Research Lunch Club August matches went out at the end of July — members across 17 cities are booking their lunches right now. Join today and you'll be in the next round: no cold DMs, no scheduling back-and-forth, just lunch with three or four other researchers who get what you do.

🔬 Dogfooding vs. QA vs. User Research by Anna Kaley for Nielsen Norman Group: Dogfooding — using your own product internally — catches bugs, crashes, broken flows, and obvious feature gaps before users ever see them. It stress-tests the product in real work environments and builds shared ownership and empathy across teams. But it can't replace user research: internal teams know far too much about the product to represent real users. The core distinction is that dogfooding answers whether the product works, while user research answers whether it works for the people it's actually for.

🤖 76 Open Research Questions in AI Usability by Jakob Nielsen for Jakob Nielsen on Substack: AI is the biggest change to UX design in decades, Nielsen argues, yet we know embarrassingly little about how people actually use it. He lays out 76 open research questions in AI usability, grouped into seven lists for audiences ranging from students to the big AI labs. Crucially, many can be answered with qualitative methods and modest resources in a few weeks to a few months. The piece frames AI usability as an urgent, wide-open research agenda rather than a settled design problem.

🧠 Turing the page: can you tell human writing from AI? by Dr Maria Panagiotidi for UX Psychology: A 2026 study by Sears and Weisberg tested whether people can distinguish human-written fiction from AI-written fiction. Across three studies and nearly 2,600 participants, readers generally performed no better than chance — and in one study significantly below it, at about 39% correct. Panagiotidi connects this to earlier work showing people can't reliably detect AI-generated text, yet judge output more harshly once they know it's AI. Her conclusion: 'sounding human' and 'being written by a human' are different signals, and users routinely conflate the two.

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