UX News
A look at what's going on in the field of user experience.
Reading and writing are interfaces. And AI can reduce their friction.
, UX Collective - MediumThe question is not whether AI reduces work, but where the intellectual work moves.Photo by Mikhail Pushkarev on UnsplashThere is plenty of AI slop on the internet, and much of it deserves the criticism it gets. But let’s not pretend AI invented slop. Humans were producing shallow, derivative, formulaic, and poorly researched content long before most of us knew what an LLM was.
What’s becoming more tiresome than the slop itself, though, is the growing commentary treating any use of AI-assisted writing as an intellectual failure. A certain kind of AI critic has become the new grammar Nazi, policing not only bad writing but also the means by which writing is produced.
Figma Design Critique Using Claude Code
, UX Planet - Medium
Claude Code recently got a new plugin /design that lets you craft designs right in Claude Code. But you can also use this plugin to…
What Minority Report got wrong about AI (so far)
, UX Collective - Medium
The film gave us two futures. We rebuilt the one that was easy to demo.The film cautioned against predictive systems and pre-crime, and the we turned it into a screensaver.For two decades, Minority Report has been shorthand for the future of interaction. Show the film to a designer and one image surfaces: Tom Cruise in a black glove, sweeping translucent panels through the air like a conductor.
Teams chased it, vendors sold against it, and every few years someone demos a rig and invokes the film.
How to Audit and Extend Your Figma Design System with Claude Code
, UX Planet - Medium
Claude Code recently got a new plugin /design that lets you craft designs right in Claude Code. I’ve described the entire process of…
When the canvas starts acting, who’s really in control?
, UX Collective - Medium
How agentic interfaces are changing what designers control, from interactions to agency, orchestration and attention.Agentic canvas can now brings context from across tools into one place, then acts on it without needing step by step instructions. AI-generated visual, Aurélie Radom ©.For most of the history of software, the interface has been the place where people tell a system what to do. We click, drag, type and select, and the system responds. A lot of interaction design has been about making those actions easier to understand and making the next step obvious.
The terminal has always been a different kind of interface. It gives you a lot of power, but most of that power is hidden behind commands. You need to know what the system can do and how to ask it to do it. This is one reason designers have always struggled with terminal-based tools. They expose the language of the machine more than the possibilities of the tool.
AI took away engineering’s right to say no
, UX Collective - Medium
The closed system of software engineering, where the complexity of the code acted as both a wall and a gatekeeper.AI didn’t touch what engineers actually know. It ended their power to be the only ones who could say what was possible.When I started out as an information architect, one of my first projects was a massive enterprise product. By the time my boss assigned it to me, the tech specs had been written and the features defined. My job was to turn them into wireframes.
I spent three weeks burning the midnight oil trying to get every detail right, reviewing with my boss, making sure I’d translated the documentation into a solid user experience.
Fable 5.1 for Product Designers
, UX Planet - Medium
Anthropic just updated its most advanced AI model, Fable. The new model, Fable 5.1, demonstrates even better results than its predecessor…
Claude Code’s New Design Plugin Is a Big Deal for Product Designers
, UX Planet - Medium
Claude Code recently got a new plugin /design that lets you craft designs right in Claude Code. I’ve described the entire process of…
Nine Design Fixes for Your UX Research Reports
, MeasuringU
We’re known in the industry for metrics, for methods, and for defining UX research measurement.
But while we believe in using data to drive decisions, we also know that changing minds is not something you can just enter into an Excel formula.
Five Ways to Use Rapport When Moderating
, MeasuringU
@media (max-width: 782px) { .mu-nofloat-mobile img { float: none !important; display: block; margin: 0 auto 1.25em; } } What makes a good moderator? There is more to it than reading a script.
While AI moderation is getting a lot of headlines, humans will still be moderating sessions. Some teams (including ours) are experimenting with AI moderation for lower-stakes, higher-volume studies (verbal surveys). But when it’s hard to get a participant, and you need to get as much as you can out of their time and yours, the quality of a good moderator pays dividends.