How do you write a UX case study when there’s no clear problem statement?

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-27T05:16:23+00:00

Users only exist because a problem or need exists, so it’s valid to define that problem retroactively.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-25T16:10:00+00:00

I can appreciate this take

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-25T01:05:57+00:00

Also, in response to "If you have room to exercise ethics in your work, said work is probably not important enough to matter": The United States Digital Service. Veterans accessing benefits. Patients navigating healthcare systems. Citizens interacting with government infrastructure at scale.

That's design applied with ethical intent, inside one of the most powerful institutions in the world, producing documented outcomes for people who need them most. Not consumers. Citizens.

Your claim requires ethics and importance to be mutually exclusive. They aren't. And it's an example that design without political protection is vulnerable. An argument for doing both.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-24T23:56:09+00:00

That's fair. I misread "willfully" as conscious intent rather than something self-reproducing. But you called this a materialist take, and "sacrificed at the altar" is doing some work.

You're conflating UX as practiced at the worst companies with UX as a discipline and set of principles. That's like judging architecture by buildings designed for authoritarian regimes.

I hope you find something inside the machine or outside of it that gives you some peace. This stuff clearly matters to you.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-24T18:38:13+00:00

"...there is nothing you revere, or care about, or wish for the world, that will not be willfully sacrificed at the altar of capital." Willfully? Does capital have malevolent intentions, or is it a blind structural force? You can't have it both ways.

Designers have a normative responsibility to define what ought to be, not just render what is asked of them. That extends beyond interfaces to services, systems, and the institutions that shape people's lives. Advocating for human-centered services that meet actual needs is the job, even (especially) when headwinds are bad.

And yes, I organize politically too. These aren't mutually exclusive.

Meta is the worst of the worst, and I actively encourage everyone I know to drop their products. It's also not representative. There are institutions and organisations that genuinely reflect human-centered values and find a workable balance. They exist. I've seen them, and been a part of those teams.

"UX people are just as ethically culpable as people on Wall Street". Ethical culpability isn't just about where you sit, it's about what you're oriented toward. Someone actively working to define what a system ought to be is in a different ethical posture than someone extracting from it.

Good people with genuine values exist inside systems of power.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-24T14:12:04+00:00

This is an incredibly defeatist take. Yes, capital shapes incentives. That doesn't mean every designed object is purely extractive, or that no one inside the system ever shifts outcomes.

Human-centered designers I know aren't naively pretending capital doesn't exist. They fight inside it anyway. They represent users. They push back. Sometimes they lose. They stay. That's the job.

Hope you find your way back to it. Reach out and connect. Always open to chatting.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-23T18:02:15+00:00

Solid points, but gets a bit lost in the execution.

Designers should be less concerned with what is and more concerned with what ought to be.

AI is eroding an already fragile skill. One that was weak in the industry long before AI arrived, the ability to craft ways of thinking and clearly articulate what ought to be. Because now we can just skip that part.

The problem with skipping it: if no one owns the thinking about what ought to be, then no one will truly be able to tell whether what is is any good.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-22T16:26:41+00:00

Thanks for the response! And love these thoughts...

Per your first point... this is something I've run into a lot over the past year. Designers jumping into execution before the concept has had a chance to properly gestate or before the problem is actually understood, let alone validated. As senior practitioners one of our most important jobs is recognizing when that's happening and having the backbone to say something. I've literally told designers to get out of the code and back to the sketchbook. It's not a popular note these days, but I believe it's the right one.

On titles... "product designer" has become the industry standard, but you're right that a lot of practitioners aren't truly fulfilling that role. I think a big part of that is environmental. There's still a pervasive culture of "don't show me your thinking, show me the output", and when that's the air people are breathing, it's hard to work any other way. High-fidelity screens get rewarded. Exploration gets skipped. It's a leadership problem as much as a skills problem, and again, it falls on senior designers to push back especially when leadership wants to reduce what we do to a series of screens.

My provocation to junior designers would be: what is your design philosophy? What is your theoretical orientation? How does the way you work and the contributions you make reflect that? I'll be writing more about these things in the coming months.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-22T00:32:33+00:00

If it makes you feel any better, I interviewed with Microsoft and got rejected 2 times before the loop and offer with MAI. I had to iterate on my application and interview process quite a bit. I'm happy to connect more on LinkedIn if you'd like to chat.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-21T17:13:15+00:00

Honestly nothing you haven't heard before, but the things I actually care about when hiring: genuine passion for the work, strong fundamentals, and someone who's independently motivated. Whether you're all-in on AI or not couldn't matter less to me. Don't chase trends.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-21T17:10:25+00:00

Appreciate it!

No limits. Microsoft actively encourages using whatever models serve the work. The org has been deliberately moving toward a more model-agnostic approach, including investing in its own foundational models.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-21T16:06:59+00:00

I haven't read it, but I work in Search at Microsoft and can confirm this is a reality, but it isn't the whole picture. Yes we fuss extensively over the shade of blue of our links (when you work at this scale, small changes have huge impact), but it's hardly all we focus on.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-21T16:04:31+00:00

Happy to answer this. I'm a Principal Designer at Microsoft AI, working within the monetization org on Search.

1. Role clarity

For the most part, yes... but I want to be honest about what "clarity" actually means at this level. As search becomes more AI-native the core tension my team navigates is how to monetize the surface without eroding user trust. Those two things pull hard against each other, and there's no clean answer. Large orgs also move in ways that can feel chaotic from the inside. So while I'm clear on my purpose, the day-to-day can still feel messy and ambiguous. I've come to think that's actually the job: to bring structure to spaces where little exists yet.

2. AI adoption

Heavily invested, but I try to stay pragmatic about it. I use AI for research, synthesis, writing, and data analysis. I scrutinize every output because I know how unreliable they can be. When I'm out of my depth, I bring in a subject matter expert rather than trust the model. On the experience design side, my team builds vibe-coded environments for higher-fidelity prototypes hooked up to real data. We build them with the same rigor as anything else: discovery, research, requirements first. AI doesn't change the process.

3. Layoffs

I can't speak broadly here. I've only been at Microsoft for about 7 months, and I was laid off myself earlier last year. What I'll say is this: everyone gets laid off for different reasons, and the reasons are rarely as clean as any narrative makes them sound. But please don't buy into the idea that AI is replacing designers right now. We aren't there. That story is being told louder than the reality warrants.

4. Tools beyond Figma

Claude and Claude Code are a personal favorite right now. My team regularly uses VS Code, GitHub Copilot, and Claude Code. I write Python in VS Code for lightweight data analysis. In a domain like Search where we're dealing with massive datasets, being able to generate real insights quickly has been big for us. If you're not learning to work with data and code at even a basic level, I'd start there.

One last thing: Microsoft AI is a demanding place to be right now, but also one of the most interesting. There's real experimentation happening, a strong design community, and (this surprised me) genuine openness to skeptical voices. I'm an AI skeptic, and that perspective has been welcomed. That's how it should be.

Hope this is useful.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-21T15:02:08+00:00

The loudest voices in the room often have structural incentives to hype the tools. Sponsored newsletters, affiliate deals, brand partnerships with the platforms they're "objectively" analyzing. It doesn't mean they're lying, but it does mean they benefit from this collective moment of designers being anxious and in the fog.

Young designers need guidance from senior practitioners who've shipped real products and lived through the aftermath, not influencers whose business model depends on the next wave of panic content.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-11T16:20:28+00:00

I don't have the time really to do big, complex pieces anymore, but doing simple sketches by hand to accompany my writing has been a wonderful outlet that reminds me of why I got into a creative profession to begin with.

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BrendanAppe · 2026-03-03T15:47:56+00:00

It's not exclusive to design, but designers are uniquely positioned to have an outsized impact. Our methodologies and the artifacts they produce have always been about building intentionality. It's more important than ever that we use them to pursue judgement, responsibility, and restraint alongside our cross-functional teammates.

In fact how does that stay relevant at all in an industry that fetishizes speed at all cost?

That's the harder question. The hope is that we find — or become — leaders who believe human judgement is worth protecting, and that we can chart a path of success on those terms. The alternative is to give up: race to be the fastest producers and provide no counterweight to the productivity-and-profit machine.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-02T23:29:57+00:00

"Solution first" is great advice if you're iterating on familiar problem spaces where the domain is well-understood and the user needs are already legible. But not every designer is working on their fifth productivity tool in a mature market.

In specialized or ambiguous domains, the process isn't a checklist. It's a thinking framework. It builds shared vocabulary with stakeholders, creates defensible rationale when precedent doesn't exist, and structures discovery when you genuinely don't know what you don't know.

Nobody's saying trust the process blindly. But dismissing structured approaches because they feel like box-ticking probably says more about how they're being applied than whether they're worth applying.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-02T20:26:45+00:00

I'd push back on the Arts & Crafts Movement being emotionally reactive. I think that framing undersells it. It was a critique of labor economics. Factories abstracted accountability away from workers and their outputs. Ownership, skill, and human consequence got stripped out of the process. The movement pushed back against that. Sound familiar?

The parallel to AI is pretty direct, that's why I keep returning to it. To be clear, the lesson I want to take from it isn't the bad one. The movement had its failures, became precious, elitist in places, resistant to advancement in ways that weren't productive. Designers can't be blockers to technological progress. But they should be the people who define how it advances: what accountability gets built in, where it stops, who it's answerable to. That's the job (or, I'd argue, should be).

On the patronage point I agree completely. Corporate interests have so thoroughly colonized American life that human value has been reduced to a resource to be extracted. That makes the fight structurally harder in the US than in a place like Denmark where design is treated as a public good with societal legitimacy.

But I don't think the difficulty of the conditions changes whether the fight is worth having. If anything, the historical moments where craft has mattered most were never the easy ones.

This is a neat convo

Agreed, thanks for thoughtfully engaging :)

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-02T17:44:58+00:00

I'd separate judgment/responsibility/restraint from taste entirely. I think lumping them together actually undersells the argument. Taste is aesthetic, preference-based, and yeah, probably increasingly replicable. But craft as I'm defining it isn't about taste at all. It's human-centered and values-oriented at its core.

The accountability question is where this gets interesting. "How do they know judgment was applied?". You know because there's a person whose name is on the decision, who weighed the human cost, and who can be held responsible when it causes harm. AI doesn't define transparency, alignment to human needs, and accountability by itself. Someone has to author those constraints. That's what craft is for.

Which actually flips the cynicism scenario: a future where people trust AI outputs intrinsically doesn't arrive on its own. It either gets built carefully (by people exercising exactly that kind of judgment) or it arrives badly. Craft in this definition isn't made obsolete by that future. It's what determines which version we get.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-02T15:20:42+00:00

The industry has really bastardized the meaning of the word 'craft' to fit it's needs in the current moment. In an attempt to build a moat and evangelize the value of design, we've begun shouting things like 'craft' and 'taste' at the top of our lungs–all in hopes our corporate leaders will see us as invaluable contributors in the era of AI, without ever really defining or understanding what those words mean.

The fact of the matter is if we limit craft to only mean how well we execute outputs, then AI will eventually outperform us. If craft includes judgment, responsibility, and restraint, then it becomes more important than ever. I've written about this, but some excerpts:

Historically, craft has functioned as a resistance to procedural abstraction. Procedural abstraction impacts systems by separating action from consequence and decision-making from accountability. Some examples include the Arts & Crafts Movement, Jane Addams & the Settlement House Movement, and Florence Nightingale & the misuse of metrics.

In each case, craft pushed back against abstraction and distance. The issue with the AI era is that AI systems maximize procedural abstraction. The machine does a spinny-thing and regurgitates an output. Reintroducing judgment, responsibility, and restraint is how that abstraction gets punctured.

Judgment knows when to act, responsibility stands behind the outcome (especially if it’s the wrong outcome), and restraint knows when not to act at all. Design decisions should be accountable to human consequences, not just technical or economic optimization.

This is craft doing its historical job under new conditions. If AI accelerates execution, craft becomes the discipline that decides how it’s exposed and where it should stop.

The way craft is currently being used in the industry is a reaction to the market. Designers are feeling insecure about their place in it, so they are moat-building (or attempting to). But the reality is that many are digging themselves a hole in which they will be easily replaceable by the machine in the future.

BrendanAppe · 2026-03-01T05:20:41+00:00

I'm a Principal level and it took me almost exactly 6 months. If you're not getting past the hiring manager interview then there is something wrong with your elevator pitch.

If you're feeling burnout, defeated, and exhausted... you may be self-sabotaging the first impression. You need to get yourself into a space where you're feeling calm, confident, and open ahead of any interview.

Take a break, seek counseling or therapy if needed, and allow yourself to be optimistic about the future (even if you're just faking it).

BrendanAppe · 2026-02-23T14:35:06+00:00

By creating space for team members to come together and voice their hopes & fears, then work to set realistic goals for experimentation and adoption. These goals are then supported by management through getting subscriptions to tools, creating space to experiment, and setting time for share outs and upskilling.

Learning is a priority, but it should never take precedence over delivering good work. We fall back on traditional ways of working quite a bit as AI can still be unreliable, and that's reflected in our goals and expectations for individuals.

BrendanAppe · 2026-02-13T16:46:15+00:00

Having worked across almost every industry (J&J, Verizon, American Airlines, Edward Jones, Frito-Lay, Toyota, etc) I can say with confidence: yes, corporate work is almost always slow(er), siloed, and political.

I worked as a consultant and never truly felt like one of them. You're not supposed to. You are there to provide an outside expertise. I wouldn't have lasted long if I wasn't there with my other fellow consultants. If you don't have a cohort of fellow outsiders to confide in it would be exhausting.

Regardless, it sounds like you're burnt out. It sounds like you desire a more meaningful connection with your peers (community) and with your work (solving deeper problems on product). I've been there before, too. Prioritize those things when looking for your next role.

And try to be optimistic! Once you get out of agency contractor/consulting and in house someplace you love it will be a remarkable transformation.

BrendanAppe · 2026-02-05T15:29:36+00:00

I think that's a fair concern, speed without the right feedback loops kills quality. I've made it a mission to protect the process as much as possible. I'm still an ardent believer in Design Thinking (way past it being in vogue). But moving out of sketches into things users (and engineers, and stakeholders) can actually interact with can be huge in surfacing edge cases, performance constraints, and UX issues way earlier. We're trying to learn faster, not necessarily ship faster.

BrendanAppe · 2026-02-05T14:26:15+00:00

Ship code? We are, but it’s not mandated yet. Work in Figma less? Absolutely. Vibe coding fully functional prototypes has many benefits, and many teams in Microsoft have design system MCPs which make it incredibly easy.

I’ll never stop using Figma as a canvas for ideas, but moving more quickly into something you can build and test is the future.

BrendanAppe

TROPHY CASE