What We're Getting Wrong About UX

Are UXers misunderstood? Yes. Yes they are. What can we learn from them though?

Author

Shiva Manjunath
May 16, 2025

Do product/CRO people REALLY know well? There may be some Dunning Kruger happening, and maybe we really don't get why they keep complaining about our initiatives.

I had the AMAZING Kate Moran, VP of Research and Content at Nielsen Norman Group, on the pod to discuss this!

We got into:

- What product teams/CRO can learn from UX, and vice versa

- Why product teams really need to focus on longer term relationships with the customer (and not chasing short term gains)

- Amazing (and not so amazing) use cases for AI in UX

What Are We Getting Wrong About UX? ft. Kate Moran

From A to B · Episode

open.spotify.com/episode/0rCjihxGDQps6DIKmJFeCc?si=_z8tZ1F9TOinBWREw_EHaA

Sometimes, users say they want something. But just giving them EXACTLY what they want isn’t always valuable. Why? Because sometimes they don’t always communicate EXACTLY what they mean.

Kate shares some amazing tips on how to go deeper than just the surface words to get to the meat of what they are ACTUALLY saying!

Latest Skit

Twyman's Law. That is all.

Latest Meme

This is a meme I made a while ago but I think it’s still funny. Shit, I KNOW it’s funny. Product owners shipping things while CRO is testing in the background is the perfect Yin and Yang.

Shoutout Erin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/erindoesthings/) and Els (https://www.linkedin.com/in/elsaertsuserresearch/) for modeling this meme for me at a conference - if you aren’t following them, you’re doing it wrong.

Us #CROs are your best friends, Product Owners. We gotchu. We will help you. Shoutout to Els Aerts and Erin Weigel for modeling for this meme.

www.linkedin.com/posts/shiva-manjunath_cros-experimentation-optimization-activity-7254824630689898496-a14e

Thing on my mind

Fixing analytics is fucking hard. But it’s one of the MOST important / foundational things you can do. Recently I’ve had a ton of bot traffic messing up my analytics reporting. Mostly, form visits. It wildly overinflated some metrics.

While I SIGH SO FUCKING HARD because now it’s some shit I need to fix, the important thing is that analytics isn’t a ‘one and done’. You have to keep on making sure it’s tracking properly. And as more things get added to the site, bugs can be introduced to tracking.

Have skepticism and checks in place to make sure your data is always tracking properly.

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