『Boagworld: UX, Design Leadership, Marketing & Conversion Optimization』のカバーアート

Boagworld: UX, Design Leadership, Marketing & Conversion Optimization

Boagworld: UX, Design Leadership, Marketing & Conversion Optimization

著者： Paul Boag Marcus Lillington
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Boagworld: The podcast where digital best practices meets a terrible sense of humor! Join us for a relaxed chat about all things digital design. We dish out practical advice and industry insights, all wrapped up in friendly conversation. Whether you're looking to improve your user experience, boost your conversion or be a better design lead, we've got something for you. With over 400 episodes, we're like the cool grandads of web design podcasts – experienced, slightly inappropriate, but always entertaining. So grab a drink, get comfy, and join us for an entertaining journey through the life of a digital professional.Boagworks Ltd 経済学
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  • How to Get Your Organization Mentioned by AI

    How to Get Your Organization Mentioned by AI
    2026/10/20
    This month we're joined by Rich Mehta, who has spent the last year helping out at Headscape and has recently been writing about how AI is changing the way people search. After a brief detour into childhood nicknames (Mr. Bogey and Lily, since you ask), we get into what it actually takes to show up when someone asks ChatGPT or Claude a question. Paul also gets very excited about a testing tool everyone else probably discovered years ago, and we finish with an article about cleaning up the mess AI leaves behind.App of the Month: PolypanePaul recently pushed a website live for a client, which he hadn't done in a long time, and found himself needing a decent way to check every breakpoint without losing the will to live. He started with Mobile Simulator, a free Chrome extension that shows any page at a mobile breakpoint with one click and lets you switch between a long list of device sizes. It doesn't emulate the actual devices, but for a quick sense check it does the job nicely.The real star, though, is Polypane, which takes the same idea to the extreme in a dedicated app. Its main features include:Multiple viewports side by side, from mobile all the way up to 5K, all kept in syncReal device presets, or your own CSS breakpoints and custom sizesSynchronized scrolling, clicks, hovers, and even form input across every paneEmulation of user preferences such as high contrast, dark mode, and reduced motionBuilt-in accessibility checks and 40+ debug tools, including layout overlays, readability, and color blindness simulatorsSocial and meta previews, plus automatic broken link and redirect checksLive CSS and JavaScript editing applied to one pane or all of themMarcus admitted his developers mostly stick to browser tools, but seeing every breakpoint at once and acting on them all together saves an awful lot of repeated testing. Fair warning, though, show this to your team and they'll immediately ask for a bigger monitor.Getting Found by AI with Rich MehtaRich has written 2 articles for Headscape that started this conversation. What happens when your law firm's clients stop Googling and start asking AI looks at how search habits are changing, and Writing law firm content for AI: what the research suggests covers good practice for getting found. They were written with law firms in mind, but the advice applies to pretty much any organization.What is GEO?GEO stands for generative engine optimization, although you'll also hear it called AEO, because the industry hasn't quite settled on a name yet. It's about making sure your organization appears when someone asks an AI tool a question, whether that's ChatGPT on their phone or Claude on their desktop. Rich explained that these tools answer questions in 2 ways. They draw on a huge index of training data (which is cheaper for them), and they also go out and search the web in real time to fill in the gaps.Paul came into this with the same skepticism he has about SEO, which is to say he thinks most of it is bollocks. Rich's response was that there is far more overlap between the 2 than most people like to admit, and that the best starting point for both is the same, which is working out what your audience actually needs from you rather than churning out content because someone told you to.FAQs make a comeback (sort of)That led to a lively bit of back and forth about FAQs. AI seems to like question and answer content, which is a little ironic given how long we've spent telling people to get rid of FAQ pages. Paul's view is that answering frequently asked questions was never the problem. The FAQ page is where content goes to die. The answers belong in context, so a returns policy should sit on the product page, cart, and checkout rather than on some forgotten page in the main navigation. Rich agreed and added that putting answers in a question and answer format also lets you mark them up with FAQ schema from schema.org, which helps AI understand which answer goes with which question.Are we all just guessing?Google publishes detailed guidance on how to get listed, but OpenAI and Anthropic don't offer anything comparable. Rich pointed out that these tools are designed to make their own decisions, which makes it hard for their makers to say "do X and you'll appear." They're also much younger than Google, which took decades to become that open.Instead, a lot of what we know comes from academic research. Rich's article draws on a 2023 study from Princeton and IIT Delhi that looked at how AI builds up a picture of an "entity," meaning a business, organization, or person. In short, it gathers everything it can find about you from across the web and uses that picture when answering questions. The mechanics haven't changed much since, even if the models have improved.The sources each model relies on vary a lot. Reddit is a big source for many of them, while some models use YouTube content in 30-40% of responses and others ignore it almost entirely. Answers also change depending on ...
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  • Your UX Team Is Set Up for the Wrong Job

    Your UX Team Is Set Up for the Wrong Job
    2026/09/15
    This month we look at why most in-house UX teams are organized around work that no longer arrives in the way it used to. Product owners, developers, and marketers are all producing design with AI tools long before anyone thinks to raise a ticket, and telling them to stop has quietly stopped working. We talk about what to fund instead, how to measure a team that is no longer the bottleneck, and where Marcus thinks Paul has gone too far. We also cover a new tool that gives a freelancer something close to a staff team, a new free email course, and the unexpected link between bees, a man with a bin on his head, and the power of consistently turning up.App of the Month: Grok BotGrok Bot launched in early beta on 11 August 2026 from SpaceXAI and Cursor, and it is the first AI tool in a while that has genuinely surprised Paul. Rather than a single chat window, you spin up a set of agents with their own roles, so there is a chief operating officer to talk to day to day, plus a finance person, a marketer, a salesperson, and a designer. Each one has its own computer, they brief each other, and they keep working after you shut the laptop.What makes it interesting is the complete absence of setup. There are no API keys to find and no MCP servers to wire up. You tell it which service you use, it pops up a button, you log in as you normally would, and it handles the rest. If there is no connector, it falls back to a browser. Paul asked it about a client message sitting in Slack, and it read the thread, gave him advice, created a task for Monday, added a note to the relevant meeting, and then offered to write the Slack message telling the developers what was happening.For freelancers who lose hours to the admin they are least confident about, this is the closest thing yet to having colleagues. Marcus raised the obvious concerns about privacy and about becoming too reliant on output nobody checks, which is fair. Paul's answer to the second one is a quality control agent whose only job is to check everyone else's work, with the caveat that both can still be wrong.The catch is the price. It runs at $200 a month, although that does include Cursor.How the team is set up for the wrong jobEverybody is designing nowPaul used to insist that only proper UX people should do UX, and he is honest that a good part of that was protecting the job description rather than protecting the user. That position has become much harder to defend. Product owners come back from an hour with an AI tool holding a prototype and a flow that mostly hangs together. Developers generate interface options before the ticket has even been refined. Marketers build and test their own landing pages. Some of it is good, some of it is plausible rubbish, and all of it turns up before anyone thinks to involve design.The complaint Paul hears most often from in-house teams is some version of how do we stop people doing this. In our experience you cannot stop them, because going around you is faster than waiting three months for a slot. The consequences are real, they are just delayed. Somebody ships a prototype that looked fine, and six months later the accessibility has failed quietly, the conversion rate is poor, and the product looks like it was built by three different companies. By then everyone has moved on and the rework never gets attributed to the decision that caused it.Cutting the team is the expensive responseMeanwhile the money is going the other way. Headcount that leaves is not replaced, and the seat at the table turns into being asked to comment on decisions that have already been made. Cutting the team is the expensive response, because the work does not disappear, it just gets done worse and later.What to fund insteadThe organizations getting this right have moved design upstream, away from producing every screen. Fund the team to set the conditions instead of being the only route to a wireframe:A design system with real usage guidance, so a developer at 4pm can make a decent decision, or brief an AI to make one, without booking time with a designer.Playbooks for the work that keeps repeating. Landing pages are the obvious one, because marketers are already building them and they are not conversion experts, copywriters, or developers.A research repository that anyone can query, so the findings get used in the meeting six months after the readout instead of dying in a slide deck.Office hours, audits, and coaching as the service, with the hard political work still firmly on the books.How you measure the teamHow the team is measured has to change with it. If people are still judged on screens produced and tickets closed, the queue rebuilds itself inside a month, because nobody can afford to spend a week writing guidance that tanks their own numbers. Measure whether other people shipped something decent without design touching the file. Measure whether last quarter's research got referenced again. A quieter team is a sign the setup is working, not ...
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    52 分
  • Brand Guidelines Are Ruining Your Website

    Brand Guidelines Are Ruining Your Website
    2026/08/18
    Why print-first brand systems break online, and how to push back without demanding a full rebrand. I've been grumbling about this one for years, because although almost everyone now meets a brand through a screen, we're still handed identities designed for brochures, business cards, and the occasional exhibition stand, and then told to make the website behave itself. So this month I have a proper rant about it and Marcus does his best to talk me down, which he largely manages. We also get into top task analysis, which is one of my favorite research techniques, and the free app I've built because I got fed up running it the hard way. App of the Week Top Task Analysis is a free app I've built to make top task analysis considerably less painful, mainly because I'd spent years running it with a spreadsheet, a survey tool, and a fair amount of swearing. How top task analysis works Top task analysis is a technique Gerry McGovern came up with, and it works a bit like a survey except that it stops people from being greedy, because an ordinary survey hands you a long list of everything your users say they'd quite like and no sense whatsoever of what they'd actually walk over hot coals for. This forces them to prioritize, so you end up knowing which small handful of things the majority genuinely care about. Gerry's classic example is the Microsoft Office knowledge base that kept answering more and more questions and kept watching its satisfaction score slide, because the answers people actually needed were buried under a hundred they didn't. I use it for all sorts, from shaping information architecture and working out which objections are worth answering, through to prioritizing features and deciding what has earned its place on a dashboard. Roughly 80% of your users want about 20% of what's on your site, and this is how you find the 20%. What the app does The reason nobody runs it as often as they should is that it needs at least 2 rounds, one to gather the tasks and another to vote on them, so the app handles both in a single pass. You seed it with a starter list from AI, from the client, or from whichever stakeholder shouts loudest, and it genuinely doesn't matter if that list is a bit rubbish, because visitors can search it, pick the 5 tasks that matter most to them, and add anything that's missing, which then appears for everyone who arrives after them. A second screen asks them to put their 5 in order, and the back end lets you see the lot, merge the 14 different ways people phrase the same task, and tidy up anything unhelpful. And yes, there's a profanity filter, because I have met the internet before. Marcus made the good point that you want a segmentation question alongside it so you can see top tasks broken down by audience, which is already in there, and he also dug up a hospital trust site we worked on years back where we dropped the top 8 tasks straight under the main navigation. They're still sitting there 8 years later, which either says something flattering about the technique or something less flattering about how often that site gets touched. Give it a go It's free, because I did think about charging for it and then couldn't be arsed, which is not the sharpest business decision I've ever made. Have a play and tell me what's broken. The app: Top Task AnalysisThe step-by-step guide: Top Task Analysis: A Free App And Step-by-Step GuideFeedback: paul@boagworld.com When brand guidelines fight the web Most people meet a brand through a screen these days, and yet the web is still treated as the place where you paste in whatever was designed for print. A branding agency mocks up a homepage that has never met a real sentence, the guidelines get signed off after 18 months and roughly all of somebody's political capital, and then some poor soul is handed the job of protecting it, at which point they'll defend an unreadable contrast ratio to the death because it's sitting on page 47 of the PDF. Consistency matters and I'm not arguing otherwise, but being consistently difficult to read isn't much of an achievement. Marcus agreed with the general complaint and pointed out that Headscape has described itself as a brand interpreter for digital for something like 15 years now, for exactly this reason. He also told the story of a charity working with deafblind people whose shiny new sub-brand logo failed color contrast checks, and if I'd invented that example nobody would have believed me. A brand should serve the organization and its audience, so the moment its rules make the website harder to use, those rules need to change. What a brand actually is A lot of the confusion comes from shrinking brand down to a logo, some colors, a typeface, and a photography style, when all of that is really just the clothes the organization turns up in. The brand itself is closer to a personality, made up of what the organization believes, how it talks, and how it treats people when nobody important is watching, and your copy ...
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    51 分
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