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PODCAST

UX Murder Mystery

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.

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All Episodes

01:15:31

Meta Pays $17 Billion, Apple Folds, and an AI...

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/09/30

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

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01:05:21

Stop Selling Change: Why Transformation Keeps Failing...

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/09/17

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

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52:31

Ghosted by the Machine: Who Really Rejected Your Resume?

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/09/03

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

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54:19

Not Lovin' It: How the McDonald's App Turned...

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/08/27

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

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01:45:03

She Built AI at Google. Now She's Warning Newsrooms.

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/08/13

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

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01:09:58

It's a Trap: How Disney's $350M Star Wars Hotel ended...

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/08/06

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 Life & Death Design, and Jacob Swindler, environmental and experiential design leader. Together they dig into the mystery at the heart of the case: how does an experience with record guest satisfaction die this

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49:30

Are we Waymo's Tests?

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/07/30

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 robotaxi as it drives directly over lit fireworks on the Fourth of July, while a bystander waves at the car to stop. Nobody is hurt in either case. But these are not isolated moments: a robotaxi cutting

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54:47

Rejected at 1:50 AM???

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/07/24

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 algorithm decides who gets to work. This week, Brian and Eve are joined by Jess Lowry, host of the Deprecated Human podcast, whose own research tracks the job opportunities that vanish inside AI hiring

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40:51

If Roblox Won't Protect Kids, They Won't Protect the...

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/07/16

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 design culture that treated child safety as a cost center. The verdict then: platform design is safety design. This week, Roblox proves that promise runs in only one direction, and the developers are next

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33:08

Craft vs. Code: The Config 2026 Identity Crisis

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/07/09

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 Figma's annual conference and the identity crisis hiding in its own program. The keynote pitched a canvas that absorbs everything: code, motion, AI, shaders, even hardware. Meanwhile the breakout stages

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53:55

One Line of Code: How TurboTax Killed Free Tax Filing

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/07/02

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 that ran it eventually walked away from the program entirely. The free product died. The paid one is doing just fine. The victim is IRS Free File. The prime suspect is TurboTax. And the murder weapon is

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45:06

UX Murder Mystery LIVE @Figma Config 2026 Day 2

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/06/25

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 time, plus the kind of unfiltered commentary you only get with a live audience in the room. Bring your hot takes. Someone's design is going down.

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45:20

Why You Can't Find Anything on Streaming Anymore

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/06/18

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 week Brian and Eve open the case file on streaming search. The broken autocomplete. The recommendation engines that surface what the platform is contractually obligated to push rather than what you actually

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59:08

Blind Spot: Who Keeps Killing Accessible Design?

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/06/10

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

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54:34

Not Allowed in the Room: Design's Missing Seat in the...

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/06/03

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

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59:05

OpenAI Sued Three Times In Six Days

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/05/28

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

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01:03:02

The Field Is the Crime Scene: Reddit's Hardest UX...

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/05/21

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

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01:04:32

The Driver Did Nothing Wrong

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/05/14

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

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52:34

The Killer Is in the Kickoff Meeting

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/04/30

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

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47:58

The Shuffle Was Never Random: How Spotify Rigged Its...

UX Murder Mystery ·

2026/04/23

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

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