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UX Murder Mystery: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Brian Crowley and Eve Eden
Where do true crime, business and technology intersect? When another product has been found dead. The cause? UX failure. We investigate what's killing your customer experience. Think true crime, but for failed designs. We dig into the real stories behind UX disasters. LinkedIn's algorithm nightmare. Paywalls that killed communities. Corporate decisions that poison good design. Every case has clues. Every problem has a solution. Got a UX horror story? Send us your evidence.
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- 3 days ago59 min
Blind Spot: Who Keeps Killing Accessible Design?
A hit show about a blind superhero. That a blind person could not follow. That is where this case opens, and it only gets stranger from there. Brian and Eve sit down with AI and voice design leader Yaddy Arroyo to open four files on the same victim: accessibility. A streaming giant that locked out the exact audience its hero represented. A usability legend who pronounced accessibility dead and prescribed a robot he could not explain. A self-driving car handing blind riders a freedom the experts swore was impossible. And the view from a parent who lives the gap between the spec and the sidewalk every single day. Four failures. One killer. By the end you will know exactly who keeps pulling the trigger, and why accessibility never actually failed. People keep failing it, then blaming the corpse. IN THIS EPISODE The Daredevil reversal and the Chicago activist who forced it. Jakob Nielsen's "Accessibility Has Failed" and the community that took it apart. The parent's view from inside the room. And the plot twist on four wheels, where Waymo and Zoox prove that accessibility was never about the technology. It was always about who was in the room. SOURCES AND FURTHER READING Netflix adds audio description to Daredevil (TIME): https://time.com/3823916/netflix-daredevil-accessible-blind/ After fan pressure, Netflix makes Daredevil accessible (NPR): https://www.npr.org/2015/04/18/400590705/after-fan-pressure-netflix-makes-daredevil-accessible-to-the-blind The fight for audio description, Dare2Describe (The Nerds of Color): https://thenerdsofcolor.org/2015/04/27/the-fight-for-audio-description-on-netflixs-daredevil/ Accessibility Has Failed, Try Generative UI (Jakob Nielsen): https://jakobnielsenphd.substack.com/p/accessibility-generative-ui On Nielsen's generative UI claims (Per Axbom): https://axbom.com/nielsen-generative-ui-failure/ Jakob Nielsen's problematic claims about accessibility (Hidde de Vries): https://hidde.blog/links/jakob-nielsens-problematic-claims-about-accessibility/ NFB and Waymo partnership (Waymo): https://waymo.com/community/articles/national-federation-of-the-blind/ Blind Waymo users revel in the joy of riding alone (NYT via The Star): https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2026/05/25/blind-waymo-users-revel-in-the-joy-of-riding-alone Waymo's accessibility features (AI Weekly): https://aiweekly.co/alerts/waymo-wins-blind-riders-with-accessibility-features Zoox, accessibility, and the curb (Evinced): <a class= "underline underline underline-offset-2 decoration-1 decoration-current/40 hover:decoration-current focus:decoration-curre
- 1 weeks ago54 min
Not Allowed in the Room: Design's Missing Seat in the AI Build
Jess Lowry on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, why design keeps getting locked out of the rooms where AI is being built, and what diversity of thinking actually looks like on a team that wants to win. ess Lowry expected to be excited about AI. After almost twenty years in UX, service design, and platform orchestration, she figured this was the moment design got to do its best work. Then she walked into the rooms where AI was actually being built and realized something had shifted. The data scientists were there. The researchers were there. The product managers were there. She was not. This week, Brian and Eve sit down with Jess to investigate what's actually happening to design in the middle of what she calls the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The "seat at the table" conversation was already dated when she started in tech in the early 2000s. The story underneath it is bigger, more structural, and far less discussed in public. Smart homes, smart cars, smart cities, and AI agents are being wired together by teams that mostly aren't talking to each other, inside companies siloed by budget line, and shipped fast because building has gotten cheap. What hasn't gotten cheap is critical thinking, long-term planning, and the human-centered eye that catches the things everyone else misses. Jess makes a clear case for where design fits in. Not as a slowdown, not as a polish layer, but as the connector that externalizes shared understanding so teams can move quickly without backing themselves into corners. She walks through the Bauhaus and arts and crafts roots of design thinking, the 10x to 100x ROI of catching problems before engineering starts, and what diversity of thinking actually looks like on a team that wants to win. Brian shares his Starbucks and ChatGPT experiment, where he got the agent to design a drink optimized to punish baristas, and the three of them work through what it means when governance is just a few keyword filters and the edge cases nobody mapped become the product. The conversation also looks forward. Jess wants a web that finally catches up to the Bauhaus, immersive environments that bring sound and light and scent into digital space, and data centers reimagined as paths into nature rather than scars across it. Brian and Eve land on a Star Trek future where AI handles food, energy, and the climate crisis first, and the rest of us get to self-actualize. If you've felt locked out of the rooms where the future is being built, this one's for you. And if you're hiring, deciding, or quietly running the team that's about to ship the next AI feature, Jess has a question for you: how many opportunities to win are you actually creating?
- 2 weeks ago59 min
OpenAI Sued Three Times In Six Days
Six tech companies. Two weeks. One playbook. Brian and Eve walk through the lawsuits, settlements, and corporate meltdowns piling up across the tech industry, and trace the single defense strategy connecting all of them. OpenAI is named in three separate legal actions in six days, including a wrongful death suit over the F S U mass shooting and a wrongful death suit over a college student's overdose. Pennsylvania sues Character dot A I after a chatbot claimed a fake medical license. Meta threatens to pull out of New Mexico rather than redesign for child safety. Apple pays 250 million dollars to settle a class action over Siri features it advertised but never shipped. And GameStop C E O Ryan Cohen tries to buy eBay, can't explain the math on live television, and gets rejected. The through-line: ship fast, monetize the harm, settle the bodies, update the disclaimer, and tell the next user this version is different. Related listening: attorney Bakari Sellers, who represents the Chabba family in the F S U shooting lawsuit against OpenAI, in his own words: https://youtu.be/J6_6vluYNVc Sources cited in this episode: NBC News, CBS News, Yahoo Finance, NPR, CNBC, MacRumors, and the SEC Form 8-K filing from eBay Inc. Hosted by Brian J. Crowley & Eve Eden / Edited by Kelsey Smith / Intro Animation & Logo Design by Brian J. Crowley / Music by Nicolas Lee / A joint production of EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories / ©2025 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden / questions@UXmurdermystery.com / "Thank you for watching and or listening!" For informational and entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies and individuals use publicly available information for critique and education. Not factual assertions about motives or intentions. Creators disclaim liability for damages from reliance on content. Events may be dramatized for illustrative purposes. podscan_v9DZhMTHbaN9cVQFqN1dyKq5JUJd6mep
- 3 weeks ago1h 3m
The Field Is the Crime Scene: Reddit's Hardest UX Questions, Answered
Somewhere on Reddit, a designer just spent five hours on a take-home assignment and got a form rejection. The field isn't dying in one place. It's bleeding out across the whole map. Brian Crowley and Eve Eden answer the questions UX practitioners are actually asking right now. Not the ones recruiters answer at conferences. The ones people post anonymously at midnight after their fourth interview round goes silent. The case files: the AI bubble designers keep getting blamed for, and the April 2026 Axios finding that AI-enabled workflows can now cost more than the human labor they replaced. The four-year client relationship that ended when a designer was swapped for Claude. Hiring processes that ask for five hours of work and return template rejections. The box within a box problem in current AI interfaces. Whether the field needs licensing. And the Reddit question Brian and Eve don't dodge: is UX design just psychological manipulation with a nicer name. If you have been ghosted, force-prompted into AI workflows you did not ask for, or laid off in the last eighteen months, this is the episode where someone says the quiet part out loud. Send your case: questions@uxmurdermystery.com
- May 14, 20261h 4m
The Driver Did Nothing Wrong
Two automakers. Multiple deaths. One shared cause: interfaces that prioritized looking like the future over keeping people alive in the present. Anton Yelchin's 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee didn't malfunction — it worked exactly as designed. Fiat Chrysler's monostable electronic shifter abandoned 80 years of muscle memory for a haptic gimmick that left 1.1 million drivers guessing whether their car was in Park. The recall came after Yelchin was already dead. Then there's Tesla, where touchscreen-buried controls, door handles that fail in fires, and Autopilot marketing collide with the only metric that matters: who walks away. Two case files. One verdict. When the interface is the murder weapon, "user error" is just the alibi.
- Apr 30, 202652 min
The Killer Is in the Kickoff Meeting
Founders don't set out to build extraction machines. So how does the product vision get overwritten between seed and Series B? Jessica Murray joins Eve Eden and Brian Crowley for a founder-focused autopsy of the startup product lifecycle — why UX lives at the decision layer (not the interface), how engagement optimization quietly rewrites your product, and the one thing every founder should define before they build. We walk the Spotify crime scene, name the investor pressure trap, and hand founders a diagnostic they can run on their own roadmap this week. Hosted by Brian J. Crowley & Eve Eden Edited by Kelsey Smith Intro Animation & Logo Design by Brian J. Crowley Music by Nicolas Lee A joint production of EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories questions@uxmurdermystery.com Thank you for watching and or listening! ©2025 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden For informational and entertainment purposes only. Views expressed are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies and individuals use publicly available information for purposes of critique and education and are not factual assertions about motives or intentions. The creators disclaim liability for damages arising from reliance on this content. Events may be dramatized for illustrative purposes.
- Apr 23, 202647 min
The Shuffle Was Never Random: How Spotify Rigged Its Own Platform Against Artists and Listeners
Independent artists were told Spotify was a level playing field. It wasn't. While real musicians earn fractions of a cent per stream, Spotify seeded its most-followed playlists with fake artists through a secret internal program called Perfect Fit Content — designed to reduce royalty payouts to real musicians. Meanwhile, the shuffle you trust is engineered, the algorithm is pay-to-play, and Wrapped is a surveillance campaign you share voluntarily every December. Brian and Eve open the full case file: the shuffle algorithm, Discovery Mode payola, the Discover Weekly filter bubble, a decade of ignored search failures, the 1,000-stream royalty threshold that cost indie artists $46.9 million in year one, and the ghost artist program Liz Pelly exposed in Harper's Magazine. Two victims. One platform. Case closed. UX MURDER MYSTERY HOSTED BY Brian J. Crowley Eve Eden EDITED BY Kelsey Smith INTRO ANIMATION & LOGO DESIGN Brian J. Crowley MUSIC BY Nicolas Lee A JOINT PRODUCTION OF EVE | User Experience Design Agency and CrowleyUX | Where Systems Meet Stories ©2025 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden Email us at: questions@UXmurdermystery.com Thank you for watching and or listening! This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by the hosts are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. All discussions about real companies, individuals, or organizations are based on publicly available information, media reports, and personal opinions offered for the purpose of critique, education, and storytelling. We make no representations or warranties about the accuracy or completeness of any information discussed. Nothing in this podcast should be interpreted as a factual assertion about the actions, motives, or intentions of any individual or corporate entity. Listeners should conduct their own research before drawing conclusions. The creators and guests of this podcast disclaim all liability for any loss, harm, or damages arising from reliance on any information or opinions presented. Names, characters, and events may occasionally be dramatized or fictionalized for illustrative purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is purely coincidental.
- Apr 19, 202625 min
Is UX Dead? Answering Reddit's Hardest Questions
Brian Crowley goes solo to answer real questions pulled from r/UXDesign — covering the job market, AI, stakeholders, and what UX even means anymore.
About UX Murder Mystery
Where do true crime, business and technology intersect? When another product has been found dead. The cause? UX failure. We investigate what's killing your customer experience. Think true crime, but for failed designs. We dig into the real stories behind UX disasters. LinkedIn's algorithm nightmare. Paywalls that killed communities. Corporate decisions that poison good design. Every case has clues. Every problem has a solution. Got a UX horror story? Send us your evidence.
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