View through a full height window looking over some grass, with a building on the right, a lake in the background with mountains in the distance. There are some small snow patches on the mountains.
Also, this is the view from today's workshop room at the university in Rapperswil...
...I haven't stopped being english because I've come here for two days.
LinkedIn has decided that as I'm in Switzerland currently, my page needs to be in French. I'm in a German speaking part of Switzerland, and I speak German. This really isn't helpful.
No other browser tabs are exhibiting this behaviour...
Tomorrow I will be talking about Walt Disney. Experience Strategist supremo.
I hope everyone is ready for it...
Dammit, posted before adding alt text:
Couple on a bench silhouetted against the sun setting behind the hills in the distance, with lake Zürri filling the frame
This is rapidly becoming my happy place
The point of the post isn't the workshop, it's to share what a lovely place this is.
Quayside properties lit up with evening sunset colours with the water and boats in the foreground - Rapperswil, Switzerland
A long wooden bridge extends ahead into the distance with water each side. Ahead, I'm the distance, there are mountains. It is sunset and the light is soft.
Sunset over lake Zürri. There are hills in the distance. A building spans the foreground with a spire extending upwards right of centre. The sun sits centrally in the picture with its reflection shining on the water.
The roofs of old buildings fill the foreground with a sliver of lake visible beyond them in the soft evening sunset light. In the distance beyond the lake are hills and snowcapped mountains.
I'm currently in the small Swiss town of Rapperswil where I'm running an Experience Strategy workshop at the university.
It's a VERY lovely place. I could live here.
Strong and fabulous...
Hopefully then the rest of us can get down to solving real problems well, delivering the best experiences possible.
It seems people still think, on the whole, that 'good design' = looks nice. I'm including a LOT of 'Product design' people in that 'people' too.
The good news is, I think AI is coming for those people. It won't be long before you can chuck the AI and great solution and just say "beautify it".
This is agood read:
Wickes & Checkatrade sending me mother's day emails?!
It's the second cohort of this certificate group that will have had fun with it.
I've also run it for students in Chur, and for members of the EUXL.
It's a highlight of my year for a number of reasons, and not least, because I love Rapperswil and Zürich as places to be.
We will be examining:
- How a holistic Experience Strategy can communicate the way forward for an organisation.
- How to craft an Experience vision that supports a business vision
- How to define Experience outcomes we can measure
- ...and a few other things
This Thursday I travel to Zürich, a city I love, on my way to the Ost Schweizer Fachhochschule in Rapperswil, where I will be running a workshop for the Post Grad CAS UX Managment students.
The theme is Experience Strategy.
Believe me, I would LOVE for it to work. I would LOVE to be able to chuck in the interviews and get the JTBD and real problems extracted in 30 seconds. It just doesn't do that yet.
Feel free to let me know if you've found a tool that does.
...but it missed lots and lots of other pointers as to what was really going on, which weren't pulled out at all.
A couple of months ago, I experimented with some tools and found that not only did the AI in question just pull out some quotes and cluster those which were roughly the same (missing similar facts/quotes in the process)...
The insight comes from the abductive reasoning a human does as to why these themes exist. So when I see this language used, I am dubious as to the competence of the author and as a result, the output from the research.
Maybe it's just me.
...well, it's in how I get insights from the data. I cluster responses around a theme which, to be honest, is what I thought everyone did. This is not yet an insight.
Clustering quotes or "facts" is not an insight. It is used to generate an insight.
I often wonder what other people do when synthesizing user research. I feel that now AI is being employed, the gaps are beginning to show. Things like AI being useful for "clustering insights"...
...what's the giveaway here...?
I have to pick just ONE?
Assuming your talking about Spreepark? Used to live near there, but never went.
Lol (not lol)
Speaks volumes, right?
A question for the everychanging modern world:
If I do something 3x as well without using AI as someone who uses AI, does that make me more employable or less employable?
An interesting read. The more I read this, the more I realised this had been affecting me...
When Using AI Leads to “Brain Fry” hbr.org/2026/03/when...
Also, fast paced, shouldn't mean rushed, but it nearly always does. "We had to ship this feature in 4 weeks" - why? Why did you have to ship it in 4 weeks and not 5 weeks?
Oh, it's because someone said and gave you a deadline. You didn't actually "have" to.
