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🧹 The Custodial Era of UX: Cleaning Up After AI by Anna Kaley and Raluca Budiu for Nielsen Norman Group | Kaley and Raluca argues that AI has made producing content, prototypes and working features cheaper than evaluating them, so UX teams increasingly meet work after it already exists rather than at the blank page. She calls this custodial work: deciding what to keep from AI output, what to change, and what should never have shipped. The article catalogues the UX debt that builds up when teams skip foundational questions (interfaces that technically function but confuse, obviously generated copy, features built because they could be) and sets out how to adapt by building shared judgment across the team, speeding up evaluation, and steering AI-generated designs earlier in the process. The closing point is that custodianship of user needs is a strategic role, not janitorial work.

🤖 Persistent lessons in human-centered automation Meg Kurdziolek for UX Collective | Kurdziolek opens with a field observation from her time researching an inventory robot in grocery aisles, where a shopper held a punnet of blueberries up to a 300-pound machine full of cameras, got nothing back, and walked away calling it stupid. She traces the same gap back to Xerox PARC in the 1970s, where the belief that a smarter machine is a more useful machine ran into Lucy Suchman's photocopier study: two users abandoned a copier whose rigid plan ignored what they were actually trying to finish. The argument is that LLM-era agentic products are repeating the system-centric mistake, and that situated observation of real people mid-task is still the method that catches it. The practical lessons cover designing for human unpredictability and making a system's intentions legible to the people around it.

💼 Taking back control of UX and research: An interview with Shift UX curator Jemma Ahmed | Jemma Ahmed, a mixed-methods insight practitioner with two decades in the field, curates the Research as Strategy track at Rosenfeld's Shift UX conference and is candid that she is job hunting herself. She argues that UX is not dead, because working out what a human needs and building for it is a perennial skill, but that traditional research jobs are shrinking in some places and resurfacing under other titles: strategist, policy, insight. She describes organisations as knowledge economies awash with rigorous studies, lived experience and AI-generated literature reviews, and says the useful question is how researchers operate in that mix rather than defending the word research. She also makes the case for curated, expert-led conferences as a filter against the volume of AI-generated opinion online.

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