UX Murder Mystery
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.Coming soon. Got a UX horror story? Send us your evidence.
Episodes
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Why Is UX Director the Most Miserable Job in Tech? Peter Merholz
Designers once decided what to build. Now they are told what to "draw." Brian and Eve sit down with Peter Merholz, co-founder of Adaptive Path, co-author of Org Design for Design Orgs, and co-host of the Finding Our Way podcast, to open a case the industry keeps arguing about and never closes…
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Eddie Bauer: 20 Years of Rewards, Zero Purchase History
Twenty years of rewards. Zero purchase history. Brian takes a parka with a broken zipper to a closing Eddie Bauer store. He has no receipt, but he has a rewards account he has held for almost twenty years. The system says he has never bought anything from Eddie Bauer. Nobody at the counter can...
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UX 101
Brian Crowley goes solo to talk UX 101
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The AI Got Out: A Correction, a Breakout, and a Government Portal
Well there's egg on our face. In the last episode Brian asserted that the AIs had been contained and it was just a test. That was completely wrong AND we've learned that the extent of the hacks has gone much further than we initially knew, which leads Eve and Brian to ask... what don't we know…
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Meta Pays $17 Billion, Apple Folds, and an AI Researcher Walks Out
Hook. Hold. Harvest. Hide. That is how state attorneys general described Meta's business model before the company agreed to a reported $17 billion child safety settlement whose remedy reads like a design spec: default time limits, an overnight block, no cosmetic filters for minors. Brian J.…
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Stop Selling Change: Why Transformation Keeps Failing (ft. Erin Stadler)
Deloitte invented another word for how organizations should be: changefulness. Erin Stadler read it and laughed out loud. Brian Crowley and Eve Eden investigate why organizational change keeps failing with someone who stopped consulting on it and built the alternative instead. Erin spent 13 years...
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Ghosted by the Machine: Who Really Rejected Your Resume?
Rejected ten minutes after applying. No feedback, no human contact, no explanation. Millions of job seekers know this exact experience, and most of them blame the same suspect: the AI. But is that who actually did it? In this episode, Brian Crowley and Eve Eden bring in an expert witness from...
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Not Lovin' It: How the McDonald's App Turned Customers Into the Product
McDonald's built one of the most downloaded food apps in the world, and the customers using it describe a crime scene: orders charged and canceled with no refund path, deals that vanish at the register, rewards that fail to scan in front of a line of strangers, and a privacy policy that says the...
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She Built AI at Google. Now She's Warning Newsrooms.
The news is on the table and AI is holding the murder weapon. Or is it? This week, UX Murder Mystery hosts Brian Crowley and Eve Eden interrogate a witness who has worked both sides of the story: Ovetta Sampson, founder of Right AI, former Director of UX for Google's Core Machine Learning, and a...
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It's a Trap: How Disney's $350M Star Wars Hotel ended after 18 Months
Disney spent $350 million on a Star Wars hotel where guests live inside the story for two days. It closed in 18 months. In this episode, Brian Crowley and Eve Eden investigate the Galactic Starcruiser with two guests who actually stayed aboard and loved every minute: Katie Swindler, author of…
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Are we Waymo's Tests?
A driverless Waymo rolls within a few feet of a guns-drawn felony stop in downtown Los Angeles while officers shout directions at a car with no one inside. The company says the whole encounter lasted about 15 seconds. Months later in San Francisco, passengers film themselves pleading with their...
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Rejected at 1:50 AM???
Derek Mobley applied to over 100 jobs in seven years. He was rejected every single time — sometimes within the hour, once at 1:50 in the morning. No human ever read his application. Now his lawsuit against Workday — the software vendor, not the employers — could redefine who's accountable when an...
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If Roblox Won't Protect Kids, They Won't Protect the Business
A five year build. Twelve thousand players. Gone in an afternoon. This week on UX Murder Mystery, we reopen the Roblox case file, and this time the victims are not just kids. They are the developers who built the platform's billion dollar economy. Back in Episode 3, we put Roblox on trial for a...
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Craft vs. Code: The Config 2026 Identity Crisis
Config used to be a crime of passion. A room full of people who make the interface, gathered to celebrate the craft. So why did Config 2026 feel less like a craft conference and more like a platform-strategy launch wearing a craft conference's clothes? In this episode, we open the case file on...
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One Line of Code: How TurboTax Killed Free Tax Filing
Free. Free. Free. Free. You saw the ad. What you did not see was the free product they buried so you could not find it. There was a genuinely free way to file your taxes, and about a hundred million people qualified for it. Then one line of code told the internet it did not exist, and the company...
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UX Murder Mystery LIVE @Figma Config 2026 Day 2
Join hosts Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden for a live recording of UX Murder Mystery, the show that investigates how good design dies. We take a real product, follow the evidence, and name what went wrong—part case file, part autopsy, all UX. Expect a notorious interface failure dissected in real...
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Why You Can't Find Anything on Streaming Anymore
You pay for five streaming services and still spend forty minutes scrolling before you give up and rewatch something you have seen four times. Somewhere between the infinite scroll and a search bar that cannot find a movie you know for a fact exists, discoverability got quietly killed off. This...
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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…
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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)…
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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...
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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.
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They Knew. They Did It Anyway. The Meta Trial Nobody Expected.
The Case of the Double Murder Meta didn't just fail. It failed twice — in completely different directions — and both failures trace back to the same root cause: a company that designed for its own vision instead of its users. Crime #1: The Metaverse. $40 billion. Legless avatars. A platform…
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The Bullseye Bait and Switch
Target built its brand on a simple promise: expect more, pay less — and for a while, it delivered. Inclusive sizing. Accessible stores. Diverse representation. It was a masterclass in mass customization — the idea that good UX could scale across every kind of customer. Then the backlash came. And...
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Fine. Everything Is Fine.
We covered these cases. Nothing is fixed. Some of it is worse. Brian Crowley and Eve Eden check back in on: SONOS Two years later, they just put back a button they never should have removed. IROBOT Bankrupt, acquired by China, and flagged as a national security risk. Your vacuum knows your floor...
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Pre-Existing Negligence
On October 1, 2013, the federal government launched Healthcare.gov — the digital front door to the Affordable Care Act, and the most ambitious e-government initiative in American history. By the end of Day 1, the site had crashed. By the end of the week, only six people had successfully enrolled....
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When the Music Died: How Sonos Killed Its Own App and Lost Everything
Sonos shipped an unfinished app that broke thousands of speakers, wiped $500M in value, and took down the CEO. Brian Crowley and Eve Eden investigate one of the biggest UX failures ever. You spend thousands on premium speakers. They work beautifully for years. Then one update kills everything —...
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Who Killed Meetup? Three Owners, Zero UX
A platform born from 9/11 grief to fight American loneliness — sold to WeWork, fire-sold during COVID, and now strip-mined by Bending Spoons. Meetup.com is one of the most heartbreaking UX murders we've ever investigated. In this episode, Brian Crowley and Eve Eden follow the evidence through…
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The Case of the Vanishing Humans: Dead Internet Theory
The Case of the Vanishing Humans The internet isn't dead. It's undead—still moving, still generating content, but its soul is gone. In this episode, Brian and Eve investigate the authentication crisis killing trust online. The victim? Authentic human interaction. The suspects? Platforms that...
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The Loyalty Trap: How Surveillance Pricing Turns Your Rewards App Into a Weapon with Stephanie Nguyen
THE CASE: Surveillance Pricing -- Who's Setting the Price, Who's Being Watched, and Who's Really Paying You scan your loyalty card. You earn your points. You think you're getting rewarded. But what if the more loyal you become, the higher prices you're paying? In this episode, hosts Brian Crowley...
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How iRobot Lost $3.5 BILLION: The Roomba Bankruptcy Explained
How did iRobot go from a $3.5 billion robot vacuum empire to bankruptcy in just 4 years? We investigate the product failures, broken UX, and regulatory decisions that killed an American icon.The company that invented the robot vacuum market and sold 50 million Roombas just filed for bankruptcy.…
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$14 Billion to Bankruptcy: The Wish.com Disaster
$14 Billion to Bankruptcy: The Wish.com Disaster In 2013, Wish.com promised to democratize shopping: designer looks for dirt-cheap prices, delivered straight to your door. By 2018, they were pulling in $1.9 billion in revenue. Their 2020 IPO valued the company at $14 billion, and they were…
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$3 Billion to Zero: Who Killed Skylanders?
In 2011, Activision cracked the code that would print money for years: convince kids they needed to buy physical toys to unlock digital characters. Skylanders pioneered the "toys-to-life" genre, generating over $3 billion in its first three years and creating a new category that Disney, LEGO, and...
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When Design Challenges Became Exploitation with Christina Hamlin
The crime scene: A take-home design challenge. The victim: Fair hiring practices. The suspects: Well-meaning companies asking for "just a few hours" of strategic work. In this episode of UX Murder Mystery, hosts Brian Crowley and Eve Eden investigate how design challenges and whiteboard exercises...
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He Thought He Owed $730K. Robinhood Had No One to Call.
CONTENT WARNING: This episode discusses suicide. We cover the death of Alex Kearns in the final segment (starting at 31:33). Crisis resources are listed below. If you're struggling with thoughts of suicide: Call 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) Text "HELLO" to 741741 (Crisis Text Line) You're not...
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Movie Theaters: What We Love & Why They're Struggling
After some heavy episodes, Eve and Brian lighten things up with a fun conversation about their love of movies and movie theaters—and why the industry is in deep trouble. We discuss what makes the theatrical experience magical, how individual UX improvements accidentally killed the communal vibe,...
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From Layoffs to Launching a Podcast: Our Origin Story
Ten episodes in, it's time we properly introduce ourselves. In this milestone episode, Eve and Brian step away from investigating product murders to share their own origin stories—how they got into UX, how they met teaching at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the career roller coasters…
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LinkedIn Job Search Failure: Why AI Screening Blocks Qualified Candidates
LinkedIn's AI screening tools are blocking qualified candidates from jobs they're perfect for. We investigate how automated recruiting broke the job market—and what both sides get catastrophically wrong. Comedian and recruiter Lindsay Adams brings a unique dual perspective: the comedy of watching...
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UX Job Market Crisis: Layoffs, AWS Failures, and Why Tech Workers Need Unions
The UX job market isn't just "tough"—it's forcing designers to leave the country, abandon expensive cities, and consider completely different careers. Brian and Eve get real about what's happening in tech right now: the inhumane way companies handle layoffs, why AWS outages reveal deeper problems...
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Microsoft Clippy: Why AI Assistant UX Failed
Clippy never died. It just evolved into the intrusive AI assistants plaguing us today. In this episode, Brian and Eve investigate why tech companies keep building "helpful" features nobody wants, from Microsoft's tone-deaf Copilot to the Rabbit AI device that projects interfaces onto your hand...
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UX Leadership Crisis: Why Design Directors Are Failing Their Teams
On today's episode: Eve and Brian as the questions: Should UX practitioners need licenses? Is UX Leadership failing designers, writers and researchers? Are they prepared to think critically about AI? UX MURDER MYSTERY HOSTED BY Brian J. Crowley Eve Eden EDITED BY Kelsey Smith INTRO ANIMATION &…
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Google Glass & Apple Vision Pro: Why AR Headset UX Keeps Failing Users
This week, Eve and Brian talk about the biggest UX scam in tech right now, wearable 'innovation' that no one asked for. From Apple Vision Pro's $3,500 ski-mask aesthetic to Meta's mind-reading wristband, they uncover how the race for futuristic hardware keeps ignoring one thing: real humans.…
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Dating App UX Failures: Why Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and Match Design for Addiction Not Love
This week Eve and Brian talk about some 🌶️🌶️🌶️. What happens when dating apps evolve backwards how did covid change the game? In this episode of UX Murder Mystery, we investigate how Match, Tinder, and Bumble transformed from hopeful matchmakers into user-hostile addictive profit machines—and...
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Roblox Child Safety Crisis: How UX Design Enabled Predator Grooming
What happens when a game made for kids becomes a playground for predators? Eve and Brian break down Roblox's biggest UX crime — failed moderation — and how better design could have saved more than just reputations. In 2018, Roblox's design team created an in-game economy that pedophiles exploited...
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LinkedIn UX Failures: How Bad Design Drives Users Away From Professional Networking
Brian and Eve talk about how LinkedIn was once a useful product and now it's lost it way gaining all the worst noise and anxiety of social media with very little utility. LinkedIn's UX drives away the professionals it's supposed to serve. We investigate why the feed is full of spam, how the...
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UX Industry Crisis: Why Designers Are Losing Influence in Product Development
UX designers are being marginalized in product development. We investigate why design roles are shrinking, how AI is being blamed, and what's really happening to the profession. Perfect for: UX designers, product managers, design leaders, career changers, design students UX MURDER MYSTERY HOSTED…
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About this show
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.Coming soon. Got a UX horror story? Send us your evidence.
Hosted by
Brian Crowley and Eve Eden