Kevin Waltz

Walks through psychological drivers like autonomy, achievement, novelty, and recognition that shape how users engage with a product. Useful when making engagement features and you want a psychology lens on what to build.

Marina Yalanska

Marina Yalanska covers the two main types of user motivation, extrinsic from outside rewards and intrinsic from within, and explains why designers must understand both. Useful when shaping UX for habits or engagement and you want to know what drives users.

Dev Patnaik

Classic piece on needfinding that pushes designers to look for needs first instead of jumping to solutions, using observation and iterative research. Useful when a team is too quick to leap to features without understanding why users would want them.

Jun Loayza

Walks through how to uncover real user needs through conversations, behavior, and pattern-spotting. Useful when planning user research to back a new product or feature.

Christina Wodtke

Argues that disruptive products must be 9x better than the incumbent and that finding that gap requires deep research plus strong synthesis. Useful when a team thinks "slightly better" is enough to win a market.

Jevgeni Kabanov

Jevgeni Kabanov breaks value-led growth into hard and soft value props and how each lands with users. Useful when a team has fuzzy positioning and needs sharper value claims.

Kate Williams

Kate Williams (SurveySparrow) walks through the psychology behind consumer buying behavior. Useful when a CX team wants a friendly read on what drives buyers.

David Susman

David Susman (Verywell Mind) explains cognitive biases and how they shape thinking and choice. Useful when a team needs a starter list of biases to review their decision processes against.

Katelyn Bourgoin

Katelyn Bourgoin breaks down buyer psychology and the hidden why behind purchase decisions. Useful when a marketing or product team wants to understand the buyer's emotional triggers.

Ben Davis

Ben Davis (Econsultancy) explains the customer mental model and why it matters in marketing and UX. Useful when a marketing team wants a shared definition before a research project.

Wes Hunt

Wes Hunt walks through ten real examples of mental models in UX design. Useful when designers need concrete examples to spot mental-model gaps in their own products.

Adam Fard

Adam Fard shares an actionable guide to using mental models in UX design so interfaces match how users think. Useful when a designer is trying to make complex flows feel familiar.

Infoteam Consulting

Infoteam Consulting walks through how to truly understand customer needs in B2B sales. Useful when a sales or product team needs a primer on listening for real needs, not surface asks.

Kevin Namaky

Walks through how to write a strong Reason to Believe so a brand promise feels credible, with tips like keeping reasons few and tied to the benefit. Useful when a marketer or PM is drafting a creative brief and needs proof points to land.

Tony Ulwick

Tony Ulwick's Jobs-to-be-Done piece argues customers buy products to get a job done and outcomes are how they judge progress. Useful when a product team wants the clearest version of the JTBD framework before applying it.

Paul Adams

Paul Adams tells the story of how Intercom invented Job Stories to escape persona-driven user stories that did not match real behavior. Useful when product teams want to understand the origin of job stories and adopt the format with intent.

Susan Weinschenk

Susan Weinschenk says intuitive UX comes from matching the product's conceptual model to the user's mental model. Useful when a team obsesses over visuals but ignores how users expect things to work.

Charlie Barton

Argues that asking 'why' over and over is a flawed way to find root causes and offers better questions. Useful when a team's RCA sessions feel circular or stuck.

Chris McCumskey

Explains how to define a clear, measurable problem before doing root cause analysis. Useful when a team jumps to solutions before they really understand the issue.

Kobi Salinas

Compares effective and ineffective user stories and explains how bad ones hurt the project. Useful when a product team wants a checklist for spotting and fixing weak user stories.

Avi Siegel

Frames the user story versus job story debate as misguided, since each format serves a different stage of product work. Useful when teams argue over which format to use and need a way to use both well.

Valerio Zanini

Lays out System Story and Job Story formats as alternatives to User Stories when the user story does not fit. Useful when a product team is writing backlog items and finds the user story format awkward for the work.

JTBD ToolKit

Revisits Job Stories as a flexible alternative to user stories, focusing on triggering events, motivations, and outcomes. Useful when a product team is rethinking how it writes stories so design starts from a real situation, not a persona.

Bill Cushard

Argues that customer education programs should start with value proposition design so training fits real customer jobs. Useful when a SaaS team is building customer education or onboarding and wants it tied to actual customer needs.

Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn explains why user stories beat formal requirements and use cases. Useful when teams are debating how heavyweight their requirements docs should be.

George Wilde

George Wilde guides PMs through writing effective user stories that drive real outcomes. Useful when a team's stories feel like task lists instead of user-centered work.

Lisa Mo Wagner

Lisa Mo Wagner shares how to write strong user stories that hold up under planning. Useful when a team's stories keep getting rewritten or rejected by engineering.

Shubhadeep Chattopadhyay

Shubhadeep Chattopadhyay shares best practices for writing clear user stories. Useful when a PM or BA needs a checklist before grooming stories with the team.

Wes Hunt

Wes Hunt's Deliverable UX guide explains how mental model maps capture user beliefs, behaviors, and emotions during a task. Useful when a team is starting their first mental model exercise and needs a friendly how-to.

Megan Chan

Megan Chan at NN/g explains mental models as users' beliefs about how a system works and why matching them creates intuitive UX. Useful when a team debates whether a design feels right to first-time users.

Ward Andrews

Ward Andrews argues that most apps lose 77% of users in three days and that strong onboarding is the lever that beats churn. Useful when a team has a leaky funnel and needs to focus on the early days of a user's life.

Stuart Silverstein

Stuart Silverstein breaks down how to evaluate enterprise apps by looking at complexity, age, and ad-hoc requests that pile up over time. Useful when you inherit a tangled internal product and need a method to find the worst pain points first.

Alexandra O'Neal

Alexandra O'Neal applies Perceptual Control Theory to UX — using control loops to discover what users are actually controlling when they use a product. Useful when a researcher wants a deeper theoretical lens on intent than 'jobs to be done' offers.

Jordan Julien

Jordan Julien explains why knowing user intent — what someone is actually trying to do — is the foundation of good UX, and how teams misread it. Useful when a team is designing flows but never asks 'what is the user trying to do here?'

Eva Schicker

Eva Schicker walks through how to revise an Initial Problem Statement (IPS) in UX — when to rewrite it, what to keep, and how new research forces edits. Useful when a project's problem statement is going stale and a team needs a way to update it without losing the thread.

Chris McCumskey

Walks through root cause analysis as a problem-solving tool, from defining the issue to finding causes. Useful when a new team needs a clean intro to RCA.

Chad Burroughs

Short video that runs through a real root cause analysis with a worked example. Useful when teams need a clear demo before trying RCA on their own problem.

Michael Goitein

Argues that following stakeholder orders alone creates bad product experiences and pushes user needs first. Useful when stakeholders are pushing features and you need a frame to push back.

Aries Fadli Prayoga

Explores how to design empty states and blank canvases on purpose so users know what to do first. Useful when your product has a lot of empty screens and users feel lost on first use.

Robert Sens

Argues good mobile onboarding starts with understanding why a user installed the app in the first place. Useful when your mobile activation is weak and you suspect onboarding isn't matching user intent.

Javier Nicolás D.

Javier Nicolas asks what users want most and how to align UX with their values. Useful when a team is deep in features and has lost sight of what users actually care about.

Vrinda Tyagi

Separates user goals from user needs and warns product thinkers about treating them as the same thing. Useful when a discovery team keeps designing for the surface goal and missing the deeper need underneath.

Xenia Avezov

Walks a health-tech case where systems thinking shaped secondary research scope so the team avoided solving the wrong problem. Useful when starting a study in a new domain and you want to map the user's world before diving in.

Tony Ulwick

Tony Ulwick's JTBD framework captures complete customer needs in days (not months) and stays valid for years. Useful when teams need a stable foundation of needs to drive product decisions.

Alexander Osterwalder

Strategyzer's Value Proposition Canvas pairs a Customer Profile (jobs, pains, gains) with a Value Map (products, pain relievers, gain creators) to design products people want. Useful when teams need to align product features to specific customer jobs.

Dave Gray

Dave Gray's updated Empathy Map Canvas has six areas (Goals, Sees, Says, Does, Hears, Thinks & Feels) and starts with defining who and what observable behavior. Useful when teams want a clearer empathy-mapping tool than the original.