Therese Fessenden is a Senior Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group and host of the NN/g UX Podcast. Her research focuses on understanding human behavior, attitudes, and expectations in order to better orchestrate system and service design strategies.
Neurodivergent users face executive-function, communication, and sensory challenges. Neuroinclusive design helps all users by focusing on simplicity, clarity, control, support, and co-creation.
UX Theatre, coined by Tanya Snook, is the act of performatively using UX frameworks without achieving impact. It’s caused by unclear goals, shaky methods, weak evidence, poor insight adoption, and skipping testing.
Dogfooding, or using your own products internally, helps catch bugs, but it can't replace user research: your team knows too much to represent real users.
UX maps clarify complexity but are often presented poorly. Prepare audiences by communicating early, speaking plainly, and focusing on collaborative outcomes.
No design is perfect on the first try. Combining iteration, parallel design, and competitive testing helps teams move quickly, explore broadly, and make confident, evidence-based design decisions.
Personas and archetypes are different ways of communicating the same user research data. Archetypes describe categories of users; personas humanize those categories to illustrate real impact.
