UX Murder Mystery

Config used to be a crime of passion. A room full of people who make the interface, gathered to celebrate the craft. So why did Config 2026 feel less like a craft conference and more like a platform-strategy launch wearing a craft conference's clothes? In this episode, we open the case file on Figma's annual conference and the identity crisis hiding in its own program. The keynote pitched a canvas...

Free. Free. Free. Free. You saw the ad. What you did not see was the free product they buried so you could not find it. There was a genuinely free way to file your taxes, and about a hundred million people qualified for it. Then one line of code told the internet it did not exist, and the company that ran it eventually walked away from the program entirely. The free product died. The paid one is d...

Join hosts Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden for a live recording of UX Murder Mystery, the show that investigates how good design dies. We take a real product, follow the evidence, and name what went wrong—part case file, part autopsy, all UX. Expect a notorious interface failure dissected in real time, plus the kind of unfiltered commentary you only get with a live audience in the room. Bring your h...

You pay for five streaming services and still spend forty minutes scrolling before you give up and rewatch something you have seen four times. Somewhere between the infinite scroll and a search bar that cannot find a movie you know for a fact exists, discoverability got quietly killed off. This week Brian and Eve open the case file on streaming search. The broken autocomplete. The recommendation e...

A hit show about a blind superhero. That a blind person could not follow. That is where this case opens, and it only gets stranger from there. Brian and Eve sit down with AI and voice design leader Yaddy Arroyo to open four files on the same victim: accessibility. A streaming giant that locked out the exact audience its hero represented. A usability legend who pronounced accessibility dead and pre...

Jess Lowry on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, why design keeps getting locked out of the rooms where AI is being built, and what diversity of thinking actually looks like on a team that wants to win.   ess Lowry expected to be excited about AI. After almost twenty years in UX, service design, and platform orchestration, she figured this was the moment design got to do its best work. Then she wal...

Six tech companies. Two weeks. One playbook. Brian and Eve walk through the lawsuits, settlements, and corporate meltdowns piling up across the tech industry, and trace the single defense strategy connecting all of them. OpenAI is named in three separate legal actions in six days, including a wrongful death suit over the F S U mass shooting and a wrongful death suit over a college student's overdo...

Somewhere on Reddit, a designer just spent five hours on a take-home assignment and got a form rejection. The field isn't dying in one place. It's bleeding out across the whole map. Brian Crowley and Eve Eden answer the questions UX practitioners are actually asking right now. Not the ones recruiters answer at conferences. The ones people post anonymously at midnight after their fourth interview r...

Two automakers. Multiple deaths. One shared cause: interfaces that prioritized looking like the future over keeping people alive in the present. Anton Yelchin's 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee didn't malfunction — it worked exactly as designed. Fiat Chrysler's monostable electronic shifter abandoned 80 years of muscle memory for a haptic gimmick that left 1.1 million drivers guessing whether their car wa...

Founders don't set out to build extraction machines. So how does the product vision get overwritten between seed and Series B? Jessica Murray joins Eve Eden and Brian Crowley for a founder-focused autopsy of the startup product lifecycle — why UX lives at the decision layer (not the interface), how engagement optimization quietly rewrites your product, and the one thing every founder should define...

Independent artists were told Spotify was a level playing field. It wasn't. While real musicians earn fractions of a cent per stream, Spotify seeded its most-followed playlists with fake artists through a secret internal program called Perfect Fit Content — designed to reduce royalty payouts to real musicians. Meanwhile, the shuffle you trust is engineered, the algorithm is pay-to-play, and Wrappe...

Brian Crowley goes solo to answer real questions pulled from r/UXDesign — covering the job market, AI, stakeholders, and what UX even means anymore.

The Case of the Double Murder Meta didn't just fail. It failed twice — in completely different directions — and both failures trace back to the same root cause: a company that designed for its own vision instead of its users. Crime #1: The Metaverse. $40 billion. Legless avatars. A platform nobody asked for, built to solve a problem Wall Street invented. By February 2026, Horizon Worlds was mobile...

Target built its brand on a simple promise: expect more, pay less — and for a while, it delivered. Inclusive sizing. Accessible stores. Diverse representation. It was a masterclass in mass customization — the idea that good UX could scale across every kind of customer. Then the backlash came. And Target blinked. In this episode, Brian and Eve are joined by J. Tod Fetherling — entrepreneur, healthc...

We covered these cases. Nothing is fixed. Some of it is worse. Brian Crowley and Eve Eden check back in on: SONOS Two years later, they just put back a button they never should have removed. IROBOT Bankrupt, acquired by China, and flagged as a national security risk. Your vacuum knows your floor plan. DATING APPS Match Group's own CEO admitted his apps prioritize metrics over experience. The swipe...

On October 1, 2013, the federal government launched Healthcare.gov — the digital front door to the Affordable Care Act, and the most ambitious e-government initiative in American history. By the end of Day 1, the site had crashed. By the end of the week, only six people had successfully enrolled. By the end of the audit: $1.7 billion spent, 60 contracts spread across 33 vendors, and not a single p...

Sonos shipped an unfinished app that broke thousands of speakers, wiped $500M in value, and took down the CEO. Brian Crowley and Eve Eden investigate one of the biggest UX failures ever. You spend thousands on premium speakers. They work beautifully for years. Then one update kills everything — your alarms vanish, your speakers disconnect, and you can't even adjust the volume. In this episode, hos...

A platform born from 9/11 grief to fight American loneliness — sold to WeWork, fire-sold during COVID, and now strip-mined by Bending Spoons. Meetup.com is one of the most heartbreaking UX murders we've ever investigated. In this episode, Brian Crowley and Eve Eden follow the evidence through three ownership changes in seven years, a broken RSVP system that's been ignored for over a decade, dark-p...

The Case of the Vanishing Humans The internet isn't dead. It's undead—still moving, still generating content, but its soul is gone. In this episode, Brian and Eve investigate the authentication crisis killing trust online. The victim? Authentic human interaction. The suspects? Platforms that prioritized engagement over verification, marketers who weaponized AI at scale, and now—AI agents themselve...

THE CASE: Surveillance Pricing -- Who's Setting the Price, Who's Being Watched, and Who's Really Paying You scan your loyalty card. You earn your points. You think you're getting rewarded. But what if the more loyal you become, the higher prices you're paying? In this episode, hosts Brian Crowley and Eve Eden investigate surveillance pricing with Stephanie T. Nguyen, former Chief Technologist at t...

How did iRobot go from a $3.5 billion robot vacuum empire to bankruptcy in just 4 years? We investigate the product failures, broken UX, and regulatory decisions that killed an American icon. The company that invented the robot vacuum market and sold 50 million Roombas just filed for bankruptcy. Now a Chinese manufacturer owns all their IP, home mapping data, and customer information. In this epis...

$14 Billion to Bankruptcy: The Wish.com Disaster In 2013, Wish.com promised to democratize shopping: designer looks for dirt-cheap prices, delivered straight to your door. By 2018, they were pulling in $1.9 billion in revenue. Their 2020 IPO valued the company at $14 billion, and they were spending millions on Super Bowl ads positioning themselves as the future of e-commerce. Three years later, th...

In 2011, Activision cracked the code that would print money for years: convince kids they needed to buy physical toys to unlock digital characters. Skylanders pioneered the "toys-to-life" genre, generating over $3 billion in its first three years and creating a new category that Disney, LEGO, and Nintendo would rush to copy. Then it all vanished. In this episode, hosts Brian Crowley and Eve Eden i...

The crime scene: A take-home design challenge. The victim: Fair hiring practices. The suspects: Well-meaning companies asking for "just a few hours" of strategic work. In this episode of UX Murder Mystery, hosts Brian Crowley and Eve Eden investigate how design challenges and whiteboard exercises went from legitimate evaluation tools to weapons of exploitation—with Christina Hamlin as our expert w...

CONTENT WARNING: This episode discusses suicide. We cover the death of Alex Kearns in the final segment (starting at 31:33). Crisis resources are listed below. If you're struggling with thoughts of suicide: Call 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) Text "HELLO" to 741741 (Crisis Text Line) You're not alone. Help is available 24/7. --- THE CRIME: When "democratizing finance" became gambling in disguise...