Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Dan Maccarone
The AI reckoning in UX was 20 years in the making
The field has blown up and rebuilt itself three times in twenty years. This is the third. Everyone thinks AI is coming for design. The truth is uglier and older. The field has done this to itself twice before, and it’s about to do it again. The UX job market right now is genuinely grim. Jeff Sauro, PhD and Jim Lewis, PhD found that UX job postings are down 71 percent from their 2022 peak, and research postings are down even further.
A founder with a tool is not a founder with a clue
Somewhere in this room is the one person who can tell if any of it is actually good. AI made everyone else look exactly like them. AI lets a solo founder produce a product, but it can’t help them understand whether that product is actually good…yet. That expertise, the hard-won judgment underneath it, has always been what decides who wins and who quietly (or epically) fails.
Nobody wants your AI app
The switchboard operator’s job was automated out of existence. The work it became, the invisible systems that now connect every call, is worth more than the job ever was. AI is about to do the same thing to the app. The people buying AI are blunt about the fact that the future is intelligence that disappears into existing platforms. Everyone wants it invisible and under their total control at the same time. We are all racing to build AI apps that nobody wants to open.
What the AI era owes you
A handloom weaver in 1820 could not have named a single job his trade would turn into. Neither can anyone today. No one is going to save your career from AI. That’s the most useful thing anyone can tell you about your job, and the sooner you believe it, the sooner you start building a version of yourself the next economy will actually need.
Michelangelo painted a Last Judgment where every soul is finally answered for. We built the first creation that arrives with no maker, no soul, no ending, and no one on the throne. The oldest book didn’t predict AI, but the comforts it promises, a maker who cares, a mind you can trust, a life that means something, an ending that sets things right, are exactly the ones we keep handing to a machine that has none.
The lie we keep telling ourselves about regulating AI
The internet’s founders governed a technology nobody agreed on, without kings, presidents, or voting. Congress still can’t figure out how. The excuse for not regulating AI is that nobody can agree how. The people who built the internet would find that laughable. One after another, the people building the most powerful AI in the world have asked to be regulated. Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay calling for the industry to slow down and submit to outside oversight.
Bottle your judgment and make it outlive you
Press enter or click to view image in full size You hand it your judgment, and it wears your smile back at you. Bottle your judgment and make it outlive you The most valuable thing you own dies with you, unless you get it out of your head. Let a machine and the person next to you finally use it. Right now I’m helping build software whose whole job is to package how one particular person thinks.
Never mind the prompts, here’s the thinking
Everyone is selling you this pitch about AI and design: it’s faster. Ten times faster. Ship in an afternoon what used to take a month, watch a prototype assemble itself while you sip your coffee. Then I spent the better part of a year rebuilding my studio’s entire design process around AI, across four real products, with real clients, real deadlines, and collaborating with real engineers who were used to standard deliverables. To be blunt, it didn’t make us faster.
You don’t find your UX voice. You build it.
The myth of arrival Most of us are taught to find our UX voice in someone else’s process. If you’ve been in UX for more than five minutes, or five years, you’ve probably been trained to chase artifacts over influence, deliverables over outcomes, frameworks over vision, feedback over clarity. There’s always another method to try, another artifact to ship, another Figma file to perfect. But your voice doesn’t live in the noise, it lives in how you move a room.
Craft vs. Complacency: The Ethics of Laziness in AI-Driven UX
Recently, a partner sent me an image to use on a client site. At first glance, it looked like another rough AI mockup. But then we looked closer. The image had started as a photo taken by a well-known photographer, someone with millions of followers on Instagram. Then it had been put through generative AI. And then it had been sloppily photoshopped. So it wasn’t just AI-generated, it was an IP violation layered with lazy design. It was poorly edited. And it was immediately recognizable as inauthentic.
We built UX. We broke UX. And now we have to fix it!
Maybe you’ve read the think pieces: UX is dead. Or dying. Or evolving. Or in a state of strategic irrelevance. Thought leaders like Pavel Samsonov, Patrick Neeman, Ed Orozco, and Cyd Harrell have all taken swings at the conversation, talking about how we’ve lost influence, lost trust, and in many cases, lost our way. Let’s not waste time sugarcoating it: UX didn’t get sidelined by accident. We let it happen. We let ourselves be turned into ticket-takers, stylists, and decorators of decks no one reads.
The Beauty Bias
Good-looking women may actually have a harder time landing some jobs. By Dan Maccarone, published January 1, 2003 - last reviewed on June 9, 2016 There's a twist to the "beauty bias," the idea that physically attractive individuals are rewarded socially as well as biologically: Gorgeous women may be at a disadvantage when seeking jobs in which appearance is deemed irrelevant.
The UX of Getting Started in UX
This is the third article in a 3 part series about the state of the UX ecosystem. To start at the beginning, read this article. Let’s get the hard part out of the way. Not everyone is cut out to work in User Experience (UX). That’s not a dig at anyone. Most of us aren’t cut out to be dentists, developers, or defensive linebackers. For those that excel at UX, it starts with seeing the world through a problem solving lens and a need to keep improving on the solutions we’ve already found.
5 Things Bars Have Taught Us About Business
A screeching ring pierces an otherwise silent 4:30 a.m Sunday morning. Dan rolls over and sees his then-wife, Mel, groggily hit accept on her iPhone. She listens to one side of a conversation that escalates quickly. Then she hangs up. “What was that about?” Dan asks, hoping to turn over and go back to sleep. “That was Josh. He’s freaking out,” she says. “A guy was just shot right outside our bar.” It’s August of 2009, and they’re two months in as bar owners. Welcome to the business.
5 Things Bars Have Taught Us About Business
A screeching ring pierces an otherwise silent 4:30 a.m Sunday morning. Dan rolls over and sees his then-wife, Mel, groggily hit accept on her iPhone. She listens to one side of a conversation that escalates quickly. Then she hangs up. “What was that about?” Dan asks, hoping to turn over and go back to sleep. “That was Josh. He’s freaking out,” she says. “A guy was just shot right outside our bar.” It’s August of 2009, and they’re two months in as bar owners. Welcome to the business.
The UX of Learning UX is Broken
It’s May of 1999, the heart of the dot-com boom. I walk into my first “professional” job as an information architect (what we would call User Experience today). I was an arrogant 22-year-old who had not only been creating websites since I was the age of 18, but had been paid well for it. From Photoshop to HTML to (limited) SQL, I knew how to do it all. And IA(information architecture) was only one slim facet of what I knew.
The UX of hiring for UX positions
“If I were to just see you blind, I’d think, ‘Cute kid. Next.’” That’s how Emily Rees, Director of Talent at The Stem, described how she normally would have reacted to Dan as a candidate for an information architect position when his resume landed on her desk in May of 1999. On paper, Dan had zero professional design training or experience and neither his B.A. in English and performing arts nor his M.S. in journalism stood out as typical qualifications for what she looked for to fill that role.
uxdesign.cc - User Experience Design
The problem with focusing on skills is that it hinges too much on specific software or process. By nature, many people in the UX field have a broad range of skills — this is what makes them great at connecting the dots, developing insights, and being able to look at people and products in a holistic way. By focusing on a specific skill set, it’s likely that you could be completely disqualifying an amazing candidate.
The Barstool MBA: Everyone Will Steal From You
Have you ever wondered how tips get shared in a busy bar when multiple servers help you? Well, with so much cash changing hands so quickly, it’s not exactly scientific. And sometimes, it gets messy — or downright ugly. Here’s an example of both: “I worked in a bar once that didn’t have a ‘pooled house,’ and bartenders got tipped out by servers.
The Barstool MBA: The Brand as Experience – Dan Maccarone – Medium
A screeching ring pierces the otherwise silent 4:30 a.m Sunday morning. Dan rolls over and sees his then-wife wife, Mel, groggily hit accept on her iPhone, then listens to one side of a conversation that escalates quickly. She hangs up. “What was that about?” Dan asks, hoping against hope he could turn over and go back to sleep. “That was Josh. He’s freaking out. A guy was just shot right outside our bar.” It’s August of 2009 and we were two months in as bar owners. Welcome to the business.
The UX of Learning UX is Broken
It’s May of 1999, the heart of the dot-com boom. I walk into my first “professional” job as an information architect (what we would call User Experience today). I was an arrogant 22-year-old who had not only been creating websites since I was the age of 18, but had been paid well for it. From Photoshop to HTML to (limited) SQL, I knew how to do it all. And IA (information architecture) was only one slim facet of what I knew.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Dan
Contact Dan, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack