Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.

“You have likely seen companies quickly introduce AI mandates to keep pace with these trends. In the blink of an eye, we went from having no money for a Mural license to heavily investing in a bulk subscription to Copilot. Vanity metrics, such as the number of tokens used (tokenmaxxing) have been used to measure implementation speed, without a direct link to how they will affect OKRs or, for UX, how they can deliver consistent results for our users.”

Be like water: Rethinking the design process with AI →
By Luis Berumen Castro

Fix seller UX and improve marketplace performance →
[Sponsored] Download the free checklist with 8 proven UX patterns that help sellers onboard faster, list products more easily, and stay active. Grab your free copy.

Editor picks

• The thinking was never just mine →
  Maybe “mine” was never about origin.
  By Giorgio Schirò
• Low cortisol solution to big problems →
  The strange details we only notice when we slow down.
  By Rita Kind-Envy
• The death of the empty state in AI products →
  AI products replaced 20 years of empty-state research.
  By Adi Leviim

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

Nudges.fyi: biases & heuristics for the age of AI →

Make me think

• The organization is the bottleneck →
  “The pattern with AI coding agents is strikingly similar. If you don’t have automated tests, or documentation, or CI/CD pipelines that support progressive delivery, you won’t succeed with microservices — and you won’t succeed with AI coding agents either. The organizations reporting the best results are the ones that already invested in the foundations.”
• The internet you grew up on isn’t dying →
  “The places you spent your younger years are gone or unrecognizable, and the places you use now are visibly straining under a flood of machine-generated text nobody asked for. There is a low ambient grief about it, and a faint guilt, something like: I should be doing something. I should be somewhere else. I want the old thing back.”
• AI slop is killing online communities →
  “Like a young child coming home from kindergarten with their latest crayon scrawls, the internet is currently awash with people sharing their AI-generated work. And just like the young child’s drawings, much of that work should be proudly put up on the walls within the artist’s house — and no further.”

Little gems this week

Can a typeface be safe? →
By Elvis Hsiao

Rethinking design with your hands in the AI world →
By Darren Yeo

The one-dimensional pipe between two high-dimensional minds →
By Hiroshi Sato

Tools and resources

• AI holds the context, I do the thinking →
  How I use AI to partner on design problems.
  By Suleiman Shakir
• Discovery is the work AI gives back →
  Productivity is the floor of AI’s value, not the ceiling.
  By Gale Robins
• AI for UX →
  The guide you wish someone had given you sooner.
  By Caryn Farvour (Humphreys)

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Be like water, The death of the empty state, AI for UX was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.