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.Coming soon. Got a UX horror story? Send us your evidence.

UX Murder Mystery is a arts podcast hosted by Brian Crowley and Eve Eden, with 45 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Brian Crowley and Eve Eden hosts UX Murder Mystery, a arts show with 45 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #43

  Meta Pays $17 Billion, Apple Folds, and an AI Researcher Walks Out

  Sep 30, 20261h 16mS1

  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. Crowley and Eve Eden work through the month in tech and the design decisions underneath each story. Apple's foldable iPhone Duo and a keynote engineered to avoid live failure. Dating apps losing paying users while a CEO calls swipe velocity the problem. Rideshare prices that look like willingness-to-pay algorithms, and driver streaks that look like manipulation. Grok's nonconsensual image generation and the case for building safety into the experience itself. Jacob Coxon's resignation from Anthropic, followed by a real argument between the hosts: is a 10% extinction estimate measurable, were the lab incidents contained, and is the Robot God story a marketing plan ahead of the IPOs? Brian argues LLMs work more like cold reading than intelligence. Eve describes her "wisdom council" method for making AI useful. The episode closes with the fall wave of tech documentaries, including a Musk film that replaced its subject with an AI avatar. Disclosure: the hosts prep this show with Claude, which is made by Anthropic. The Anthropic segment is built from outside reporting. For informational/entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies/individuals use publicly available info 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. 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 ©2026 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden questions@UXmurdermystery.com

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  Episode #42

  Stop Selling Change: Why Transformation Keeps Failing (ft. Erin Stadler)

  Sep 17, 20261h 5mS1

  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 as a founder and COO at Boomtown testing one question: if people actually adopt these practices, does it create an adaptable organization? It did. People who joined said they could never go back to a traditional company. Erin breaks down why transformations bomb at scale, the principles layer most rollouts skip, how her team created more change by never saying the word change, and why she thinks change management needs to go away as a concept. She gives her honest read on SAFe as one of the first certified SAFe consultants, and on the "is agile dead" debate. Then the AI turn: companies grew access to AI 50% in a year, fewer than 60% of people who have it use it daily, and 84% never redesigned a single workflow around it. Erin's diagnosis: AI is exposing how poorly organizations design the way they work. The episode closes with why everyone in your company is now a product manager, what Netflix's CPTO gets right about systems thinkers, and one question to ask about your standup this week. Erin Stadler: https://www.erinstadler.com/ Netflix CPTO Elizabeth Stone on Lenny's Podcast: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/netflix-cpto-on-ai-and-the-future 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 ©2026 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden questions@UXmurdermystery.com Thank you for watching and or listening! For informational/entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies/individuals use publicly available info 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.

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  Episode #41

  Ghosted by the Machine: Who Really Rejected Your Resume?

  Sep 3, 202653 minS1

  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 inside the system: Max Gerdes, Executive Director of Staffing Solutions at Motion Recruitment, who has spent more than a decade recruiting UX, UI, product, and technology talent. Max walks through what really happens after the apply button, where automated rules end and AI begins, and why an instant rejection usually isn't what candidates think it is. The investigation moves through the Mobley v. Workday lawsuit, where a candidate alleges he was rejected from more than 100 jobs by employers using AI screening tools, the false negative problem where companies measure hiring speed but not the qualified people their systems throw away, and the accountability vacuum where nobody in the chain can fully explain a consequential rejection. Then the case widens to the platforms: Indeed and Glassdoor consolidating under one owner, hundreds of millions of candidate profiles under one roof, and Eve's own poll data suggesting the job board era may already be over. The episode closes with the defense's case: what automation has genuinely made better, and which decisions should never leave human hands. Links: World Economic Forum on AI in candidate screening: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/03/ai-hiring-human-touch-recruitment/ RPJ Law on the June 2026 Mobley v. Workday ruling: https://rpjlaw.com/recent-developments-in-mobley-v-workday-california-court-allows-key-ai-hiring-bias-claims-to-move-forward/ TechCrunch on the Indeed and Glassdoor integration and layoffs: https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/11/indeed-glassdoor-to-lay-off-1300-staff/ Harvard Business Review on how AI assessment changes candidate behavior: https://hbr.org/2025/07/how-ai-assessment-tools-affect-job-candidates-behavior Motion Recruitment: https://motionrecruitment.com 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 ©2026 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden questions@UXmurdermystery.com Thank you for watching and or listening! For informational/entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies/individuals use publicly available info 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.

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  Episode #40

  Not Lovin' It: How the McDonald's App Turned Customers Into the Product

  Aug 27, 202654 minS1

  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 company may profile their psychological trends and behavior. In this zoomed in episode, Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden investigate how an app can be a business triumph and a customer experience disaster at the same time? Links: WFTV Action 9 investigation on canceled orders and refunds: https://www.wftv.com/news/local/not-lovin-it-mcdonalds-customers-have-mobile-app-complaints/Y3ASQYX6XNDDFPCTS56U6S3YZA/ Tasting Table on the disappearing app deals: https://www.tastingtable.com/2099096/problem-mcdonalds-mobile-app-according-to-customers/ BigGo News on app surveillance and two tier pricing: https://biggo.com/news/202510090122_McDonalds_App_Privacy_Concerns Daily Meal on what the app knows about you: https://www.thedailymeal.com/1455292/mcdonalds-app-tracks-activity/ McDonald's Privacy Statement: https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/privacy.html McDonald's app page with the August 2026 terms update: https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/download-app.html 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 ©2026 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden questions@UXmurdermystery.com Thank you for watching and or listening! For informational/entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies/individuals use publicly available info 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.

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  Episode #39

  Who Killed the News? Ovetta Sampson on AI and Journalism

  Aug 13, 20261h 45mS1

  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 onetime police-beat reporter who learned early to second source everything, including her own mother. Together they examine the evidence: the "AI is inevitable" narrative the major outlets keep pushing, the bias that gets baked in before anyone touches a keyboard, the graduates booing tech executives at commencement, and the artists fighting back by poisoning the training data itself. Ovetta runs her Human Engagement Risks framework over the modern newsroom, offers real advice for small outlets with no ethics team, and explains what it takes to build AI with equity as a load-bearing value instead of a press release. Then comes the verdict: is the tech industry, as it stands today, good for democracy? CONNECT WITH OVETTA: Ovetta Sampson: https://www.ovetta-sampson.com/ Right AI: https://www.rightainow.com/ Designing with AI Training: https://www.rightainow.com/designing-with-ai Designing for AI Training (cohort starts Sept. 9): https://www.rightainow.com/designing-for-ai How Risky Is Your AI Design? Free MindfulAI™ Risk Assessment Tool: https://www.ovetta-sampson.com/mindfulai-diagnostic-tool Open for Speaking Events: https://www.ovetta-sampson.com/book-ovetta REFERENCED IN THIS EPISODE: AISHA: https://aisha.ai/ Coded Bias (PBS Independent Lens): https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/coded-bias/ CREDITS: 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 ©2026 Brian J. Crowley and Eve Eden questions@UXmurdermystery.com Thank you for watching and or listening! For informational/entertainment purposes only. Views are commentary and speculation, not statements of fact. Discussions of real companies/individuals use publicly available info 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.

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