX, Larkin Brown, Sr. Director Product Research at Pinterest, showed how years of human-centred research are being woven into AI-powered product experiences. Her message was clear: the future of visual discovery will not be built by AI alone, but by combining machine intelligence with the messy, subtle and deeply human ways people search for who they want to become. When people do not have the word

AI doesn't read your design system the way you do

By Robin Cannon, VP of Product, Knapsack Ask an AI tool to build a screen today and watch what it reaches for. Inside tools like v0, Cursor, and Figma Make, a model will generate a working interface in seconds — and most of the time it builds from whatever components it already knows, not from yours. Often that means shadcn/ui, the open-source library these tools ship with and were trained on. Your team spent two years on a design system — the shared rulebook for how your product looks and beha

Why AI Is Making Design Converge on the Same Look

By Anamol Rajbhandari In 1997, a small piece of software called Auto-Tune arrived in recording studios, built to do something narrow and technical, which was to nudge a slightly flat or sharp vocal back onto the note it had been reaching for. For an individual singer, the effect was close to magical, as someone who could mostly carry a tune but never quite land it could suddenly come out sounding clean and professional. Someone who could barely sing at all could be smoothed into something passa

Best use of AI Finalists: Three Teams Integrating AI

The Best Use of AI Award is for teams that have meaningfully integrated AI into their workflow or product. As a change in how they work, make decisions, or build better products. This year’s final three show three different ways AI can make a real difference:  * Intercom R&D, for making agent-first development part of how 500 people build and ship * Vodafone Ireland, for using AI to accelerate design thinking and move teams from assumptions to validated decisions * PageOn, for moving from Fi

Impact Award Finalists: Three Teams Turning Evidence Into Real Outcomes

The Impact Award is for teams whose evidence directly drove real outcomes, including user adoption, retention, and conversion. This year’s final three tell three very different but equally strong stories:  * All human & Power NI, for redesigning Help & Support to drive digital self-serve * De Gruyter Brill, for unifying two academic publishing platforms into one clearer experience * LiveEO, for helping utility teams make smarter vegetation management decisions and reduce outages What connec

The Unblocker Award Finalists: Three Teams That Increased Cross-Functional Collaboration

The Unblocker Award is for teams that successfully removed organisational, structural, or process barriers that slow cross-functional collaboration down, and can show the difference it made. This year’s final three are: * Delivery Hero - Cape Multibrand Design System: Connecting 10 Design Systems at Global Scale * PLUS - Ending Redundant Work on a Rotating Design Team * Heineken International - Unblocking Delivery Through Product Leadership Alignment Each one solved a different kind of bloc