UX Murder Mystery

AI agents interviewing AI agents. Zillow cuts 500. A DesignOps team cut to the bone. Older workers behind the register for insurance. The FIRE movement meets the layoff wave. And a pie chart on wealth that explains the rest. Eve and Brian connect it. Eve Eden and Brian Crowley open with the AI job interview parodies and ask what happens when an agent interviews an agent. Recruiters cannot tell fake candidates from real ones. Applicants send agents of their own. Auto-apply tools fire off resumes by the hundreds. Then the layoffs. Brian's former employer cut the small design operations team he was on, then cut it again. Zillow dropped just over 500 people in August. Peter Merholz's point from last week: layoffs rarely deliver what companies promise. A generation told to job-hop, chase a FIRE number, and never trust a company now watches that plan meet a market that did not keep its side of the deal. The bill lands on everyone else. Older workers at Walmart and Kroger to keep health insurance. Medicare and Medicaid getting harder to hold onto. The CBS This Morning pie demonstration on wealth that left shoppers stunned. Savings accounts that used to pay, 401(k)s that replaced them, RSUs that look like ownership, and a shareholder vote that means little when one founder holds control. Whose grandmother is that at the door? The hosts say it is all of ours. Sources: CBS This Morning, "Americans know wealth inequality is a problem, but what does it look like?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DANUXO-GQwU and "Income inequality: $0.01 for average American family is $11,700 for Jeff Bezos" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrsiYZ19n2k. GeekWire on the Zillow layoffs, August 4, 2026: https://www.geekwire.com/2026/zillow-cuts-more-than-500-jobs-in-its-largest-layoff-of-the-year/ Send questions, news articles, and counterpoints: [email protected]

Designers once decided what to build. Now they are told what to "draw." Brian and Eve sit down with Peter Merholz, co-founder of Adaptive Path, co-author of Org Design for Design Orgs, and co-host of the Finding Our Way podcast, to open a case the industry keeps arguing about and never closes: what happened to design? Five questions drive the investigation. What happened to "Big D" design, and who turned a strategic discipline into production support? Where did designers' verve go? Why is the UX Director so often the hardest seat in tech? What happens to the design role when anyone can do any part of it? And why will no one hire entry-level designers? The suspects include agile transformations, management consultants, CFOs, and product managers. The evidence runs from the org chart to the hiring queue. Show notes: Peter Merholz: https://www.petermerholz.com/ Org Design for Design Orgs: https://www.petermerholz.com/org-design-for-design-orgs/ Finding Our Way podcast: https://findingourway.design/ For informational/entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies/individuals use publicly available info for critique and education. Not factual assertions about motives or intentions. Creators disclaim liability for damages from reliance on content. Events may be dramatized for illustrative purposes. Hosted by Brian J. Crowley & Eve Eden Edited by Kelsey Smith Intro Animation & Logo Design by Brian J. Crowley Music by Nicolas Lee A joint production of EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories ©2026 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden [email protected] Thank you for watching and or listening! UX Murder Mystery, true crime for design, Peter Merholz, Adaptive Path, Org Design for Design Orgs, UX design, design leadership, UX director, design org, entry-level designers, design careers, product design, product management, agile, design jobs

Twenty years of rewards. Zero purchase history. Brian takes a parka with a broken zipper to a closing Eddie Bauer store. He has no receipt, but he has a rewards account he has held for almost twenty years. The system says he has never bought anything from Eddie Bauer. Nobody at the counter can override it. From there, Brian and Eve trace how a brand built on a lifetime guarantee got to that counter. In Clark v. Eddie Bauer, an Oregon outlet shopper alleges the outlet stores ran a permanent sale against "list prices" the goods were never actually sold at, then swapped the tags to an unexplained "Comparable Value." In February 2026, the company running the stores filed for Chapter 11, Eddie Bauer's third bankruptcy, and nearly 200 stores closed. The brand itself never went bankrupt. Authentic Brands Group owns the name, and a week before the filing, the website moved to a different operator. Brian and Eve walk through a string of owners, a sale that taught customers to wait, and a licensing structure that split one brand across separate companies with separate systems. They also hear out the operator's explanation: falling sales, supply chain costs, and tariffs that hit the whole sector. And they look at what Patagonia and American Giant do differently. The question at the end: what brand do you still trust, and is it the same company that earned that trust? Sources cited in this episode: Retail Dive, Business Insider, RetailWire, NPR, and the Ninth Circuit and Oregon Supreme Court opinions in Clark v. Eddie Bauer. Hosted by Brian J. Crowley & Eve Eden / Edited by Kelsey Smith / Intro Animation & Logo Design by Brian J. Crowley / Music by Nicolas Lee / A joint production of EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories / ©2025 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden / [email protected] / "Thank you for watching and or listening!" For informational and entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies and individuals use publicly available information for critique and education. Not factual assertions about motives or intentions. Creators disclaim liability for damages from reliance on content. Events may be dramatized for illustrative purposes.

Brian Crowley goes solo to talk UX 101

Well there's egg on our face. In the last episode Brian asserted that the AIs had been contained and it was just a test. That was completely wrong AND we've learned that the extent of the hacks has gone much further than we initially knew, which leads Eve and Brian to ask... what don't we know now? Here's what we do know. An OpenAI agent got out of its test sandbox, exploited a zero-day, and spent two and a half days inside Hugging Face trying to steal the answers to its own exam. Another one got into an Australian government health portal in June. OpenAI found out in August and told the government in September, by email, to a public inbox. There are now dozens of organizations on the notification list, including US government sites. And the same week all of this came out, every AI CEO in the country went to the White House, agreed to police themselves, and renamed the whole thing "super intelligence." Brian and Eve go through the accord layer by layer and explain why "independent" auditors picked by the companies are not independent, why self-governance has never once produced accountability, and why Nvidia's CEO saying he hopes this is "an engineering challenge" is not as reassuring as it sounds. Then it gets bigger. The three-month gap between a breach and anyone hearing about it. The money behind every pause announcement. What a crypto documentary taught Brian about who gets left holding the bag. Eve on why automation is eating the local middle class. AI-generated product photos, fake newspapers, the fake highway pileup video Eve's dad sent her. An unverified claim that a loose agent seeded itself across the internet, and what that would even mean. We don't have the answers. We're pretty sure the people who say they do don't either. Disclosure: we prep this show with Claude, which is made by Anthropic, one of the labs in this story. Everything here comes from outside reporting.

Hook. Hold. Harvest. Hide. That is how state attorneys general described Meta's business model before the company agreed to a reported $17 billion child safety settlement whose remedy reads like a design spec: default time limits, an overnight block, no cosmetic filters for minors. Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden work through the month in tech and the design decisions underneath each story. Apple's foldable iPhone Duo and a keynote engineered to avoid live failure. Dating apps losing paying users while a CEO calls swipe velocity the problem. Rideshare prices that look like willingness-to-pay algorithms, and driver streaks that look like manipulation. Grok's nonconsensual image generation and the case for building safety into the experience itself. Jacob Coxon's resignation from Anthropic, followed by a real argument between the hosts: is a 10% extinction estimate measurable, were the lab incidents contained, and is the Robot God story a marketing plan ahead of the IPOs? Brian argues LLMs work more like cold reading than intelligence. Eve describes her "wisdom council" method for making AI useful. The episode closes with the fall wave of tech documentaries, including a Musk film that replaced its subject with an AI avatar. Disclosure: the hosts prep this show with Claude, which is made by Anthropic. The Anthropic segment is built from outside reporting. For informational/entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies/individuals use publicly available info for critique and education. Not factual assertions about motives or intentions. Creators disclaim liability for damages from reliance on content. Events may be dramatized for illustrative purposes. Hosted by Brian J. Crowley & Eve Eden Edited by Kelsey Smith Intro Animation & Logo Design by Brian J. Crowley Music by Nicolas Lee A joint production of EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories ©2026 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden [email protected]

Deloitte invented another word for how organizations should be: changefulness. Erin Stadler read it and laughed out loud. Brian Crowley and Eve Eden investigate why organizational change keeps failing with someone who stopped consulting on it and built the alternative instead. Erin spent 13 years as a founder and COO at Boomtown testing one question: if people actually adopt these practices, does it create an adaptable organization? It did. People who joined said they could never go back to a traditional company. Erin breaks down why transformations bomb at scale, the principles layer most rollouts skip, how her team created more change by never saying the word change, and why she thinks change management needs to go away as a concept. She gives her honest read on SAFe as one of the first certified SAFe consultants, and on the "is agile dead" debate. Then the AI turn: companies grew access to AI 50% in a year, fewer than 60% of people who have it use it daily, and 84% never redesigned a single workflow around it. Erin's diagnosis: AI is exposing how poorly organizations design the way they work. The episode closes with why everyone in your company is now a product manager, what Netflix's CPTO gets right about systems thinkers, and one question to ask about your standup this week. Erin Stadler: https://www.erinstadler.com/ Netflix CPTO Elizabeth Stone on Lenny's Podcast: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/netflix-cpto-on-ai-and-the-future Hosted by Brian J. Crowley & Eve Eden Edited by Kelsey Smith Intro Animation & Logo Design by Brian J. Crowley Music by Nicolas Lee A joint production of EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories ©2026 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden [email protected] Thank you for watching and or listening! For informational/entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies/individuals use publicly available info for critique and education. Not factual assertions about motives or intentions. Creators disclaim liability for damages from reliance on content. Events may be dramatized for illustrative purposes.

Rejected ten minutes after applying. No feedback, no human contact, no explanation. Millions of job seekers know this exact experience, and most of them blame the same suspect: the AI. But is that who actually did it? In this episode, Brian Crowley and Eve Eden bring in an expert witness from inside the system: Max Gerdes, Executive Director of Staffing Solutions at Motion Recruitment, who has spent more than a decade recruiting UX, UI, product, and technology talent. Max walks through what really happens after the apply button, where automated rules end and AI begins, and why an instant rejection usually isn't what candidates think it is. The investigation moves through the Mobley v. Workday lawsuit, where a candidate alleges he was rejected from more than 100 jobs by employers using AI screening tools, the false negative problem where companies measure hiring speed but not the qualified people their systems throw away, and the accountability vacuum where nobody in the chain can fully explain a consequential rejection. Then the case widens to the platforms: Indeed and Glassdoor consolidating under one owner, hundreds of millions of candidate profiles under one roof, and Eve's own poll data suggesting the job board era may already be over. The episode closes with the defense's case: what automation has genuinely made better, and which decisions should never leave human hands. Links: World Economic Forum on AI in candidate screening: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/03/ai-hiring-human-touch-recruitment/ RPJ Law on the June 2026 Mobley v. Workday ruling: https://rpjlaw.com/recent-developments-in-mobley-v-workday-california-court-allows-key-ai-hiring-bias-claims-to-move-forward/ TechCrunch on the Indeed and Glassdoor integration and layoffs: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/11/indeed-glassdoor-to-lay-off-1300-staff/ Harvard Business Review on how AI assessment changes candidate behavior: https://hbr.org/2025/07/how-ai-assessment-tools-affect-job-candidates-behavior Motion Recruitment: https://motionrecruitment.com Hosted by Brian J. Crowley & Eve Eden Edited by Kelsey Smith Intro Animation & Logo Design by Brian J. Crowley Music by Nicolas Lee A joint production of EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories ©2026 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden [email protected] Thank you for watching and or listening! For informational/entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies/individuals use publicly available info for critique and education. Not factual assertions about motives or intentions. Creators disclaim liability for damages from reliance on content. Events may be dramatized for illustrative purposes.

McDonald's built one of the most downloaded food apps in the world, and the customers using it describe a crime scene: orders charged and canceled with no refund path, deals that vanish at the register, rewards that fail to scan in front of a line of strangers, and a privacy policy that says the company may profile their psychological trends and behavior. In this zoomed in episode, Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden investigate how an app can be a business triumph and a customer experience disaster at the same time? Links: WFTV Action 9 investigation on canceled orders and refunds: https://www.wftv.com/news/local/not-lovin-it-mcdonalds-customers-have-mobile-app-complaints/Y3ASQYX6XNDDFPCTS56U6S3YZA/ Tasting Table on the disappearing app deals: https://www.tastingtable.com/2099096/problem-mcdonalds-mobile-app-according-to-customers/ BigGo News on app surveillance and two tier pricing: https://biggo.com/news/202510090122_McDonalds_App_Privacy_Concerns Daily Meal on what the app knows about you: https://www.thedailymeal.com/1455292/mcdonalds-app-tracks-activity/ McDonald's Privacy Statement: https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/privacy.html McDonald's app page with the August 2026 terms update: https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/download-app.html Hosted by Brian J. Crowley & Eve Eden Edited by Kelsey Smith Intro Animation & Logo Design by Brian J. Crowley Music by Nicolas Lee A joint production of EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories ©2026 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden [email protected] Thank you for watching and or listening! For informational/entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies/individuals use publicly available info for critique and education. Not factual assertions about motives or intentions. Creators disclaim liability for damages from reliance on content. Events may be dramatized for illustrative purposes.

The news is on the table and AI is holding the murder weapon. Or is it? This week, UX Murder Mystery hosts Brian Crowley and Eve Eden interrogate a witness who has worked both sides of the story: Ovetta Sampson, founder of Right AI, former Director of UX for Google's Core Machine Learning, and a onetime police-beat reporter who learned early to second source everything, including her own mother. Together they examine the evidence: the "AI is inevitable" narrative the major outlets keep pushing, the bias that gets baked in before anyone touches a keyboard, the graduates booing tech executives at commencement, and the artists fighting back by poisoning the training data itself. Ovetta runs her Human Engagement Risks framework over the modern newsroom, offers real advice for small outlets with no ethics team, and explains what it takes to build AI with equity as a load-bearing value instead of a press release. Then comes the verdict: is the tech industry, as it stands today, good for democracy? CONNECT WITH OVETTA: Ovetta Sampson: https://www.ovetta-sampson.com/ Right AI: https://www.rightainow.com/ Designing with AI Training: https://www.rightainow.com/designing-with-ai Designing for AI Training (cohort starts Sept. 9): https://www.rightainow.com/designing-for-ai How Risky Is Your AI Design? Free MindfulAI™ Risk Assessment Tool: https://www.ovetta-sampson.com/mindfulai-diagnostic-tool Open for Speaking Events: https://www.ovetta-sampson.com/book-ovetta REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE: AISHA: https://aisha.ai/ Coded Bias (PBS Independent Lens): https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/coded-bias/ CREDITS: Hosted by Brian J. Crowley & Eve Eden Edited by Kelsey Smith Intro Animation & Logo Design by Brian J. Crowley Music by Nicolas Lee A joint production of EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories ©2026 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden [email protected] Thank you for watching and or listening! For informational/entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies/individuals use publicly available info for critique and education. Not factual assertions about motives or intentions. Creators disclaim liability for damages from reliance on content. Events may be dramatized for illustrative purposes.