Beyond UX Design

We remember what we learned but lose track of where it came from. I dig into source confusion, the memory quirk that quietly decides who gets credit on your team, whose research gets remembered, and why the person who repeats an idea usually beats the person who had it.
Have you ever watched your idea come out of someone else’s mouth twenty minutes later and get all the applause you didn’t?
Source confusion is the reason your team’s history gets rewritten without anyone meaning to do it. We hold onto what we learn and quietly lose the note about where it came from. Back in 1993, researchers Marcia Johnson, Shahin Hashtroudi, and Steven Lindsay laid this out as the source monitoring framework: memories don’t come with a tag saying where they originated. Every time you recall something, your brain rebuilds the source on the spot using clues like how vivid it feels or whether you remember thinking it through. And because the source gets rebuilt instead of retrieved, it can get rebuilt wrong. An idea you worked hard on feels like yours whether it was or not, and an idea that arrived easily in conversation leaves fewer clues behind, which makes it easy to lose track of who actually said it first.
On a design team, this quietly reshapes who gets credit, and credit is the whole game. It decides who gets trusted with the next big project, who gets promoted, and whose voice carries weight in the next planning meeting. The person who develops ideas out loud and in writing piles up credit, while the person who seeds an idea quietly and moves on gets absorbed into someone else’s story. The good news is that this is predictable, and predictable things you can plan around. In this episode, I get into how to work with it: attribute out loud and in writing, capture ideas before the room talks, keep decision logs with names on them, and build your own paper trail because your org isn’t going to do it for you. Give it a listen and see where source confusion might be quietly rewriting your team’s history.Topics:
• 00:37 - Why it isn’t stealing
• 02:27 - Flipping the scene around: how you fall for this too
• 03:24 - What source confusion actually is
• 04:04 - The memory-as-filing-cabinet myth and the source monitoring framework
• 04:40 - How your brain rebuilds a source from clues instead of retrieving it
• 05:45 - The Brown and Murphy round-robin experiment and cryptomnesia
• 06:55 - Schacter’s seven sins of memory: these are side effects, not bugs
• 07:15 - How credit gets absorbed in critiques and research
• 08:12 - How this quietly shapes who gets promoted
• 08:45 - Using it to your advantage: be the last confident voice in the room
• 09:15 - The defensive move: stop relying on anyone’s memory
• 09:38 - Why your boss won’t track credit for you
• 09:55 - What to actually do about it
• 10:20 - Write ideas down before the room talks
• 10:50 - Attribute out loud and in writing
• 11:20 - Make your own contributions and leave a paper trail
• 11:50 - Check the origin story before performance reviews
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At the end of April, my design team dropped Figma. As of May first, we've been one hundred percent in Cursor. Then a friend asked me if I'd lost my identity as a designer, and I couldn't answer him. This season, eight solo episodes, is my answer. Starts September 08.
If the tool that defined your career disappeared tomorrow, what part of being a designer would actually be left?
This season is different. No guests, no interviews. Just me, telling you exactly what happened when my team lost the tool that, for a decade, basically defined what it meant to be a designer. At the end of April, our Figma license got cut. It wasn't our decision. By May first, we were doing everything in Cursor, and I've been sorting through what that means ever since.
The whole thing kicked off with a DM from Chris, a longtime listener and a friend, who asked me a question I couldn't answer: do you feel as if you lost your identity as a designer? My first reaction was no, obviously not. My second reaction was that I didn't actually know. Across eight episodes, I'm going to work through it out loud. The day the call came down. What we traded away and what came back. Whether I lost something or just lost the story where the answer was easy. What's still mine when the robot does the pixel pushing. The economics nobody wants to say out loud. And the question that worries me most: if judgment is what survives, and judgment gets built by the exact work that's disappearing, who comes after us?
I'm not selling a tool, and I'm not selling a course. I'm a design lead who's actually living this, and I've got a lot to say. If your team has made this switch, or you can feel it coming, this season is for you. Follow the show so the first episode lands in your feed on September 08.
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Whoever puts the first number, the first draft, or the first design in front of the team quietly decides where everyone else ends up. This week I dig into why anchoring bias steers our estimates, redesigns, and negotiations more than we realize, and what we can do about it.
Ever set out to redesign a feature and ended up with the same product wearing a fresh coat of paint?
There’s a good chance you got anchored before the work even started.Anchoring bias is the tendency to lean too heavily on the first piece of information we encounter when making a decision. Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman named it back in 1974, and the effect is stubborn. Their famous Wheel of Fortune study showed that even a totally random number could pull people’s estimates toward it. Later research on experienced judges and real estate agents found the same pattern, even when the professionals swore the anchor hadn’t influenced them at all. That denial is a big part of what makes this one so tricky.
On product teams, this shows up constantly. The first draft of a PRD sets the frame every reviewer edits around. The old design becomes the gravity for the new one, and a supposed redesign quietly turns into a reskin. The first estimate in a planning meeting drags everybody else’s numbers toward it.
This week, on the Cognition Catalog, I walk through where anchoring comes from, why willpower and expertise barely help, and a handful of specific moves you can make to keep the first thing seen from automatically becoming the thing that wins. Give it a listen and let me know if you’ve caught yourself getting anchored lately.
Topics:
• 3:00 The Two-Week Estimate Trap
• 4:45 What Is the Anchoring Effect?
• 5:20 The Wheel of Fortune Experiment
• 6:20 Why We Stop Adjusting Too Soon• 7:15 Even Experienced Judges Get Anchored
• 8:10 The Real Estate Study• 9:00 How First Drafts Frame Everything
• 9:35 Why Redesigns Turn Into Reskins
• 9:55 The Status Quo Is an Anchor Nobody Chose
• 10:30 Using Anchoring on Purpose
• 11:25 Why Willpower Doesn’t Fix It
• 12:00 Five Things to Try With Your Team
• 14:30 The Bottom Line
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Jeremy catches up with friend of the show, Chris Nguyen, who’s rebuilt his business twice since his last appearance. They talk about why designers can’t count on job security the way they used to, what it actually takes to build something of your own, and why the perfect plan is a myth worth abandoning early.
If you can’t count on your job to protect you, what are you doing to protect yourself?
Chris Nguyen has already rebuilt his business once since he last joined the show, and by the time this episode airs, he’ll be in the middle of doing it again. He built UX Playbook into a recognized education brand, tried a community project called Backlog that fizzled out, took several months off to recover, and landed on Rectangles: a live-stream and newsletter brand built around the design conversations he wishes he’d had years ago. None of it happened on a straight line, and that’s kind of the point.
Jeremy and Chris talk candidly about why designers can’t afford to treat a single employer as their whole safety net anymore. Jeremy’s own team recently made a drastic tooling change that upended how designers on his team work day to day, and he connects that disruption directly to a bigger argument: if the ground can shift under you that fast, having something outside your job, whether it’s a side project, a creative outlet, or a small business, isn’t optional anymore. It’s how you stay steady.
The conversation keeps circling back to a simple, unglamorous truth: nobody has the plan figured out in advance. Chris talks about sitting on the Rectangles idea for the better part of a year before finally committing to a two-week sprint to get it out the door, and admits he still doesn’t fully know what it’ll become. Jeremy pushes on that idea with his own reflections on burnout, reinvention, and why doing something just for yourself, outside of work entirely, might be the most stabilizing thing a designer can do right now. Give this one a listen if you’ve been sitting on an idea and waiting for the right moment.
Topics:
• 03:16 – Catching up on 100 episodes and the never-ending edit grind
• 05:33 – What Chris has been building since his last appearance
• 06:20 – The funk, the time off, and the shift from product to media
• 09:37 – Why running a media company means the content is the product
• 11:36 – Chris breaks down what Rectangles actually is
• 14:04 – Going beyond UX and UI into big D design
• 15:26 – The early 90s aesthetic behind the Rectangles brand
• 20:10 – Why Jeremy’s team just walked away from their Figma license
• 22:42 – Designing straight into Cursor with a component library
• 29:20 – The case for building income outside a single job
• 32:36 – How UX education content has changed as the industry shifts
• 34:22 – The unglamorous side of building something online
• 52:56 – Why a latte art post outperformed a bias breakdown on LinkedIn
• 57:03 – Chris’s closing advice on ideas versus execution
• 58:23 – Consumption versus creation and why the balance matters
• 58:43 – Where to find Chris and the Rectangles launch details
Helpful Links:
• Connect with Chris on LinkedIn
• Subscribe to Rectangles
• Get your UX Playbook
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Your team isn’t just avoiding risk, they’re avoiding the unknown. In this episode of the Cognition Catalog, I break down the ambiguity effect: the cognitive bias that makes unfamiliar ideas, tools, and people feel like threats before anyone’s even evaluated them on their merits.
Have you ever watched a genuinely strong idea get quietly buried in a planning meeting?
Not because anyone argued against it, but because nobody could fully picture how it would play out?
The ambiguity effect is what happens when our brains treat “I don’t know” as “probably bad.” It’s not the same as avoiding risk. Risk is when you know the odds, and they might not be in your favor. Ambiguity is when you don’t even know the odds, and that uncertainty is what our brains treat as a genuine threat. The research goes back to economist Daniel Ellsberg in 1961, who ran a simple thought experiment with two jars of colored balls and predicted that people would almost always choose the jar they could see clearly, even when the hidden jar was, on average, an equally good bet. Decades of follow-up research confirmed he was right.
In a UX or product context, this shows up constantly and quietly. It’s the familiar roadmap feature that beats out the bolder, fuzzier idea. It’s the proven engineering framework that wins over the newer tool that might actually be a better fit. It’s the new hire or new leader whose ideas get extra scrutiny, not because they’re weaker, but because you haven’t had enough time to read them yet. The bias doesn’t announce itself. It disguises itself as discipline and caution. In this episode, I walk through where the ambiguity effect comes from, how to spot it in your team’s decision-making, and a handful of practical ways to make sure your best ideas get a fair shot before the fog scares everyone off. Give it a listen.fds
Topics:
• 02:28 – How the ambiguity effect plays out in a planning meeting
• 03:59 – What the ambiguity effect actually is
• 05:00 – The Ellsberg experiment
• 07:05 – Risk vs. ambiguity, what’s the difference?
• 08:22 – How it shows up on your roadmap
• 09:49 – When the unknown is a person
• 12:10 – What to do about it
• 14:42 – Closing thought
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