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- ⚰️ 7 Deadly AI Sins for UX Professionals & 🤔 Which Decisions Deserve Your Energy
⚰️ 7 Deadly AI Sins for UX Professionals & 🤔 Which Decisions Deserve Your Energy
This week: 7 Deadly AI Sins for UX Professionals; How to Know Which Decisions Deserve Your Energy, and Which Don't; The perils of preference testing, plus 4 guidelines if you must. Our podcast pick is Aryn Korpalski - Keeping Research Human from Brave UX with Brendan Jarvis, plus the latest job opportunities in research. And finally - join Research Lunch Club, now live in 33+ cities, before we send out our Sixth round of matches next week!
People of Research
October 23, 2025
🎤 Research Community
🚀 Research Lunch Club October Matches Are Coming!
We’re connecting researchers across 20+ cities around the world — from New York to London to Sydney.
From AI to cognitive science, ethnography to UX research, members are being matched in trios to share ideas, stories, and insights over lunch. 🍽️
Whether you’re a seasoned researcher or just starting out, there’s a seat waiting for you.
🍴 Why not start this weekend with lunch alongside two brilliant researchers? It’s networking made simple — tailored, fun, and over food. Check out this weeks highlight from the UK 🇬🇧 👇️
📰 Article Picks
🔗 7 Deadly AI Sins for UX Professionals: Tanner Kohler for NN/g outlines a framework of seven "sins" or temptations that UX professionals face when using AI, arguing that succumbing to them weakens skills and undermines quality work. He pairs each sin with a corresponding "virtue," such as replacing "Outsourced thinking" with Ownership, "Naïve trust" with Skepticism, and "Bland taste" with Originality. The article advises professionals to use AI as a partner for perspective rather than a guide for direction, citing NN/g's own use of a custom GPT for creating exam questions as a good example of automating repetitive tasks, and stressing that the goal is to maintain professional growth and rigor.
🔗 How to Know Which Decisions Deserve Your Energy, and Which Don't: Melina Moleskis for The Decision Lab explains why people often waste mental energy on trivial choices, a phenomenon driven by confusing the perceived difficulty of a decision with its actual importance. She introduces the impact-frequency matrix as a framework for sorting decisions into four quadrants to guide how much energy they deserve. Using examples like choosing a mattress (high-impact) versus bed legs (low-impact), Moleskis provides strategies for each quadrant—such as making category decisions for high-impact/high-frequency choices and delegating or setting defaults for low-impact ones—to help conserve cognitive resources for what truly matters.
🔗 The perils of preference testing, plus 4 guidelines if you must: Molly Malsam argues that preference testing in usability research is often fallacious and misleading because human choices are irrational and easily swayed by cognitive biases. She explains how the framing effect, choice blindness, the aesthetic-usability effect, and the decoy effect can lead to stated preferences that do not correlate with actual usability. Citing case studies where the preferred design performed worse on usability metrics and the classic Pepsi Challenge/New Coke debacle, Malsam provides four guidelines for researchers who must conduct such tests, emphasizing that independent, behavioral measures should always overrule user preferences.
🎙️ Podcast Pick
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We’re People of Research & Research Lunch Club - a global hybrid community uniting researchers across the industries, from UX Research to Behavioural Science. We connect, collab and grow. People of Research was created by @faysel.
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