Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.

“To have a perspective is to say ‘no’ to things that are technically possible but strategically wrong. Most products fail not because they lack features, but because they lack a clear stance on what they are not. Every feature added without a clear perspective dilutes the ones that actually matter. Design is an editorial act: the more you leave out, the more weight you give to what remains.”

Perspective →

5 design links a day, curated by the folks from UX Collective →
For people who still believe in the web as a platform for knowledge sharing, long-form writing, and community.

Editor picks

• The ground is shaking →
  Why designers must flip the script on AI.
  By Peter (Zak) Zakrzewski
• Designers finally have a say in the product they design →
  AI gave desugbers back the decisions that were always theirs.
  By Daniel Mitev
• Rethinking design awards in an AI world →
  Why design awards are still relevant and what needs to change.
  By Darren Yeo

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

Ban Ray: Your face is not inventory →

Make me think

• Your ticket is a prompt →
  “The agents are behaving like the tickets they learned from. The scope-narrowing, the deference to small pieces over whole outcomes, the instinct to fragment before thinking.”
• Why are executives enamored with AI but ICs aren’t? →
  “Here’s my current posit for why there’s such a big divide: executives have always had to deal with non-determinism and focus on nondeterministic system design, while individual contributors are evaluated by their execution on deterministic tasks.”
• Take my job, AI! →
  “On the personal side, I’ve become more and more disillusioned with product design. It can be a shit role where you’re stuck between product managers on one side, engineers on the other, “the business” above you, and your actual users below you. What remains is an increasingly cramped space for decisions we actually “own”, which is basically which color lip stick to put on the pig.”

Little gems this week

Every designer on my team ships the same quality now →
By Hoang Nguyen

AI is rewriting the rules; Language is following →
By Dora Czerna

The long and short of telephone progress →
By Neel Dozome

Tools and resources

• Context matters… A lot →
  Building intuitive AI products requires designing for context management.
  By Connor Joyce
• The many paths in the life of a designer →
  Way-finding in the work/life journey.
  By Filip Mishevski
• The rise of synthetic users →
  The future of consumer research?
  By Melek Akan

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The UX ground is shaking, synthetic users, building perspective was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.