I took an extended break from writing on my blog because my work, my role, and the wider UX research industry all transformed, and I unconsciously chose to move from “public writer” to “quiet observer” embedded in communities instead of my own site.
The missing years
If you scroll through my archive, there’s a neat cliff edge: quick post after quick post of incoherent thoughts and then nothing for about six years. No dramatic reason. Just some overlapping forces:
- Work got intense and ambiguous. Moving into senior and then lead roles meant more stakes, more meetings, more “can you just jump on this?” moments, and far less unbroken time to reflect or think and I wanted to craft more thoughtful, long-form pieces.
- I moved from creator to consumer. I found myself hanging out on Reddit, Slack, and Discord, answering questions in threads, sharing screenshots, and DM’ing frameworks instead of going further.
- My role shifted. I wasn’t just “a UX researcher” any more; I became responsible for teams, roadmaps, headcount, stakeholder politics, and the emotional load of other people’s careers. That changed what I needed from writing, and made “one more thing to do felt exhausting.
It was more like a slow fade, one skipped post at a time and the doom I felt when I looked at my drafts folder.
Are these just excuses?
Looking back, I can infer some deeper reasons that hid underneath the surface excuses.
- The bar quietly got higher. Earlier in my career, sharing a scrappy post felt fine. As a lead, I felt pressure for every post to be rigorous, strategic, and “on brand” for someone who now owns the research function.
- Context switching killed my writing muscles. Writing good posts requires the same deep focus I use for study design, synthesis, and roadmapping. By the time I finished those, I had little cognitive budget left.
- I was getting my “teaching hit” elsewhere. Mentoring teammates, running internal training, and posting in niche communities scratched the same itch that blogging used to, but with immediate feedback and less overhead.
- The industry started moving faster than my drafts. By the time I’d half-written something, the conversation had moved on to AI-assisted analysis, democratised research, or the latest tooling drama. Shipping nothing felt safer than publishing something already outdated.
So what changed in UX research whilst I was quiet?
Ironically, the six years I went silent were some of the most turbulent and interesting years UX research has had.
- Remote and hybrid became default. Research went from “mostly in a lab or the office” to remote-first, with global recruiting, unmoderated testing, and distributed teams as standard practice. I miss the lab environment and feel we lost something along the way here.
- AI moved from curiosity to core capability. AI-assisted recruitment, transcription, tagging, and even insight generation became normal parts of the research stack, not side projects.
- Research demand grew, but so did pressure. Reports show rising demand for UX research even through economic uncertainty, but with expectations of more speed, more scale, and tighter alignment to business outcomes.
- Democratised research took off. Designers, PMs, and marketers now routinely run their own studies, while dedicated researchers act more as coaches, curators, and quality guardians.
- Ethics and inclusion moved to the center. Inclusive recruiting, accessibility, and ethical use of AI and data are now framed as both moral imperatives and business differentiators.
Why I’m writing again?
So why come back to a blog now, when the world is even noisier and more challenging?
- The industry is stabilising after a rough patch. UX and research went through layoffs, AI hype, and existential questions, but current analyses suggest we’re entering a phase where differentiation and clear business impact matter more than ever.
- We need slower, deeper thinking. Community chats are great for quick takes; they are terrible for connecting dots across years of change. Long-form writing is still one of the best tools we have for making sense of where we’ve been and what’s next.
- I have a different vantage point now. Leading teams through this period has given me new scars, new stories, and new patterns to share, especially around balancing rigor and speed, AI and judgment, democratisation and quality.
The six-year silence wasn’t a void; it was a shift in channel and role. This blog is my way of stitching that time back into the narrative, and of reclaiming a space for thinking in public, at a slower, more deliberate pace.