Beyond UX Design

This is the story of a senior UX researcher who builds the perfect persona to win over a stubborn steering committee. He’s warm. He’s helpful. He remembers your kid’s name. And a few weeks later, he starts leaving feedback in Slack.
What happens when your persona starts getting more buy-in than you do?
It’s that time of year again. Today, we’re stepping away from our usual interviews to bring you our annual Halloween audio drama.
This is the story of Dana Cole. A senior UX researcher with fifteen years of airtight, beautifully sourced research that nobody reads. So when her VP of Product asks for a persona that will finally make the steering committee feel something, Dana gives them Doug Whitaker.
Doug is a sales ops director from Naperville. He has a golden retriever named Biscuit. He gets your coffee order right without being asked. He’s the nicest guy in the room.
And Dana made up almost every word of him.
👻
Whether you’ve run a hundred research studies or you’ve just inherited a wall of personas from whoever had your job before you, this one should feel a little too familiar. It’s a story about personas, persuasion, and what happens when the most convincing voice in the building was never real to begin with.
So turn the lights down, grab your headphones, and give it a listen... If you dare!

Special thanks to our cast of characters:
Voice Actor Extraordinaire, Amie Breedlove: amiebreedlove.com
Actress and UX Designer, Stephanie Terrero: stephanieterrero.com
Co-founder inflight.co, Tommy Geoco: designertom.io
All-around swell guy, Hang Xu: thegistof.me/design
Sound engineer, Derek Seibert: pillowfortpodcast.com

—
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Somebody tells me the thing we shipped is amazing, and a voice in my head says I didn’t make it. In episode four, I take on Chris’s question: did I lose my identity as a designer? I dig into the craft I lost, the career unease it exposed, and where I’ve landed for now.
If AI builds what you describe and everybody calls it amazing, who actually designed it?
A while back, Chris sent me a DM that kicked off this entire season: did I lose my identity as a designer? I’ve been putting off a real answer for three episodes, and this one is where I finally stop dodging. I start with what I was most proud of, which for me was prototypes. I’m talking Axure-level, way-more-than-the-project-needed prototypes, and later, Figma files pushed so far past their limits that I’d burn days on them. That skill didn’t fade. The place it lived just doesn’t exist anymore. And with it goes the design file itself, the one artifact that held our uncompromised vision, which raises a question I don’t have a clean answer to yet: what does a portfolio even look like now?
The question also hit harder than I expected, and in this episode I get honest about why. Losing Figma pulled the covers off something that was already sore: years of low-grade career unease, two layoffs, a cross-country move, and a household where both incomes ride the same tech cycles. That’s how my buddy Kevin the plumber, a little New Orleans-style beignet window, and Peter Gibbons from Office Space all end up in this conversation.
Then I go back to that hollow compliment and put the bigger question on the table. Is a designer the hand that makes the thing, or the person who directs it? If the robot draws now and I direct, I might be sitting in the art director’s chair that designers spent whole careers complaining about. I’ll tell you where I’ve landed for now, and why it sets up a harder question for the rest of the season. If Chris’s question has been rattling around in your head too, give this one a listen.
Topics:
00:00 - When a compliment on your work feels hollow
03:00 - Why Axure prototypes felt like a superpower
04:15 - The skill didn’t fade, its home disappeared
05:15 - Why the design file felt more like ours
06:25 - What does a portfolio look like now?
07:15 - Layoffs and the mark they leave
08:50 - What Kevin the plumber has that designers don’t
10:05 - The beignet window fantasy
10:40 - Why Peter Gibbons had it figured out
12:55 - Same tool, different outcomes
13:15 - Is a designer the hand or the direction?
13:45 - Designers in the art director’s seat
15:05 - Did I lose my identity? My truest answer
16:10 - The market doesn’t care about identity
—
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If your disagreement feels obvious to you, why does everyone keep walking out of the meeting thinking you’re on board?
A Stanford researcher once had people tap out familiar songs on a desk and predict how often listeners would name the tune. Tappers guessed about half the time. Listeners got three out of 120. That gap has a name: the illusion of transparency. It’s our tendency to overestimate how much other people can see what’s going on inside us, like our nerves, our disagreement, our intentions, and our tone.
Thomas Gilovich, Kenneth Savitsky, and Victoria Husted Medvec put this bias on the map in 1998, building on earlier work by Dale Miller and Cathy McFarland. Across lying, hiding disgust, and reacting to someone breaking the rules, the result was the same. People believed their insides were showing, and they mostly weren’t. We confuse how strongly we feel something with how clearly we’re showing it.
On product teams, this one hides well because it feels like everyone else’s fault. I share a roadmap review where I was sure my crossed arms and pointed questions made my concerns obvious, and my PM walked away thinking I was totally fine with it.
This week, we look at how the same bias shows up in Slack tone, design critiques, performance feedback, stakeholder negotiations, and async work, and why the fix is almost insultingly simple: say the quiet part out loud. So if you’ve ever been blindsided by “but you didn’t say anything,” give this one a listen.
Topics:
• 00:00 - Tap out Happy Birthday on your desk
• 01:00 - What is the illusion of transparency?
• 03:00 - The roadmap review where nobody knew I disagreed
• 04:25 - Why we think our feelings are visible
• 04:55 - The research behind the bias
• 05:55 - Egocentric anchoring: why this happens
• 06:30 - The spotlight effect and the curse of knowledge
• 07:00 - Can knowing about the bias fix it?
• 07:45 - Why your Slack tone gets misread
• 08:10 - The thumbs up emoji problem
• 08:55 - Design critiques and "obvious" rationale
• 09:15 - Why your feedback isn't landing
• 9:40 - Stakeholder negotiations
• 10:00 - Remote and async work turns it up to 11
• 10:45 - The insultingly simple fix
• 11:05 - Assume you're harder to read than you feel
• 11:45 - Say the obvious thing out loud
• 12:15 - Make feedback impossible to misread
• 12:50 - Read their words, not their face
• 13:20 - Build check-backs into async work
—
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When my team moved from Figma to Cursor, we gave things up on purpose. In this episode, I walk through the real ledger: lost visual history, the comment threads that held our why, a rejected pull request, and what we gained by designing with the real product instead of a picture of it.
When your design team trades the canvas for code, what actually disappears, and is what you get back worth more than what you lost?
A few months ago, I designed a full-page drag and drop interaction, cut it for a technical constraint, and then went looking for it a month later when that constraint disappeared. It took me 15 minutes and an AI assistant to dig it out of an old pull request. In Figma, it would've taken under a minute. And if a year had gone by, or I'd left for Costa Rica to take up surfing, nobody would've known it existed. That little treasure hunt is where this episode starts.This is episode three of "What Survives: When AI Comes for Your Design Work," and it's all about the trade-offs. I get into what my team lost when we left a canvas design tool behind: the visual iteration history that came for free, the comment threads that quietly held the why behind our decisions, the blank canvas (which, as it turns out, may have been gone long before AI showed up), and a command line skill set I can feel getting weaker every day. I also take on a fair pushback from a listener named Elena, who argues teams rarely look back at old versions anyway.But it's not a horror story. I talk through the other side of the ledger too: turning six months of Figma work into working, production-ready pages in days, the rejected PR that made me wonder if we were just cosplaying as engineers, and how we found our lane with engineering afterward. If your team has made the switch, or is about to, give this one a listen and then tell me what you traded away.
Topics:
03:10 - The foundation nobody sees
04:10 - Not a picture of the design, the design itself
04:50 - Losing the visual history
06:15 - Recovering a decision, not browsing
07:40 - Where the why actually lived
09:05 - How we kept collaboration alive
09:45 - When tooling costs more than a human
10:20 - Was the blank canvas ever blank?
11:15 - Auto layout was already doing the work
12:15 - The skills I'm renting
14:10 - The other side of the ledger
14:45 - Months of Figma work rebuilt in days
15:35 - The PR that got rejected
16:30 - Finding our lane with engineering
17:25 - Saved time is contested territory
18:15 - Engineers weren't territorial
19:25 - Designer or UI engineer?
20:05 - Back to pen and paper
—
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This week we dig into belief bias, the reason your team grills the research it doesn’t like and waves through the stuff it already agrees with. Same evidence, two completely different levels of scrutiny.
If you’ve ever won an argument at work, how sure are you that you made the better case and not just the more popular one?
Belief bias is what happens when we judge an argument by whether we agree with where it lands instead of whether the logic actually holds up. If the conclusion sounds right, weak reasoning gets a pass. If it sounds wrong, suddenly everyone turns into a fact-checker. It’s one of the oldest reasoning errors on record, first noted back in 1928, but the study that set the template came in 1983 when Evans, Barston, and Pollard separated two things that usually travel together: whether an argument is valid and whether its conclusion is believable. People accepted believable conclusions about nine times out of ten, no matter whether the logic held.
On a product team this shows up everywhere scrutiny is supposed to live. The design direction everyone already likes gets a thin rationale waved through, while the unexpected one gets picked apart. A sloppy study that confirms the roadmap is “directionally useful,” and a solid one that threatens it is suddenly “not statistically significant.” The same point lands when a senior person makes it and stalls when a junior person says the exact same thing. The fix isn’t to distrust your gut. It’s to grade the reasoning before you look at the conclusion, notice when the hard questions only come out for answers you don’t like, and slow things down when the stakes are real.
Give it a listen and catch yourself before belief bias makes the call for you.
Topics:
• 00:00 - Same idea, two meetings
• 03:45 - Two research studies, same afternoon
• 05:05 - What belief bias actually is (and where it came from)
• 06:00 - The 1983 study that proved it
• 07:00 - Why it happens: fast belief vs slow logic
• 08:10 - Belief bias is not confirmation bias
• 08:40 - Where it shows up on product teams
• 10:00 - Does group discussion fix it?
• 11:20 - 5 ways to catch belief bias

—
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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.
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