Design and Travel

Zero budget. Timeline of yesterday. And a stakeholder asking if you can just ask ChatGPT instead. Here's the thing — they're not entirely wrong. In this episode, Jill walks through six free UX research methods, theme park edition, and shows how AI has quietly made most of them more powerful than ever. From mining hundreds of app reviews in ten minutes to guerrilla interviews in a theme park queue,...

Most UX personas have a dirty secret: nobody actually talked to them. Meet Sarah — 34, lives in Austin, loves hiking, frustrated by confusing checkout flows. You've made her. Jill's made her. We've all made her. And now AI can generate ten more Sarahs in under a minute. But here's the problem: AI personas sound real. They have quotes, backstories, and emotional language — and that makes them more...

Are your UX personas actually grounded in reality — or are they just AI-generated NPCs with convincing backstories? In video games, NPCs (Non-Player Characters) are the background characters that walk around, say scripted things, and just kind of exist in the world — they look alive, but nobody's really home. Sound familiar? That's exactly what most UX personas have become: scripted, made-up, and...

A/B testing used to mean picking two options, splitting your audience, and waiting weeks for results. AI just changed the rules — now you can test a thousand variants simultaneously while you sleep. But faster testing comes with a hidden danger: AI will optimize for the wrong thing if you let it. In this episode, Jill breaks down how multi-armed bandits, AI-generated variants, and real-time signif...

You're already inside the haunted house. You just don't know it yet. In this video, I'm using an unlikely metaphor to break down something every designer — and honestly every human — needs to think about right now.

Are you feeling like you're just clocking in and out at your design job? Let me help you identify if you've hit your UX plateau and if it's time to move on.