What We Learned in 2025
To close out the year, we asked our team to look back and share what really changed how they think about services, what they learned from these experiences. The reflections that follow are snapshots from some of the members of the Jumping Elephants team on what we’ve learned together, what surprised us, and what we’re carrying into the year ahead.
Name: Tanisha
Learning through Community UX Groups
At CanUX 2025 in Ottawa this year, I attended a talk by Sarika Goel from Ford called “Designing for the Worst Day of Your Customer’s Life.” She emphasized how UX must serve users at their most vulnerable moments. The notion that design must support people even when they are stressed, panicked, or disoriented, and still enable clarity and control, gave me a new lens to evaluate our own work. It reminded me that the flows we build should handle not just ideal cases, but edge cases, failures, and moments when users are under pressure. For the coming year, I would like to be more conscious of those hidden stress points in our service flows and design for resilience, trust, and real human contexts.
Name: Jennifer
Lean Research, Big Impact
Constraints can sharpen research impact. When teams work with limited hours, ruthless prioritization becomes essential, and that discipline benefits everyone. Lean design with focused testing on highest-risk areas, like a 4-task usability study, delivers clear, evidence-based feedback in 3 days rather than weeks, allowing for quick measurement of improvements in validation rounds. This approach tightens the coupling between research and actionable recommendations, with shorter reports that answer the right questions efficiently without unnecessary scope.
Name: Robert
AI has changed everything... and nothing
As we close out the year, it’s impossible to ignore how profoundly AI has reshaped software development and yet how familiar it still feels. AI has accelerated everything: refining architectures and powering developer tools that learn, adapt, and anticipate our next move. It has compressed timelines, unlocked new capabilities, and elevated expectations across the industry. And still, the essence of building great software hasn’t changed at all. We remain grounded in the same fundamentals: understanding users, solving real problems, designing resilient systems, and collaborating as teams. AI has changed everything about how we work, but nothing about why it matters.
Here's to a new year where humans and machines keep building better together.
Name: Kaleigh
Development in collaboration with UX researchers
I’ve been at Jumping Elephants for a few months developing a UX research platform, and it has changed how I think about building software. The UX researchers and designers on this project are also our target users, so every feature conversation happens in a real-world context about who’s using it, what they’re trying to accomplish, and how it fits into their research workflow. Collaborating directly with the UX team who are also the end user has made me more intentional about connecting technical decisions back to their research process. It’s broadened my perspective from just “does this work?” to also “does this actually support how researchers think and work every day?”.
Name: Melis Burkay
Learning Through Teaching: UX Lessons From the IFA Program
This year, the most transformative part of my UX practice happened in a classroom. Co-facilitating the Indigenous Friends Association UX Program reshaped how I think about teaching, support, and human-centered design. Working closely with mentees who brought diverse abilities, learning needs, expectations, and communication styles reminded me that good design and good teaching share the same foundation: clarity, empathy, and intentionality.
I learned how to adapt quickly without losing structure, how to create learning spaces where people feel safe to express themselves, and how to meet learners where they are while still guiding them forward. Seeing our mentees grow, sometimes in small steps, sometimes in big leaps, showed me just how powerful and valuable teaching can be.
It was one of the most challenging and meaningful experiences I’ve had at Jumping Elephants, and it reaffirmed something important for me: supporting people in their learning journey is one of the most rewarding parts of the work.
Name: Amanda
Evidence-Driven Design That Ensure Access
This year, I am reminded that relying on stereotypes about users including those who navigate with assistive technologies limits our understanding and the quality of our designs. Many users who rely on screen readers, keyboard navigation, or other adaptive tools are incredibly tech-savvy and move through digital experiences with speed and confidence. Their expertise reinforces the importance of continuous accessibility testing: overlooked issues can disrupt an otherwise smooth journey.
By testing regularly and grounding our decisions in evidence from real users, we ensure our products remain intuitive, inclusive, and usable for everyone.
Name: Alasdair
My 2025 preoccupation.
When I look back on 2025, the research for our UXM (the UX SaaS solution we’re building) stands out above everything else. I spent a lot of time talking to several dozen people across the Canadian public sector about how they do UX, day to day. What struck me most wasn’t that the problems were new; it was how many of the same issues we’ve seen for years are still blocking good research.
The biggest barrier is still the basics: recruiting and compensating participants. Teams can’t easily send someone $75 for an hour of their time. They struggle to reach Francophones, Indigenous people, people with disabilities, rural residents – and sometimes even their own colleagues because of “command and control” cultures and no real incentives. It’s not about will or skill; the system makes simple, ethical research hard.
I also kept running into what feels like government amnesia. Findings are scattered across “shared drives that aren’t very shared,” locked in tools that don’t connect, or sitting in someone’s head until they move on. Teams are still re-testing the same journeys because there’s no trusted way to see what’s already been learned. The call for a “One Ring” is really a practical ask: one place where recruitment, studies, analytics, and findings live together.
Procurement remains a quiet gatekeeper. People run core tools on corporate credit cards, hit spending limits, and suddenly lose access. The wrong tools are often bought by people far from the work, and it’s still hard to buy small, focused UX help quickly. Add to that the familiar patterns of “UX theatre,” unicorn roles, and product owners without product training, and you get a picture that’s very consistent with what we’ve been hearing for a long time.
For me and for Jumping Elephants, this is exactly the set of familiar, structural challenges we’re passionate about fixing. Our MVP is designed to go after those head-on: recruitment and compensation, knowledge management, and procurement realities, so that evidence-based design is easier to do in real government environments.
That has been my main preoccupation in 2025, and it will continue to be in 2026: turning what we heard and what we’ve known for years, into a product that finally makes this work easier, not harder.
Name: Amy
Expanding UX Reach: What I learned this Year
This was my first year at Jumping Elephant as a Marketing Associate. It has been a meaningful period marked by continuous learning and a deeper understanding of the diverse services we offer. While collaborating on several campaign initiatives, I’ve gained insight into how each service supports the unique needs of our clients and how we can better adapt to meet them. The obstacles we faced challenged us to think creatively and refine our approach, ultimately strengthening our ability to serve. From a broader scope I’ve been able to expand my knowledge of the world of UX, AI search and Accessibility needs allowing for outreach to other organizations that may need the same knowledge. Overall, it has been a year defined by learning, collaboration, and progress that sets a strong foundation for the year ahead.
Name: JP
Racing to understand AI as fast as it is evolving
At the end of 2023, shortly after the release of ChatGPT, we asked the following questions in our holiday message:
As the cost, skill and effort required to produce content decreases dramatically, how will workers who produce this content be affected? How will the value and expectations of their output change?
Cheap content will flood our digital world. We will collectively face the issues of trying to detect outright falsehoods and deliberate or accidental bias. How will this be done at scale?
Who will produce the reference (foundational), content that AIs tools rely on?
Will some groups of our population be put at a disadvantage because of their inability to use the new tools or because of the use of these tools?
A lot has happened since then. We have completed a lot of research and done a lot of reading. Two years later, the questions we posed seem prescient, but the answers are still not clear.
As a society, we have a bad track record managing disruptive technologies. We usually do not take the risks seriously until we have been burned a few times. Think about nuclear weapons, the ozone layer, or social media. We learn by touching the hot stove. AI technology has advanced so rapidly that research, understanding, and regulation has lagged.
This year felt like a race to catch up. I spent a lot of time researching whether AI might be a genuine equalizer, or just another force that deepens existing divides. Since information and content sit at the heart of our UX work, we have been especially focused on how AI is changing how knowledge is created, found, and trusted.
If, I’m being honest, I am still very unsure of how this all ends. The geopolitical and economic incentives pushing AI forward are extremely compelling. Many of the biggest players are treating this as a winner-take-all race. There were moments this year when I was convinced things would go badly, and soon. Books like “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” (Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares). “The Age of Extraction” (Tim Wu) and “Empire of AI” (Karen Hao), reinforced my pessimism.
Lately, though, I have found some cautious optimism. Mostly, my hope comes from realizing that the anticipated replacement of human labour and creativity may be slower and messier than advertised. That extra time will matter. It gives space for mistakes to be felt, lessons to be learned, and hopefully some restraint to kick in. The books Abundance (Ezra Klein), and Goliath’s Curse (Luke Kemp), made the case that a more egalitarian society is possible and necessary. “Dirt-Bag Billionaire” (David Gelles), was a useful reminder that businesses (and billionaires) do not have to follow a single script. And reading “The Seven Rules of Trust” (Jimmy Wales - one of the founders of Wikipedia), reminded me that some insiders in the tech world still have some hope.
On the work front, Alasdair and I presented our research on AI-enabled search and public-sector content to several hundred people this year. It was clear from the enthusiasm to understand our research that this is not theoretical anymore but is the reality that our clients are facing. AI search tools are already reshaping how citizens find and understand government information. One of the biggest shifts we see is that public content now has two audiences, human beings and machines (AI agents). Humans are still our ultimate target and clients, but machines are now powerful intermediaries and our new customers. We know how to write for a human audience. We are now learning how to make content legible, trustworthy, and visible to systems we do not control.
That tension, and how we respond to it, feels like one of the defining design challenges ahead.
Wrapping up the Year
These reflections highlight what matters most to us at Jumping Elephants. We care about designing people on their best and worst days, using constraints to focus on what really needs to be tested and improved, and treating AI as an accelerator for human-centered work rather than a replacement for it. We’re at our best when we build products in close partnership with the people who will use them, when we treat teaching and mentoring as part of our UX practice, and when we ground accessibility in real user behaviour instead of assumptions.
As we head into a new year, we’re carrying these lessons forward into our projects, our partnerships, and our own internal tools. Thank you to our clients, collaborators, and community for being part of this work in 2025. We’re looking forward to learning even more together in the year ahead.
From all of us at Jumping Elephants, we wish you a restful holiday season and a new year filled with good health, good work, and services that work better for everyone.
Happy Holidays!
