Recently finished reading The State of UX in 2024: Enter late-stage UX, and had a few thoughts:

Automation
AI automates an increasing part of our jobs and reduces demand for designers in certain markets.

This evolution has been a long time in the making. Hard skills, traditionally deemed future-proof, are now facing challenges. The current opportunity lies in designers embracing AI-driven design generation to facilitate faster iterations and expedite the turnaround of concepts.

Saturation
Supply of designers outstrips demand. Market is still uncertain.

This was evident even in the early 2010s when the market was saturated with “designers” from bootcamps who made negligible contributions to the industry at large.

Commoditization
Focus on scalability and standardization over differentiation and delight.

Much like the industrialization of physical products, it is only logical that the next evolutionary step in digital design involves seeking ways to componentize and streamline the overall process. While there is still value in craftsmanship, (particularly when users anticipate a premium experience) the majority of products are utilitarian in nature and do not necessarily benefit from overly crafted experiences.

Financialization
Greater influence of financial health, shareholders interests, and business metrics in design decisions.

First and foremost you are a designer, not an artist; you are hired to solve business problems through design.

Disintegration
Lack of trust in digital products makes users either skeptical, complacent, or susceptible to exploitation.

An industry that heavily relied on dark patterns and manipulation to maintain user engagement results in a lack of trust? What a surprise.

Via Reuters:

“A vehicle of this size, power and huge weight will be lethal to pedestrians and cyclists in a collision,” the Brussels-based nonprofit European Transport Safety Council said in a statement.

hmm.

Days without incident:

I’m starting to think there are enough posts on this blog that I should implement some filtering at the head of the page.

Slingshot Design

Envision your design process as pulling back a slingshot, meticulously setting parameters and direction. Release the tension, propelling development swiftly toward the target with minor adjustments within the slingshot’s vectors.

Evaluate the impact:

1. Direct hit but standing: Amplify resources and extend MVP for a more impactful follow-up.
2. Missed target (degree noted): Refine your aim without starting over, leveraging existing documentation and making adjustments for a more accurate shot.

One thing that I still haven’t seen touch interfaces properly provide affordance for are secondary actions. Yes, you can access them by typically a long-press, but how does a user know which items contain additional functionality?

P.S. Onboarding modals or tooltips are a lazy excuse and if you thought that was an acceptable answer you are wrong.

Why the hell doesn’t the Apple TV Music app have a visualizer?

Awesome little visualization from Stripe to start the morning. 🌞

Some thoughts after reading this great blog post from Columbia’s Stats blog:

Where we are today, Large Language Models (LLMs) have become skilled at mimicking human intuition— taking into consideration all of the individual’s (well, the LLM’s scraping of the internet, in this case) experiences and perceptions and providing heuristic responses to prompts.

What’s really exiting is as we move out of the nascent phase of LLM AI we can now attempt to recreate the higher level of human cognition: reasoning. The question now is which LLM AI product will be the one to realize that a large investment in bringing in psychologists will help them reach that goal first?

Whoever approved this as a solution should be fired, but I think MURAL is basically a Microsoft property by now meaning they’ll probably be promoted instead.

Though really, why does MURAL even exist when you can just use FigJam?

“Hey what symbol should we use to show a track is popular?”

“How about the universally accepted symbol for ‘New’ in a list view?”

“Perfect. And what should the user interaction be when you hover over it?”

“I dunno, how about the Favorite functionality?”

“Sounds good to me! Ship it!”

What the fuck

It’s even more offensive considering they already use “🔥 Trending” in the Maps app to show when a POI is being frequently viewed.