UX News
A look at what's going on in the field of user experience.
Abstraction, combination, relation: how to visualize structure
, UX Collective - Medium
How can we create a tool that represents our thoughts — adding as little as possible and losing nothing?“The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over its simple ideas, are chiefly these three: (1) Combining several simple ideas into one compound one; and thus all complex ideas are made. (2) The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another, so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one; by which way it gets all its ideas of relations. (3) The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction: and thus all its general ideas are made.” — John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human UnderstandingEvery day, our ideas are twisted by software . We kneel at the computer and go through a set of incantations — instead it should come to us on our terms. How, then, might we build a tool actually shaped like human thought?
Lock’s passage above is a helpful foundation for us to discuss my design for such a tool: Coeus. I might summarize, and reorder, to: abstraction, combination and relation.
You can’t sit with us — why luxury brands are so desperately bad at UX
, UX Collective - Medium
Chanel, Hermés, Balenciaga: bad UX that gets the job done, and inaccessibility that makes the product coveted.
How Notion nails invites
, UX Collective - Medium
There’s so much done well on this one screen
The problems with running human evals
, UX Collective - Medium
And how you can debug themDisclaimer: The opinions stated here are my own, not necessarily those of my employer.
In my previous essay, I ranted about why benchmarks are pretty much useless for judging model use in actual products (BEFORE Satya Nadella, if I might add) and why you need custom evals. This essay is a rant about what could go wrong when you implement custom evals, especially when you use human raters.
Avoiding Common Bias Traps in UX Surveys
, UX Planet - Medium
Part 3 (of 3) in the Crafting Effective UX Surveys series.
In Part 1, we covered the essential “Do’s” for creating impactful surveys, and in Part 2, we focused on identifying and eliminating bias in survey questions. In this final part, we’ll explore the broader landscape of common bias traps that can compromise your survey data and discuss strategies to minimise their impact.
7 Key Design Patterns for AI Interfaces
, UX Planet - Medium
A Product Design Perspectiveimage source linkFrom chatbots to collaborative canvases, here’s how AI is reshaping the way we interact with digital products.
Artificial intelligence is not just a backend technology anymore — it’s now front and center in the user experience. As designers, we’re no longer just creating static interfaces; we’re shaping dynamic, adaptive systems that learn, respond, and even create alongside us. This article explores seven emerging UI patterns when designing AI-powered products, from collaborative canvases like Figma AI to system-level agents like Rabbit OS or AutoGPT.
The Art of Designing a Memorable User Journey
, UX Planet - Medium
A user journey is more than a sequence of screens. It’s the narrative that connects the dots between a user’s first interaction with a…
Designing Empty States That Encourage Action
, UX Planet - Medium
Blank screens. No messages, no data, no content. At first glance, empty states seem like insignificant, temporary moments. But in reality…
Grading Scales for the UX-Lite
, MeasuringU
If you got 95 out of 100 on your math test, you did well. You knew you had an A. If you scored 50, you knew you probably had an F. But maybe you hoped that enough students did so poorly that the teacher would curve the test to make 50 something more like a C, a passing grade at least.
Letter grades in school might rekindle some bad memories, and if you have kids, you know the pain crosses generations. But letter grades haven’t always been around. They are a 20th-century adaptation to help with interpreting performance.
20 Years of MeasuringU: Growth and Change
, MeasuringU
Who cares what happened 15 or 20 years ago? Though technology changes fast, some of the most important questions in UX research are enduring. Preparing for the future means understanding the past.
We’re celebrating our 20th anniversary at MeasuringU (2005–2025). For us, it’s less about popping the champagne and more about reflecting on how the UX industry has changed and how we have helped shape some of that change through measurement.
