Beyond UX Design

Your brain is wired to find patterns. That's mostly a good thing... until it's not. This episode breaks down illusory correlation: why your team sees connections that aren't there, and what you can do to stop making decisions based on a handful of vivid moments dressed up as a trend.
Have you ever watched your team make a confident product decision based on a pattern that, when you actually look at the data, barely exists?
Illusory correlation is the bias that turns coincidence into conviction. When two things happen close together -- even just once or twice -- our brains quietly file them as connected. The concept was first identified by psychologist Loren J. Chapman in 1967, who noticed that trained clinical professionals were reporting patient behavior patterns that statistically didn't exist. The problem isn't laziness or bad intent. It's just how human memory works. Rare or distinctive events get stored differently, and when two unusual things co-occur, the brain treats that pairing as meaningful -- even when it's pure chance.
In product and design work, this plays out constantly and in ways that feel completely legitimate. A feature ships and traffic ticks up the next day, so the launch gets the credit -- even though a competitor was down and marketing ran a campaign. Six user interviews produce two mentions of a feature, and suddenly that feature defines the whole persona. A few support tickets from one customer segment, and that segment becomes "a tough audience." The misses get forgotten. The hits stack up. And the team ends up navigating by a pattern that was never really there. This episode breaks down how illusory correlation sneaks into your metrics, your research, and your team dynamics -- and gives you a few concrete habits to start catching it before it shapes your roadmap. Give it a listen.
Topics:
• 02:20 – Personal story: the engineering lead I had all wrong
• 04:29 – What is illusory correlation?
• 04:46 – The origin: Chapman’s 1967 research
• 06:19 – Hamilton & Gifford: how the bias distorts how we see groups
• 07:10 – Kahneman & Tversky: why illusory correlations stick
• 07:50 – How it shows up in your product metrics
• 08:23 – The A/B testing problem
• 09:00 – How it distorts how teams think about people and segments
• 09:26 – How it corrupts user research
• 09:50 – Engineering superstitions and team dynamics
• 10:27 – Why more data isn’t always the fix
• 11:00 – Five habits to fight illusory correlation
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There's a gap between how designers see themselves and how everyone else sees them, and that gap has consequences. In this episode, a seasoned design executive shares what it really means to be a good corporate citizen, why design isn't the center of the universe, and how to show up differently.
What if the biggest thing holding your career back isn't your design skills? What if it's the way you think about your role inside the organization?
My guest today has spent years leading design within large, complex organizations—places like Truist, 3M, and Rocket—where designers are easily outnumbered by scientists, engineers, marketers, and businesspeople. He's navigated financial realities most ICs never consider, managed situations that don't appear in any design curriculum, and had to advocate for design without assuming it's automatically the most important thing in the room. The conversation we had is one I've been wanting to have for a long time.
We got into what it actually means to be a "good corporate citizen," not in a corporate buzzword kind of way, but in a real, practical sense. We talked about the perception gap between how designers see themselves and how the rest of the team experiences working with them, why designers are sometimes seen as a speed bump instead of an accelerant, and what it looks like when someone on your team finally gets it. We also got into design systems as a business asset, the realities of design leadership that ICs rarely see, and a concept I've been thinking about for years: followership.
If you've ever walked out of a meeting frustrated, dissented in the Slack channel instead of raising your hand in the room, or wondered why your work isn't getting the traction it deserves, this episode is for you. Hit play.
Topics:
• 03:58 - Andy's origin story: raising his hand at 3M
• 05:30 - "Design wasn't the center of the corporate universe, it was a contributor to success."
• 09:32 - Defining corporate citizenship
• 11:15 - Why design education sets us up on the wrong foot
• 13:25 - The two disconnects: hallway dissent and the speed bump perception
• 17:22 - What it actually feels like to work with a designer who doesn't get it
• 19:00 - Stop playing defense on ROI: start pointing to the metrics the org is already tracking
• 21:10 - What a mature designer looks like: signals Andy watches for
• 24:10 - Pair prompting with PMs and building relationships through AI tools
• 26:00 - "You can't build great software without great relationships"
• 29:19 - Design systems as a moat for the organization
• 37:05 - Treating your design system like a portfolio piece vs. a business asset
• 40:52 - What ICs fundamentally misunderstand about leadership
• 44:00 - Context switching and the emotional weight of being a design exec
• 47:55 - The case for async feedback: never wait for the one-on-one
• 51:05 - Followership: having a point of view and showing up with swagger
• 53:45 - The Sully Sullenberger story: "my cockpit"
• 55:00 - "Own your shit."
Helpful Links:
• Connect with Andy on LinkedIn—
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We've all been in that meeting: the one where everyone nods along and nobody says the thing they're actually thinking. That's not a personality flaw. It's a bias. This episode of the Cognition Catalog breaks down social desirability and what it's quietly costing your team.
Have you ever walked out of a meeting knowing you should have said something, and then watched the project stumble over the exact problem nobody brought up?
This week on the Cognition Catalog, we're talking about social desirability bias, and no, this one isn't just about user research. It shows up in every standup, every retro, every meeting where somebody asks "any concerns?" and the room goes quiet. Most teams deal with this constantly. They just don't have a name for it.Social desirability bias operates through two mechanisms: impression management, the conscious effort to present yourself favorably when you feel like you're being evaluated, and self-deceptive enhancement, a subtler, largely unconscious tendency to give positively biased responses without even realizing it. The tricky part is that it doesn't feel like a bias when you're in it, it feels like reading the room. It feels like being a team player. The cost shows up later, usually in a missed dependency or a launch that underperforms for reasons everyone saw coming.This episode gets into why honest cultures aren't built through value statements, why the HiPPO effect makes all of this worse, and what you can actually do to start closing the gap between what your team thinks and what they're willing to say out loud. If you've ever left a meeting with more to say than you actually said, this one's for you. Give it a listen.
Topics:
• 03:36 - What social desirability looks like at the team level.
• 04:32 - Why it doesn't feel like a bias when you're in it.
• 05:19 - The two mechanisms: impression management and self-deceptive enhancement.
• 05:50 - The research behind the bias (Edwards, Crown & Marlowe).
• 06:24 - When self-presentation slides into self-deception.
• 06:49 - How team norms shape what people say — and remember.
• 07:57 - The HiPPO effect and why it makes everything worse.
• 08:27 - How toxic environments turn up the pressure.
• 09:02 - Why honest cultures aren't built through value statements.
• 09:29 - Notice when your team is performing instead of communicating.
• 10:01 - Build structures that reward honesty.
• 10:29 - Notice when you're performing agreement yourself.
• 10:55 - Push past the summary and into the specifics.
• 11:20 - Lower the social cost of being wrong.

—

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Your tools are solid. Your process is tight. But when a stakeholder pushes back, a workshop goes sideways, or a PM challenges your work, none of that matters. What matters is how you respond. Nikki Anderson joins me to talk about improv, structured play, and how to stay sharp when the messy stuff hits.
What if the most important skill in your UX career has nothing to do with design?
Nikki Anderson is a UX research consultant, founder of Drop-In Research, and one of those rare people who can draw a straight line between improv comedy and stakeholder management, and actually make it land. She started doing improv around the same time she got into UX research, originally to overcome a lifelong fear of speaking on the spot. What she found was that the principles she was learning on stage translated almost perfectly into the conference room.
In this conversation, we get into the specific places where UX professionals tend to flail, and it's not where most people think. It's not the research plan or the prototype. It's the high-stakes meeting where everything's riding on one presentation. It's the design critique that spirals into defensiveness. It's the moment a stakeholder blames you for something and your fight-or-flight kicks in before your brain does. Nikki breaks down how improv—and specifically the "yes, and" mindset—isn't about blind agreement. It's about accepting reality, staying curious, and choosing to investigate rather than argue.
We also get into structured play, the idea that creativity doesn't just need freedom, it needs a container. Nikki makes the case that the most productive meetings, critiques, and workshops aren't the loose, open-ended ones. They're the ones with clear intention, playground rules, and maybe a little "draw a duck" warm-up before anyone starts giving feedback. If you've ever felt like the soft skills side of this job was something you were just supposed to figure out on your own, this one's for you. Listen in.
Topics:
• 04:00 - Nikki's improv origin story.
• 07:12 - Where UX professionals flail: the high-stakes meeting trap.
• 10:30 - The skepticism around "yes, and" — and what it actually means.
• 13:50 - Structured play and why it matters at work.
• 16:20 - Ambiguity and mismatched expectations: improv as a tool for dealing with them on the fly.
• 17:21 - Live stakeholder blame scenario: the "yes, and + investigate" approach in action.
• 22:45 - Applying improv to design critiques.
• 23:31 - Renaming critiques, setting playground rules, and warm-up exercises.
• 30:45 - Using improv to handle unexpected process changes.
• 31:30 - Accepting reality: the "yes" before the question.
• 35:55 - The control/no-control exercise for individual contributors.
• 38:10 - Creativity needs structure, not just freedom.
• 44:05 - Closing thoughts: take an improv class; nothing is an emergency.
Helpful Links:
• Connect with Nikki on LinkedIn
• Subscribe to the User Research Strategist
—
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Your brain doesn't show you everything around you — it shows you what it's been told to look for. In this episode of the Cognition Catalog, we break down the frequency illusion and how this quirk of attention can quietly warp how product teams spot trends, prioritize problems, and build roadmaps.
What if the trend your team keeps talking about isn't actually a trend — and your brain has been quietly manufacturing evidence for it this whole time?
The frequency illusion is one of those cognitive biases that feels like insight right up until it isn't. You learn a new term, you spot a new pattern, and suddenly it seems like it's everywhere: in your product, in your competitors' apps, in research you've been staring at for weeks. The information was always there. Your attention just finally got the memo.
In this episode of the Cognition Catalog, I break down how the frequency illusion works, where it came from (including the surprisingly colorful backstory behind the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon), and why it doesn't stop at UI patterns. The same mechanism that makes you see skeleton loaders everywhere after one design review is the same one that inflates a single customer complaint into what feels like a five-alarm fire on your roadmap.
The tricky part? It feels exactly like professional growth. And when an entire team gets primed on the same idea at the same time, that individual bias can scale into something much harder to catch. If you want to get better at separating what you're noticing from what's actually happening, this episode is for you.
Topics:
• 03:00 - The Inter story: how a LinkedIn post changed everything I saw.
• 04:00 - What the frequency illusion actually is.
• 04:30 - The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon and how it got its name.
• 05:00 - Arnold Zwicky coins "the frequency illusion" in 2005.
• 05:30 - Selective attention and confirmation bias: the two engines behind it.
• 06:30 - The recency illusion and how it compounds the problem.
• 07:00 - How the frequency illusion shows up in design critiques.• 08:30 - What to actually do about it: attention is not neutral.
• 08:50 - Watch for shared attention bias on your team.
• 09:20 - Don't let air time substitute for evidence.
• 09:45 - Create deliberate distance between discovery and decision.
• 10:15 - Surface what you're not seeing.
• 11:00 - Closing thoughts and listener question.
—

Thanks for listening!
We hope you dug today’s episode. If you liked what you heard, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts! And if you really enjoyed today’s episode, why don’t you leave a five-star review? Or tell some friends! It will help us out a ton.
If you haven’t already, sign up for our email list. We won’t spam you. Pinky swear.
• ⁠⁠Get a FREE audiobook AND support the show⁠⁠
• ⁠⁠Support the show on Patreon⁠
⁠⁠⁠• ⁠⁠Check out show transcripts⁠⁠
• ⁠⁠Check out our website⁠⁠
• ⁠⁠Subscribe on Apple Podcasts⁠⁠
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