The topics in this edition are ones it seems we’ve been talking about for a long time now - yet they remain stubbornly prevalent: What’s the impact of AI on the design profession? Why is design still so widely misunderstood? And why is ours the only profession that constantly has to justify its own existence?

Andy Budd on The Future Of The Design Industry.

A great episode of The AI and Design podcast, inspired by Andy’s recent article - The Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI which I’ve included below. It’s “a wide-ranging conversation about whether the design industry is about to boom or bust. The bull case is that AI hands designers the means of production. No more petitioning product managers for backlog space or begging engineering for a prototype — designers can spot the debt, fix it, and ship it. The bear case is that everyone else got there first. Product managers can now design, engineers can now do discovery, and design shrivels down to a five-person team babysitting the design system for a 300-person engineering org.”

Listen here:

• YouTube

• Apple

• Spotify

The Bull And Bear Case For Digital Design In The Age Of AI

”The designers who do well will not be the ones who merely use AI to produce more options. Options are cheap now. They will be the ones who know which option is worth pursuing, why it matters, how to test it, what to cut, where the product is lying to itself, and when “good enough” is quietly damaging the business.”

See also:

• The Six Levels Of Adaptive Software

• AI And The Mangrove Problem

The AI in Design Report 2026

Based on a survey of over 900 designers at startups, enterprises, and agencies who work across disciplines like product design, brand design, research, and design engineering, the AI in Design Report 2026 is an attempt to capture how AI is transforming tech design, and answer the common question: “How are others doing this, and what’s working?”

When stakeholders use AI to prototype their own designs

A short piece by Damien Lutz, asking “How do designers integrate their value into the design process while protecting its integrity and without being a blocker to innovation?”

How to write a DESIGN.md file Claude can actually use

DESIGN.md files are plain-text documents that give AI coding tools - like Claude Code and Cursor - the design system context they need to generate more consistent interfaces. This article by Lisa Demchenko is a great introduction.

Good enough, isn’t

AI hasn’t solved design - it’s just made it easier not to produce bad designs. Lenny Laurier’s point is that this creates a new problem: once every product looks decent enough, looking decent enough stops being special. What matters now is imagination - coming up with ideas AI can’t, because it can only remix what it’s already seen. He also challenges the flat design-hiring numbers everyone’s pointing to as proof design is “sorted”. Ultimately, it just reinforces that companies still consider design to be about production rather than strategy - and keep getting bland results because of it.

How design succeeded its way into... irrelevance

Peter Merholz argues that design’s problems started long before AI arrived - when agile teams put one designer on every team, making the job about fast screen production instead of deeper strategic work. Design systems and quick bootcamp courses made this worse, training a whole generation of designers to execute rather than think. His point is that AI tools like Claude Design aren’t shrinking design’s role - they’re just showing everyone a box the profession built for itself years ago.

See also: Design’s Legibility Gap

Rethinking design leadership with swarms and flocks

Could ‘structured emergence’ (borrowing from flocking/swarm behaviour) be the solve for manager burnout, team bottlenecks, and systemic design debt?

Design Arena creators raise $7.9 million to bring taste to AI models

Design Arena is tackling the one thing designers keep saying AI can’t touch - taste. It’s basically Hot or Not for design: real people vote head-to-head on AI-generated outputs, and those millions of votes become training data for the AI companies. Worth a read if you’re wondering how close AI is getting to the part of the job we all assumed was safe.

Hey designers, they’re gaslighting you.

“Too many organizations have convinced designers that they’re the problem — that if they just worked harder, they’d be taken seriously. But if just doing more were going to fix the problem… it’d be fixed by now.”

Westside Cowboy - Kick Stones (The Boys) | Later... with Jools Holland

Loving this band and this performance. The debut album is out on Friday! “Having won the Glastonbury Emerging Talent Competition in 2025, the hotly tipped four-piece band from Manchester perform their new single ‘Kick Stones (The Boys)’ from their upcoming debut album ‘It Goes On’.”

Until next time.

In 1997, historians William Strauss and Neil Howe published The Fourth Turning, a theory that history moves in predictable cycles, broadly in step with the length of a human life. Every 80-90 years, societies experience similar patterns of crisis and renewal: from post-crisis and cultural awakening to the weakening of institutions, destruction, and the re-building of social order. Whether or not you buy into their theory, the underlying insight is generally true: historical patterns repeat. And if you study them, you can anticipate what’s likely to come next.

Professional disruption follows patterns too. As I’ve been ruminating on how AI might transform UX design, I initially felt the same anxiety that many other designers are experiencing. But we’ve seen similar stories play out before in photography, web development, graphic design and consumer product design. Once you start to study those patterns, the path forward becomes clearer.

This feels familiar

When digital cameras became accessible in the 1990s, professional photographers faced an existential crisis. Suddenly, anyone could take technically proficient photos. There was no longer a need for expensive darkrooms, and bags full of fancy lenses. The barrier to entry collapsed overnight.

Yet photography as a profession is flourishing, and as prestigious as ever. The photographers who thrived weren’t the ones with the most technical expertise in manual focus or exposure settings; They were the ones who understood composition, storytelling, art direction, and commercial strategy. There was a shift from technical execution to creative vision and client relationships. The craft didn’t disappear - it just became a prerequisite rather than what sets you apart.

Web development has followed a similar arc, first in the early 2000s with tools like Dreamweaver, and again in the 2020s when no-code tools like Webflow emerged. Suddenly building websites didn’t require deep HTML and CSS knowledge, you could simply draw the site you wanted and the software wrote the code for you. Similarly, graphic design is living through this transformation right now. The juggernaut that is Canva has democratised design like I could never have imagined when I was struggling to learn Photoshop 3 from a cracked copy on a CD in my university bedroom in the mid-90s. But as incredible as it is, Canva hasn’t killed the profession of graphic design - it’s killed commodity work, whilst at the same time elevating designers who understand brand strategy, visual systems thinking, and creative direction.

There’s a pattern here: execution commodifies, and strategy and judgment become the differentiator.

The shift is already happening

Designer Dustin Larimer recently canceled his Figma subscription. Not because he hates it - because it was in the way. His new workflow is: whiteboard → Claude → production. “When you can build that fast,” he writes, “design and building become the same act. Ideas don’t wait in docs for permission. We build, and our thinking emerges as we prove out what is even possible.”

He’s right about the speed. AI will make design execution so fast that the traditional mockup-and-handoff processes feels like unnecessary friction. And he’s not wrong about what this means for designers stuck in that paradigm; While it hurts a bit to write, the mockup, as he puts it, is becoming a dead artifact.

But there’s something, perhaps implied, but missing from “whiteboard → Claude → production.” There’s no step for: Who decides what problems are worth solving? What user needs should drive the roadmap? How does this connect to business strategy? When “thinking emerges as we prove out what is even possible,” you’re navigating by building - exploring what can be made rather than determining what should be made.

This is enormously powerful for discovering the possible. Potentially risky for finding the valuable.

Dustin’s workflow isn’t an outlier - it’s where the entire industry is headed. AI design tools are becoming remarkably good at execution: generating interfaces, maintaining design system consistency, conducting basic user research, identifying patterns in data. If your company has a mature design system, AI can already generate production-ready interfaces, iterate on designs, and maintain consistency across patterns.

But AI can’t do the ‘human’ thinking. It can’t make judgment calls about what should be built versus what could be built. It can’t navigate organisational politics to get a strategic initiative funded. It can’t synthesise messy, chaotic user research into a coherent product vision that aligns with business goals.

This is the commodification phase in motion. Execution speed has become so accessible that strategy looks like overhead. Product teams can build anything, so why slow down to think? The pendulum swings toward velocity, away from deliberation. Companies will ship faster than ever - and many will build beautiful solutions to the wrong problems.

We’re at a fork in the design road. Those who remain focused primarily on execution - pixel-pushing, component creation, basic prototyping - will find themselves competing with AI tools that work faster, cheaper, and more consistently. But those who develop strategic skills will find themselves more valuable than ever.

I’m certain that many companies will - initially at least - mis-read this shift. Product teams will look at AI design tools and think they can bypass design altogether. And while I’m sure many will have some level of success, I believe most will learn painful lessons about quality, coherence, and strategic thinking - the same way recording studios learned that while digital production tools made recording cheaper, it wasn’t a replacement for a producer who could draw the best performance out of an artist.

Perhaps AI actually creates an enormous opportunity for designers: When companies realise that AI-generated designs are looking and behaving homogeneously, strategic design differentiation becomes the competitive advantage; understanding the specificity of users and creating unique solutions becomes increasingly much more valuable.

The craft of digital design - the pleasure of opening a blank canvas and creating something pixel-perfect - is becoming a hobby rather than a commercial necessity. Some of us will keep drawing digitally for fun. But strategically, the question isn’t whether this is the future. It’s what becomes essential when everyone can execute at this speed.

The skills that will define us

So what will separate the designer that thrives in this new landscape from the one who gets left behind? Thinking back to those patterns we’ve already learnt from other industries, and what I’m seeing in my own working experiences, here are the skills that I think will become increasingly important:

1. Embracing the new normal

Just because AI will be disruptive, doesn’t mean it should be avoided. History has taught us that adopting new technologies is the path to success: designers who can’t effectively work with AI tools will be at the same disadvantage as designers who couldn’t use Figma a few years ago, and those who resisted the move to Sketch before that.

This isn’t just about learning to use a new tool though, it’s about understanding the nuance of directing AI - knowing what to ask for and how to ask, how to refine outputs, and how to combine its capabilities with your creative thinking to achieve outcomes that it alone couldn’t produce. It’s about treating AI as a force multiplier for your strategic thinking, not a replacement for it.

2. Systems thinking at scale

AI can create screens and coherent user flows with ease. What it can’t do is architect a coherent experience strategy across 50 product teams in a large organisation.

Systems thinking at this level means understanding how experiences connect across multiple touch-points, thinking at multiple levels, deciphering how design decisions will impact business models, and how to create architectural frameworks that can scale and evolve. It’s like seeing the forest, not just the trees - and helping others to navigate it too.

This kind of strategic work requires moving beyond individual products and features to thinking more holistically about how design decisions cascade through an organisation and impact long-term strategic goals.

3. Research synthesis and insight generation

AI is already helping with user research and identifying patterns in data. But taking those inputs and translating messy, human behaviour into actionable strategic insights requires equally human judgment, empathy, and business acumen.

The designer who can say “here’s what this research means for our product roadmap and business strategy” - not just “here’s what users said” - will be invaluable. This is about connecting dots that AI might not see, understanding context and human nuance, and making recommendations that balance user needs with business constraints.

4. Design leadership and influence

As product teams increase the sophistication of their use of AI design tools, there’s a real risk that design gets devalued or left behind. The antidote will be designers who can successfully articulate design’s strategic value, influence C-level decisions, and build thriving design cultures.

This is about politics, storytelling, and business impact - not pixels. It’s also the skill that often requires the most dramatic mindset shift for designers who’ve spent their careers focused on craft and execution.

Design leadership means learning to speak the language of executives, building influence without formal authority, and demonstrating how design decisions impact revenue, retention, and strategic goals. It’s less about being in the room where designs are created and more about being in the room where strategic decisions are made.

5. Cross-functional orchestration

Sad though it may be, the designer of the future is less “craftsperson”, more “conductor” - coordinating and curating relationships between AI tools, engineering capabilities, business constraints, and user needs to create coherent outcomes.

This means being comfortable operating at the intersection of multiple disciplines and being a creative generalist - understanding enough about technology to have meaningful conversations with engineers, enough about business to understand financial models and growth strategies, and enough about users to advocate for their needs without losing sight of commercial realities.

6. Ethical and experiential judgment

AI will suggest solutions based on existing patterns its been trained on, but it’ll struggle to make judgment calls around the ethics of what should be built. Questions like “is this feature exploitative?”, “does this serve real human needs?”, or “what are the unintended consequences of this design decision?” will require human wisdom.

As AI makes execution faster and cheaper, these ethical considerations become more and more important. The barrier to shipping something will become much lower, which means the responsibility for thoughtful judgment will get much higher.

Knowing what skills to develop is one thing. Knowing when they’ll matter most is another - and the timeline is already unfolding.

A prediction

The late-90s tech boom championed execution over everything - ship fast, add features, optimise relentlessly. ‘Build it and they will come.’ The result was bloated software, wasted months, and expensive pivots when products missed the mark. When the bubble burst, businesses discovered that efficiency without direction just gets you to the wrong place faster. Design Thinking emerged as a differentiator precisely because companies had learned painful lessons about building the wrong things efficiently. Apple demonstrated what many had missed: being design-led could deliver significant commercial advantage.

We’re about to see that lesson learned again. The pendulum will swing hard toward AI-powered execution. And then, as it always does, it will swing back - but not to where it was before.

Understanding where things are heading is vital in helping to position yourself strategically. Based on the patterns, trajectories and industry shifts of the past, here’s what seems likely for our future.

Near-term (2025-2027): The pendulum swings away

This is the overcorrection phase that I’m sensing right now. Companies will misread what AI makes possible and strip out the design roles that they’ll later regret losing.

Junior and mid-level execution-focused roles are likely to compress dramatically. We’re already seeing this in hiring freezes and role consolidations. The logic seems sound on paper: if AI can handle execution and companies have mature design systems, why pay for junior designers or multiple design disciplines?

Some companies will go further, convinced they can eliminate strategic design input altogether. Product managers with AI tools will try to own the entire experience, and many will learn expensive lessons about the difference between generating screens and creating coherent experiences.

Simultaneously, I’m hopeful that we’ll also see a trend where senior strategic roles will actually expand at some companies that understand the value. The gap between “designer who does delivery” and “designer who shapes strategy” will probably widen.

We’ll also see the emergence of hybrid “design technologist” roles for people who bridge AI tools and implementation - designers who can not only direct AI but also work directly with code and data, effectively leapfrogging the traditional design phase, shaping designs directly in code.

We designers shouldn’t wait passively for the pendulum to swing back at this point. I’d recommend actively developing your strategic skills during this compression phase - to be positioned perfectly for what comes next.

Medium-term (2027-2030): The pendulum swings back

This is when those companies that overcorrected will begin to reckon with the consequences. As AI democratises execution, digital products will start looking increasingly similar because they’re trained on the same patterns. The companies that stripped out strategic design will notice they’ve lost differentiation. There might be usability issues, or perhaps their products will work fine, but they’ll be indistinguishable from competitors.

Companies will realise that strategic design differentiation - understanding your specific users deeply and creating novel solutions - becomes an important point of difference. This isn’t speculation; we’ve seen this exact pattern in car design, where optimisation toward the same constraints (aerodynamics, safety regulations, manufacturing efficiency) has made most SUVs nearly identical. The manufacturers that stand out are the ones making strategic choices that go beyond optimisation through strong design language and experience focus.

This means the value of good design research, genuine user understanding, and creative problem-solving actually increases. I predict that the companies that invested in strategic design capabilities during the contraction will have an advantage over those that tried to replace designers with AI.

We’ll also see new roles emerge around AI-assisted design operations - managing AI tool chains, maintaining quality standards for AI outputs, and building company-specific AI design capabilities.

The designers who built strategic skills during the contraction become scarce and valuable. And the companies that learned painful lessons will actively recruit them.

Longer-term (2030+): Equilibrium

The pendulum doesn’t return to where it started - it finds a new resting point.

My optimistic prediction is that design strategy will finally merge with product strategy and business strategy. The lines between CPO and Chief Design Officer will blur. Strategic designers will sit at the executive table as a matter of course, not as an exception.

This won’t look like the 2010s fight for “design-led organisations” or a “seat at the table”. Companies won’t need to be convinced that design matters because they’ll have learned what happens without it. The difference this time is that strategic design will be a business capability, not a service function advocating for its own relevance.

This represents the full evolution from “design as craft” through “design as service function” to “design as strategic business capability”. My hope is that the designers who develop these strategic skills now - during the contraction - will be positioned for these leadership roles.

What this means for your career

The pendulum is swinging. But rather than feeling anxious about it, consider this: strategic design work is more interesting than execution. Understanding customer needs at a deep level, shaping the direction of a product, influencing business strategy - it’s the work that many designers aspire to be doing, but often can’t because they’re either too busy executing, or simply aren’t permitted. This disruption might just force the evolution the profession needed.

If you’re early in your career, be strategic about skill development from the start. Don’t only focus on mastering tools - focus on understanding business, developing strategic thinking, and learning how design creates measurable impact (and how to prove it).

If you’re mid-career and built your expertise around execution, this is your pivotal moment. As my boss often says, “what got you here won’t be what gets you where you need to go”. Here’s how to bridge that gap:

• Listen in on strategy meetings. Hear how decisions get made and problems get framed at the business level.

• Volunteer for cross-functional projects. Work directly with product managers, engineers, and stakeholders. Learn their languages, constraints, and what motivates them.

• Measure and communicate impact. Stop presenting designs, start presenting outcomes. What changed because of your work? How did it affect key metrics?

• Learn beyond design. Business strategy, organisational psychology, even your company’s financial reports. Understand the commercial context you’re designing within.

• Find a mentor who’s made this transition. Ask specifically about developing business acumen and strategic influence - how to design beyond the craft.

If you’re a senior designer or design leader, this is your moment to step up. Organisations need people who can navigate the AI transition, articulate why strategic design matters, and build cultures where design drives business value. The compression phase creates opportunity for those who can lead through it.

Closing thought

Every creative field that’s been through technological disruption has emerged with the same lesson: the people who thrived weren’t the ones who held on to the old ways, and they weren’t the ones who simply adopted the new tools. They were the ones who used the disruption as a catalyst to move into more strategic, more interesting, more impactful work.

That same path is open to UX designers right now. The question isn’t whether AI will change design - it already is. It’s how you’ll respond and what kind of designer you want to be on the other side.

Originally published at https://tollady.com on February 17th, 2026.

Gareth Roberts and I were lucky enough to meet Dan Ramsden in 2016 while presenting at UX New Zealand. Dan’s an incredibly smart, articulate and witty chap, and a lovely bloke to boot! I’ve been a fan of his writing ever since, and this week’s article is a particular delight; The value of Design in a product organisation is a beautifully written “…exploration of what design means within a product organisation”, a topic that is hugely resonant with me right now.

Also see The purpose of UX Design — why product managers need UX designers and design leaders from April.

Oh, and I just discovered our talks from UXNZ 2016 are still available online.

Along a similar vein, I very much enjoyed Peter Merholz’ thoughts on “Craft is not the answer” from Jess Greco’s talk and the comments that followed, and Ben Gilmore’s What is going on with the Australian UX & product design job market? Some hypothesises.

I’ve been hearing the phrase ‘burnout' quite a bit lately. How to survive creative burnout provides “A simple handbook for when your motivation is gone” from Scott Berkun.

I’m delighted to see Radiohead back on the road, playing residencies across Europe. Daniel Cloutier has created this lovely setlist tracker visualisation to document what got played and how often.

The idea of an ‘octopus organisation’ is an interesting one, proposed in this book: The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation by Jana Werner and Phil Le-Brun. It comes out next month and this HBR article provides a good overview of the ideas.

I’m an inverter… Why do some gamers invert their controls? Scientists now have answers, but they’re not what you think.

Designers Want to Win. But Don’t Know the Rules of the Game.

and What can’t be measured could break your business.

See ya!

It’s funny how themes present themselves. This edition seems to mostly be about small, creative, indie ‘handmade’ stuff on the web...

I’m so glad I found this article that introduced me to The Tiny Awards. It’s my favourite thing on today’s list by far; “The Tiny Awards exist because we thought it was important to shine a spotlight on the sorts of personal web projects that tend to get overlooked by more traditional, larger or more commercial awards.” They celebrate the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web. It reminds me of a happier, simpler time and I’m so delighted to know that there are creative people out there, still building quirky, beautiful things on the web, just because.

This year’s winner is brilliant and incredibly moving: https://fiftythousandnames.org

Wolff Olins is a huge name in British design; A company that seems to have always just been there, and one I’ve continually admired throughout my own design career. To mark the studio's 60th birthday, Wolff Olins' Emma Barratt selects six projects from across the decades that sum up its singular approach to branding.

It’s surprising that in 2025 we still have to argue for the value of design, but in my experience it’s still very much the case. Business insights that prove the value of design cites evidence from McKinsey, Harvard, Adobe, Forbes, and the NEA in an effort to “help enlighten the world about design’s transformative power in business as a value driver.”

I’m excited to try out Daft Music - a project by Dennis Oberhoff - an indie developer based in Germany. “The Apple Music you know and love, reimagined for macOS.”

The best interfaces of 2025: What award-winning designs teach us is a selection of awarded app and site designs, with commentary about why they’re good and what we can learn from them.

“Unlike its peers (Product Managers, Business Analysts, Developers etc.), it seems Design doesn't have a common home and reports to different business units and C-suites. Why is this?” My mate Amir conducted research and delivered a talk exploring where design should be located within an organisational structure: Design - where does it belong?

My Life In Weeks by Gina is cool.

How to make people listen to you is the latest post from Scott Berkun’s Why Design Is Hard newsletter that companies the book. Both highly recommended reading. Bad design makes money is another great example.

Oh, and Loneliness Is Reshaping Your Workplace

Right you are then.

Reflecting on this list of links, it seems I’m continuing along the theme of slowing down, going analogue, making space for thinking and being conscious of self care. Maybe it’s my age. Maybe it’s a response to the constant noise around going faster and ‘generative AI’ everything. Maybe it’s because my wife bought me a record player.

I was away at a leaders’ conference last week and one of the motivational speakers mentioned Ikigai; a Japanese term that roughly translates to “reason for being.” I was already aware of the concept, but it was a nice reminder. Here’s How To Find Your Ikigai And Transform Your Outlook On Life And Business.

Another speaker at the same conference talked about “slowing down to speed up”; a phrase I’ve been known to use myself. That, along with “You see more when you go more slowly.” I love that, and it reminded me of Make Time, which I’m about to re-read.

Designers don’t usually burn out because they don’t care; they burn out because they care so much that they end up holding more than anyone can realistically carry. When Caring Too Much Almost Killed Me raises an important, familiar but rarely talked-about topic - designer burnout.

The best articles I read this week were all from Ben Rowe’s substack: First Thing Monday. In particular:

• Low fidelity design is higher up the value chain

• Make things happen

• Who are we designing for now?

• and Sketching With AI: Why Physical Thinking Still Matters in the Age of Generated Everything

I told myself I wasn’t ever going to post the same links as Ben in the same month, but these were just too good not to share.

It took many years and billions of dollars but Microsoft finally invented a calculator that is wrong sometimes

With all the advances in AI to produce quick, cheap, practical design work, I can absolutely see a future where hiring a design studio will be like commissioning a bespoke, custom furniture maker to help stand out in a sea of IKEA… Hiring a design studio may become a status symbol in the age of AI. And AI and the Rise of Mediocrity is an older post from TIME magazine along a similar thread.

I love this quote, shared by Jeffrey Zeldman on Mastodon:
“A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.” — Victor Hugo

Until next time.

This is not the end of design. This is the beginning of an era where designers with great taste will shape what AI creates... Taste Is the New Intelligence.

I’ve long been a firm believer in respectful agitation where appropriate as a catalyst for positive change. Being a designer used to feel like a career—now it just feels like a job is a sobering take on how modern workflows have stripped the meaning from design, and a thought on what we might do about it:
“Reclaiming design starts with the smallest possible acts of resistance. Defend a choice because it feels right, not because it ticks a box. Add something unexpected to a layout that otherwise runs on autopilot. Ask why a pattern exists before dropping it in. Take the extra beat to solve a problem in a way that excites you instead of defaulting to the safest option.”

I don’t know many companies doing dual track agile well, let alone tri-track, but it’s certainly a good idea. Dual-track agile is good, tri-track agile is even better.

Dan Mall explores this new fangled “fractional” work term, and what it means and signals: Selling Fractions.

Imran Khan explains - once and for all - why Apple have two call screens.

What GPT-5 could have learned from Apple’s missing headphone jack is an exploration of the Endowment Effect; how people tend to value items that they own more highly.

JD Vance's UK vacation caused a bit of chaos near where I grew up.

I’m late to the party, but Notebook LM is an incredible tool.

Sophie Koonin’s website is cute. Have a play with the CSS switcher in the top right. I just love the Netscape one!

I’m not sure we need to bring back background music for websites, but Back when websites had a pulse is a nice walk down memory lane.

I got a lovely comment after the last edition of this newsletter from my good friend (and the primary songwriter in my band) - Ben Keenan - introducing me to the term "Rewilding the Internet". It’s a metaphor for restoring the web to it’s diverse roots - a yearning for a return to the creativity and wonder that was so prevalent in the late 90’s, when everyone was still working it out and experimenting.

I’ve been reflecting on that a bit lately, as all around us gets perpetually faster, more efficient, more systematised, more automated, more artificial. It’s a good reminder that there’s a lot to be gained from slowing down, being more considered and making space to think and be creative.

• We need to rewild the internet is an obvious first choice, then. A lovely essay inspired by Ben’s comment.

• The latest episode of the futuristic podcast informs me that the inimitable Steve now owns a humanoid, full-stack, open-source robot. Of course he does! Is this just the next step in the AI journey?

• Slowly but surely, huge swaths of the internet are vanishing. But the artefacts of the early web are still out there, and they have lessons for the future. Continuing on my nostalgia trip, My journey to the heart of the forgotten internet is a delightful walk down memory lane: “In a world of polished, algorithmically optimised content, the old internet is a testament to individuality and experimentation. People didn't necessarily care about appealing to big online followings or going viral. They made things for the sake of it. Because they loved whatever it was they were into. Now, as some worry that AI is ushering in an increasingly impersonal online experience, where human output is filtered and regurgitated via chatbots, the early internet reminds us that personality and human creativity was once far more prized.”

• There’s something very lovely about this finger-painted portrait of musician William Barton that won the people’s choice award at this year’s Archibald prize.

• What if your digital ID was hyper-personalised and persisted across the internet. What if it carried your thought patterns, your values, your obsessions, your sense of humour and your blind spots? Sign in with OpenAI is a really interesting idea, and one that I can absolutely see happening.

• Rethinking Performance Evaluations for Designers is just the latest from this great newsletter by Stuart Frisby.

• I had no idea that Brad Frost, of Atomic Design fame played the drums. His Cold Album Drumming project - where he “plays drums to the albums he knows intimately, but has never drummed to before” - is a lot of fun. I wish I’d thought of it!

• This is what you get is an art exhibition that explores the visual art of Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, and the iconic images of Radiohead. It’s just started at the wonderful Ashmolean Museum in my beautiful home town - Oxford.

Remember Clippy? The overly enthusiastic paperclip that would interrupt your Word document to ask if you were writing a letter? At the time, it was ridiculed — we dismissed it as Microsoft’s well-intentioned but somewhat misguided attempt at helpful computing.

Well, it seems Clippy’s back. But he’s evolved considerably.

Today’s AIs no longer just ask if you’re writing a letter. Now they’ll have access to your calendar, can navigate your inbox more efficiently than you, and likely know what you need to do next well before you do.

We’re entering the age of AI browsers, and this could represent a fairly significant shift in how we approach UX and digital design moving forward.

What exactly is an AI browser?

AI browsers only came onto my radar recently through James Noble’s excellent piece “The Agentic Web: Preparing for an AI-Native Internet.” The concept is straightforward but profound in its implications.

Unlike traditional browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, these new AI browsers — such as Arc’s Dia, Perplexity’s Comet, and Opera Neon — aren’t just windows to the web. They’re intelligent copilots that understand context and intent. Forget typing search queries and clicking through results. Now you’ll be issuing instructions:

“Find me three sustainable shoe brands under £150.”

“Book me the cheapest direct flight to Brisbane next Thursday.”

“Summarise this user interview and pull out the key insights.”

The browser doesn’t just show you results — it’s an integrated web assistant that can do the legwork, make decisions, and get things done.

The two shifts that matter for designers

Working in e-commerce UX, my mind immediately went to what this means for designers like those in my team, who build digital experiences to be handled by this new crop of browsers.

I see two significant shifts happening simultaneously:

First, we’ll be designing experiences that AI browsers will navigate and interpret. These browsers effectively represent another user type — one that reads, understands, summarises, and interacts with content on behalf of humans.

Second, we’ll be working alongside AI browsers (and apps) in our design processes. As these agents embed within tools like Miro, Notion, and Figma, our creative environments will become collaborative spaces where we partner with intelligent, invisible teammates.

Designing for AI browsers (not just humans)

Most digital experiences today are optimised for human perception — beautiful interfaces, carefully crafted user flows, delightful micro-interactions. But AI browsers don’t care about your gorgeous UI and fluid motion tweens. They parse your code, read your content, understand your intent, then traverse and translate your entire product into a concise summary or set of actions.

This means we need to start thinking differently about a few key areas:

We need to design for intent, not just navigation. AI agents don’t browse around your site clicking links. They’re laser-focused on helping someone achieve a specific goal. Make it dead simple for them to understand what your experience is supposed to accomplish.

Everything needs to be summarisable. What happens when your entire app, with all its nuanced features and carefully considered flows, gets compressed into a two-sentence summary by a language model? Will users still understand the value? Will they want to engage?

Structure becomes your secret weapon. Here’s where years of accessibility work suddenly pays unexpected dividends. Those semantic HTML elements, proper heading hierarchies, and meaningful link text we’ve been championing? They’re exactly what AI agents need to navigate and understand our interfaces. The same structured markup that helps screen readers also helps artificial intelligence parse intent and content. It turns out designing inclusively for humans accidentally prepared us perfectly for our AI future.

Designing with AI browsers as creative partners

AI browsers aren’t just set to change how people consume our work — they’ll transform how we create it too. Picture this: you’re working in Miro, sketching out a service journey, when your AI assistant pipes up:

“I notice you’re mapping pain points. Want me to pull insights from last week’s user interviews and create a workshop-ready synthesis board?”

Or you’re in Figma, applying a new design pattern, and your AI collaborator offers: “I can apply that spacing system across all twelve screens and handle the component variants too, if you’d like.”

Our design tools are becoming genuinely collaborative. Not just faster or more efficient — but intelligent partners in the creative process. This shift changes everything about how we work:

Tools become teammates. You’re not just using software anymore; you’re co-creating with it. You set the direction, it builds. You provide feedback, it iterates. The boundary between designer and assistant becomes beautifully blurred.

Workflows turn into conversations. Instead of endless drag-copy-paste cycles, you’re saying things like “Generate three variations of this onboarding flow using our established patterns” and watching it happen.

Our focus shifts from craft to strategy. Less time pushing pixels, more time defining intent, reviewing outcomes, and refining the bigger picture.

This isn’t about replacing designers — it’s about giving us superpowers. It’s next-level Clippy.

What the agentic future means for UX

So where does this leave us? What should we be doing differently? Here’s what I’m starting to think about:

Think in terms of ‘intent’, not just ‘screens’ and ‘journeys’. Frame your experiences around what people are trying to achieve, not just the interface they’ll interact with. The AI needs to understand the goal, not just the visual design.

Lean into information architecture fundamentals. The designers who understand semantic markup, logical content hierarchies, and clear labelling systems aren’t playing catch-up — they’re already ahead of the game. Web standards and accessibility practices create the foundation that AI agents rely on to interpret and navigate digital experiences.

Experiment with agent workflows. What would it look like if an AI navigated your product for a user? What if it helped generate your wireframes or facilitated your next design workshop? Start prototyping these scenarios.

Play with the tools that exist today. Try automation platforms like Make or n8n. Test drive AI browsers like Dia or Comet. The future’s already here in scrappy beta form — get your hands dirty with it.

The vindication of fundamentals

Clippy failed because it was annoying — popping up to help at the wrong moments, in the wrong ways, with the wrong level of intelligence. But the intention was sound: a computerised assistant with the potential to be genuinely helpful.

Now, twenty-odd years later, we’re witnessing Clippy’s redemption arc. Today’s AI assistants have the processing power, contextual awareness, and design sensibilities to actually deliver on that original promise of helpful computing.

What’s particularly interesting to me as a UX designer is how this evolution validates principles we’ve held for years. The foundations for designing experiences for AI already exist in our everyday practices — every thoughtfully structured component, every descriptive alt attribute, every logical user flow was unknowingly building the necessary infrastructure. Our advocacy for accessibility and carefully crafted information architectures isn’t just evidence of good, ethical work; it has set us up well to serve our new AI partner user types.

This convergence challenges the recent industry narrative around traditional UX skills becoming obsolete in favour of rapid product delivery and execution speed. I’d suggest the opposite is actually true. The designers who’ve spent years developing deep information architecture knowledge, understanding user mental models, mastering accessibility considerations, and learning semantic markup aren’t being left behind — they’re best positioned to succeed in this AI-collaborative future. While the focus for many seems to be on shipping faster, experienced practitioners have the skills and knowledge to best support the structural intelligence that AI agents will depend on.

The shift towards conversational interfaces and intent-driven design isn’t separate from this trajectory — it’s the natural extension of user-centred thinking. We’re not learning entirely new skills; we’re applying foundational UX principles to a broader definition of ‘user’ that now includes both humans and our AI partners.

The future of UX isn’t about choosing between human and artificial intelligence — it’s about designing experiences that serve both brilliantly. And if you’ve been quietly perfecting the fundamentals all along, you’re already winning.

–––

Originally published at tollady.com

My family and I have recently returned from a winter holiday, where we caught up with my good friend Matt Hamm and his family. Matt lives in Spain and I’m in Oz, so it’s rare that we have the opportunity to catch up and reconnect in real life.

Chatting with Matt one night about the old days, conversation moved to our early years, working on the web. It was nice to remember some of the people and work that inspired us, the blogs and podcasts that we used to consume and remember how we used to be a lot more hands-on with designs and cutting code back then. It’s motivated me to re-build my own site by hand, start reading and writing again, and seek-out some of the things I enjoyed back then, like the Twitter web designer community (now on Mastodon), podcasts (I’ve been retrospectively enjoying One Footer In The Grave) and newsletters with links to interesting articles! So here we are…

• I love this outdoor ad campaign with billboards and fly-posted Polaroids that urge us to look up from our devices and step into the real world.

• Losing Ozzy really hurt. As a lover of Black Sabbath and Fonts, I loved this article taking a deep dive into the obscure sources for the titling designs on Black Sabbath’s early album covers. It really is a delight.

• Sure, the data is only pulled from a poll of 263 people, but this What Trustworthy Websites Look Like in 2025 (According to Consumers) study is still a good reminder of the value of well crafted UX/UI design in terms of creating trust, which in turn leads to engagement.

• I’ve often said there’s wisdom in ‘slowing down to speed up', and I’m seeing a few articles lately about slowing down and making space for time to think; a response to AI and the speed at which everything moves in our industry at the moment. AI won’t kill UX — we will is an interesting take from a slightly different angle. Kym Primrose warns against “the worrying rate at which people rush to adopt AI solutions”, suggesting “if we want to avoid becoming passengers in our own process, let’s ensure we invest just as much in training, ethics, and R&D as we do in tools and integration. AI can support great design, but it’s still our curiosity, our challenge, and our instinct that fuel the fire. All the same things that made this industry exciting in the first place.”

• This is a cool retro website design for WDC2025.

• Andy Budd shares What I’ve Learned Coaching Dozens of Design Leaders: 5 Common Challenges—and How to Navigate Them.

• Bands are removing their music from Spotify.

• People seem to increasingly be turning to AI over Search Engines to find the information they need. How AI is Reshaping SEO: 30+ Trends to Watch in 2025 speaks to a question I’ve had for a while - what does this fundamental shift mean for SEO?

Until next time!

B.

There"s just one problem... They've completely misunderstood what an actual MVP really is.

The Great MVP Hijack

"Minimum Viable Product" has become a Swiss Army Knife of product terminology - stretched, twisted, and applied to everything from first releases to feature rollouts. But here's the thing Eric Ries understood - that seems to have been forgotten - when he coined the term in The Lean Startup.

*An MVP isn't a product at all. It's a question!*

The original MVP was designed as a lean experiment - the smallest possible thing you could build to test a fundamental assumption about your product, market, or customer behaviour. It wasn't meant to be version 1.0 with fewer features. It was meant to answer: "Should we even build this thing?"

Think of it like this: if you wanted to test whether people would pay for home-delivered meals, a true MVP might be a simple landing page with a "pre-order" button, not a half-built app with basic ordering functionality. The goal is learning, not launching.

When MVP Becomes a Delivery Crutch

Somewhere along the way, product teams started using "MVP" as a euphemism for "the first thing we're shipping." Suddenly, every roadmap had MVP1, MVP2, and MVP3 - a neat progression from basic to brilliant that made stakeholders feel like they were getting value incrementally.

It might appear to be mere semantics, but this linguistic drift can actually cause some quite fundamental problems:

1) It Devalues the Learning Mindset

Real MVPs are designed to prove or disprove hypotheses. When "MVP" becomes synonymous with "Phase 1," teams focus on delivery speed instead of insight generation. They end up launching features instead of learning whether those features solve real problems. The result? Beautifully executed solutions to problems that may not exist.

2) It Inflates Scope and Expectations

By definition, there can only be _one minimum_ for any given hypothesis. Once you start numbering your MVPs, you're not building minimal experiments - you're building a product in chunks. Scope creep becomes inevitable because everything gets labelled "MVP" regardless of whether it's actually minimal or viable. Stakeholders hear "MVP" and expect a working product, not a learning tool.

3) It Creates Organisational Confusion

"MVP2" might mean a second experiment to the product manager, a second release milestone to engineering, and a basic version of the full product to the CEO. Without shared understanding, teams end up solving different problems whilst thinking they're aligned. This misalignment compounds over time, creating friction that could have been avoided with clearer language.

4) It Erodes the Value of UX

Perhaps most damaging of all, the MVP1/2/3 mindset quietly sidelines user experience work. When teams believe they're building "minimum viable" products, UX research, testing, and iteration get deprioritised in favour of feature delivery. "We'll improve the experience in MVP2" becomes the rallying cry, but MVP2 is focused on adding features, not refining the user journey. The result is a product that grows in functionality but shrinks in usability - the antithesis of good UX practice.

A Better Way Forward

If you're rolling out a product in stages, own it! Use terms that accurately describe what you're doing:

- Phase 1, Phase 2 for planned rollouts

- Alpha, Beta, General Availability for release stages

- Version 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 for iterative improvements

- Prototype, Pilot, Launch for development stages

Save "MVP" for its original purpose: a focused experiment designed to test whether the thing you're building is worth pursuing at all.

Here's a practical test: if you can confidently predict what your "MVP2" will contain, you're probably not building an MVP - you're building a product roadmap. And that's perfectly fine, as long as you call it what it is.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

Language shapes thinking. When we casually refer to "MVP2" and "MVP3", we're not just being imprecise - we're quietly shifting our mindset from discovery to delivery. We're trading the culture of experimentation and learning that sits at the heart of good UX practice for the false comfort of predetermined roadmaps.

The irony is that this linguistic sloppiness often leads to exactly the kind of bloated, assumption-heavy product development that the original MVP concept was designed to prevent. We end up building faster, but learning slower.

Digital products rarely fail for lack of technical execution these days, they fail when design misses the mark or the wrong problem gets solved. That's a strategic risk, not just a design one.

So the next time someone mentions "MVP3" in a planning meeting, ask them what hypothesis they're testing. If they can't answer, you've probably found your real minimum viable question.

–––

Originally published at tollady.com

I told you these might be infrequent.

Happy New Year! I hope 2024 is getting off to a good start for you. Quite a bit has happened since I last wrote, particularly in the design and user experience worlds...

There was quite a bit of noise about IDEO - the company known for popularising design thinking - cutting a third of their staff and closing two offices towards the end of 2023. It had to happen some time - things can’t grow forever, but it’s been interesting to understand what changes in the market and the industry have led to this and what it might mean for the future.

It seems to be the result of a combination of factors; companies tightening their budgets, the widespread adoption of design thinking and a shift towards building in-house design teams rather than using external agencies. I have a sense this pendulum swing from seeking design-focused energy and recommendations from the outside to favouring integrated, deep internal expertise from the inside is a global trend. I’ll be watching closely to see how this develops.

This all comes at a time where we’ve seen some questioning of design thinking: Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong? and the consultancy model: Jason Fried on LinkedIn: I've consulted. I've done client work. I've written books. I've spoken on…

There are definitely benefits to the integrated, deep internal expertise that in-house teams enjoy, and it’s been valuable to work extensively on both sides throughout my career to see the pros and cons for myself. While it seems inevitable that the shift will continue as part of digital design’s evolution, I do have some reservations as design becomes increasingly integrated. I’m all for consistency and sticking to conventions to aid accessibility and efficient production, but an exclusive focus on efficiency, systemising design, reducing risk and cost-benefit analyses makes me feel we’d be losing something creatively.

Why Does Every New Car Look Like Every Other New Car? and Why companies kill great design talk about the results of efficiency leading to homogeneity, and not necessarily the best experiences.

We need research, exploration and design-focused energy from agencies and internal ideation labs to provide balance. Perhaps it’s about making sure we have strategic design departments as things move in-house to balance the production-focus.

There have been a few articles discussing a need to adapt the ‘double diamond’ design process too, as we move increasingly towards in-house teams. As Andy Budd recently wrote, “The so-called “Double Diamond” is a great way of visualising an ideal design process, but it’s just not the way most companies deliver new projects or services.” Here’s a few that caught my eye…

• Reverse double diamond: Improving The Double Diamond Design Process

• Triple diamond: Why the double diamond isn’t enough

• The Best Handoff Is No Handoff

• The design odyssey: Design is not a formula, it’s an odyssey: replacing the Double Diamond

It’s a shame that IxDA had to cancel Interaction Week for 2024 too, shortly followed by the news that Design Week was to close after 38 years.

It all feels a bit like we’re witnessing the end of an era.

The other big story in the design world has been the decision by Adobe not to go ahead with their $US20 Billion Figma Acquisition. As a colleague said to me: it’s probably good news in terms of commercial competition across design software, but you’ve got to feel for the Figma team that were about to get their big pay day!

I love the Flux Keyboard - a fully customisable keyboard for artists, designers and musicians - with integrated screen for shortcuts. Created in Australia!

Oh, and here’s a 3-D journey map template for Miro.

Lastly, Quirky Ink is the online home for my colleague Anthony’s incredible artwork. Sign up to his mailing list to get a regular dose of delicious pen-art goodness in your inbox.

Hello again. We made it to the difficult second album! The critics won’t think this is as good as the old stuff.

It’s mental health awareness month and coincidentally I’ve been involved in a few conversations of late about the negative effects that working from home is having on some people’s mental health. I love remote working and don’t want to go back to the office full-time any time soon, but I’m definitely starting to sense negative effects on the mental health of myself and others. It turns out sitting with your own thoughts for too long, and communicating too much over text ‘chat’ really isn’t that healthy. How Remote Work Can Impact Employees' Mental Health explores some of the psychological benefits and challenges of remote work, and Here’s What We Do and Don’t Know About the Effects of Remote Work is an interesting read, based on data gathered from economists, psychologists, sociologists and other scholars, regarding remote work since the pandemic.

While we’re on the subject of workplaces and things like mental health, inclusive teams and psychological safety, this article about the Government Digital Service posters listing what’s ok for new starters is just lovely.

My interest and investigations into AI continue. Here’s a nice list of the Top AI Resources You Must Follow If You Are Into AI that I found.

There’s plenty being written about the benefits of AI and it’s no surprise that Generative AI provides significant boost to knowledge workers, though it’s interesting to note the caution on over-reliance in this article, and the reference to a  ‘jagged frontier’ where tasks that appear to be of similar difficulty can actually be performed worse by humans using AI.

A colleague from work recently shared a bunch of academic papers and articles about the risks and ethics of AI like The Problem With AI Is the Problem With Capitalism and more worryingly Squiggle Maximizer (formerly "Paperclip maximizer") which considers a thought experiment showing how an artificial general intelligence, even one designed competently and without malice, could ultimately destroy humanity.

Mobile first has long been considered the right approach to design for the modern web, but an article from the revered Nielsen Norman Group suggests there might be unintended, negative usability impacts to desktop experiences from designing with a mobile-first approach. Personally I don’t blame mobile first for this but rather lazy design and front-end coding. There are ways around ‘content dispersion’ if breakpoints are employed to render a better desktop layout.

Oh, and The Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore and We’re turning designers into factory workers.

In music news, I learnt this week that Outdoor Type by The Lemonheads is actually a cover of a song written by an Australian, Tom Morgan, from a band called Smudge. Apparently Evan Dando used to spend a lot of time in Australia, co-writing with Tom Morgan. Who knew?

And this Billy Bragg interview with Adam Buxton is brilliant. Billy also wrote a great article on The Voice referendum…

and wrote a book on skiffle.

It’s funny how themes start to appear for these without consciously trying. This edition seems to have emerged as a view on unintended outcomes and consequences. I hope you enjoyed it.

Until the next one.

From 2008 to 2018 I owned and ran a UX agency in Melbourne, and for a good chunk of that time we sent out a weekly email, sharing our team’s ideas and links to interesting articles that we thought worthy of spreading. We used Campaign Monitor. It was fun. And surprisingly rewarding.

I haven’t really done much writing about design or technology since then. In many ways I think I needed some time out, but having had a break and recently been inspired by my good friend resurrecting First Thing Monday, I thought it might be nice to have another crack at a newsletter of my own. Reading Ben’s articles has been a really lovely way to reconnect with a friend that I’ve not seen in a while and it’s reminded me how great email newsletters can be.

I’m not sure exactly how this will pan out (knowing me this might be the only post I ever write again), but I like the idea of sending a semi-regular list of interesting articles and the discipline of reading and keeping up to date that requires, so I thought I’d give it a crack. Maybe (hopefully) writing here will provide the impetus for writing long-form too. We’ll see.

Anyhoo, let’s get started with the first edition…

Like many in my industry, I’ve been getting pretty interested in AI of late, particularly in terms of the intersection between UX and AI. The team at Fantasy Interactive have set up an AI arm to their business, which is developing a series of videos and q&a sessions exploring some of these ideas.

I recently discovered that Jakob Nielsen -the godfather of usability and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman group - has been writing a lot about UX and AI. He’s pretty bullish on it, predicting that companies will be scrambling to find enough UX professionals with AI experience within a couple of years. He’s authoring a whole series of articles on AI and UX, of which the one above is number 3. You can find the others listed at the bottom of that article.

7 Ways UX Designers Can Use AI to Their Advantage presents a nice list of applications of AI that can help with various facets of the UX process, but the real value here is the list of tools towards the bottom of the page. Fronty and Uizard in particular, sound epic! I’ll admit I haven’t tried either yet, but Fronty uses AI to code you a web page from a picture or drawing and Uizard generates interactive prototypes - complete with animations and transitions - from an image or design mock. Regardless of how good these products are, it’s a clear indication of the direction we’re heading.

The phenomenon that is Canva announced Magic Studio this week too; a suite of AI-powered tools aimed at making it accessible and easy for anyone to create engaging and informative visuals.

Exciting as all this AI stuff is, there are obviously fears about nefarious use, copyright infringement and the impact it could have on livelihoods. Dave Blumenstein is an Australian Artist, Cartoonist and Service Designer who is creating 'Octane Render' - a comic book about how cartoonists are feeling as A.I. threatens to decimate their livelihoods, based on conversations with others in his comics/illustration community.

The entire drumming world seems to have gone wild this week over this video of Chad Smith from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers playing flawlessly to a song he’s never heard before. Fair enough, the man’s amazing. Enjoy…

And it would be remiss of me not to link to this brilliant ad campaign by Briggs that aims to help debunk voter confusion in the lead-up to the Voice to Parliament referendum, as the conspiracy theories start to gain momentum. Give it a watch, then have a read of this.

Hope you found that as interesting as I enjoyed writing it.

Until the next one.

From Luke & Yoda to Rocky & Mickey, The Karate Kid & Mr Miyagi to Neo & Morpheus, popular culture is littered with great mentorship/master-apprentice success stories.

The benefits of the apprenticeship model are proven and well understood; our young and inexperienced have learnt through the passing of wisdom from the masters that came before them since our first ancestors walked the earth.

The practice of design is a craft that benefits greatly from the apprenticeship model. It’s vital for juniors getting started in the industry to have the opportunity to learn from their more experienced peers. I have very fond memories of starting my design career in Central London in the late 90’s, watching my experienced, talented colleagues in action; selling their designs and explaining complex concepts to clients, masterfully designing pixel-perfect designs to a grid in Photoshop, analysing research findings and crafting sitemaps with the utmost care and consideration. I loved every day in that office, soaking up the knowledge and atmosphere with an insatiable thirst, continuing the learning through shop-talk in the pub, long after the working day was done.

Times have changed. In recent years with the rise of remote work, many junior designers have found themselves in the unique position of starting their careers without the benefit of face-to-face learning that was once a staple of working in an office. This could be a problem for juniors, who are at risk of missing out on the valuable learnings and guidance that comes from being around more experienced folk, in person, day to day.

One of the biggest pitfalls of this shift is the lack of mentorship and guidance that junior designers would typically receive from more experienced designers in a traditional office setting. Being able to wander over to someone’s desk to observe their work, ask questions and receive feedback in real-time is invaluable for learning and growth.

Additionally, the social aspect of working in an office is also be beneficial. Being able to build relationships with colleagues and learn from them can help to foster a sense of community and belonging, which can be much more difficult to achieve in a remote setting. (There’s a point to be made about keeping cameras on in meetings here, but that’s a whole other post in itself).

A big one for me is that remote working also means less opportunities to observe and learn from other professionals in the field, such as clients, stakeholders, and other industry experts. There’s much to be said for face-to-face interactions with these types of professionals that can provide valuable insights and help to broaden the junior designer’s perspective and understanding of more than just the work, but the industry more generally.

In my current position as the leader of a team of designers, a key part of my role is to support the group’s mentorship and professional development. As you’d expect, my peers in the leadership team and I regularly catch up to discuss a variety of topics and this subject of working from home and it’s impact on junior designers came up recently, instigated by my colleague, Andrea Boundy. As she put it in a recent post:

WFH works well when you are firmly in the middle of your career or beyond, are autonomous and can stand your ground in meetings.

But what about juniors and people just starting out? You can‘t overhear conversations of those more senior around you, you can‘t turn to the person next to you to ask a quick question and receive the guidance you need… Instead maybe you are left to your own thoughts, self-doubt, not wanting to ‘disturb‘ someone even via ping, nor wanting to set up a meeting for a 2 minute conversation.

I don‘t have an answer, but want to make sure that in the post-pandemic landscape of corporate life, the next generation of talent aren‘t somehow being disadvantaged with regard to their growth, learning and progression.

It’s certainly a concern, but for all the negatives, remote work also comes with its own set of benefits for junior designers — as it does for us all — such as increased flexibility and the ability to work from anywhere.

It doesn’t look like we’re moving back to full-time at the office again any time soon, so it’s becoming increasingly important for junior designers to find alternative ways to gain the necessary value that mentorship and learning provides. Fortunately, there are opportunities that can be found through remote, such as involvement in online design communities, attending virtual events and workshops, and making use of the wealth of online learning resources available.

In terms of day-to-day at work, participation in online design critiques, co-design workshops and 1:1’s is critical and should be given priority wherever possible. There is an inevitable tendency to slip into designing in isolation by virtue of working remotely, so taking opportunities to collaborate wherever possible is a great way to instigate discussion about the work and gain learnings from others around the craft.

While remote work certainly has its challenges for junior designers, all is not lost. By taking advantage of the resources available to them, being proactive in seeking out learning and taking as many opportunities as possible to collaborate with their peers — either online or face-to-face — junior designers should still be able to grow as professionals while making the most of the benefits working remotely. The important thing is for them to be conscious of what might be missing and to take the initiative to seek alternative ways to learn.

Designers that complain about these things are missing the point. Constraints are the gig! Our job as designers is to come up with solutions to problems and to do so within the context of any associated constraints. Design without constraint isn’t design at all — it’s art.

“Design is the intentional solution to a problem within a set of constraints.”
- Mike Monteiro.

The challenges associated with constraints can certainly be frustrating at times and make the job difficult, but the trickier and more ‘wicked’ the problem, the better. That’s what makes for an interesting challenge and like with any puzzle, the more complex it is, the more rewarding it is to solve. Finding solutions that work for a complex set of constraints forces you to have to think differently, laterally and approach problems from alternative angles. Once you see constraints as a challenge and not a blocker, designing solutions can be a very rewarding exercise and often the point at which truly great innovation happens.

As I write this, I’m sitting at the desk in my home that I now work from full-time. Like many of us, I have transitioned to this way of working and accepted it as my new normal as a result of the Coronavirus crisis and the associated lockdowns. Like many businesses, we’ve transitioned all meetings to online/video, adapted our workshops to use collaborative, online software and communicate real-time through tools like Slack. While some of the team are still struggling with the change, most seem to have adapted well. We’ve successfully innovated as a result of an enormous, unforeseen constraint through necessity.

In many ways, we’re better off for the change. Personally, I’m finding I’m more productive, with less ad-hoc distractions throughout the day. Our team’s output has increased significantly as a result of the change, not to mention the business finding additional benefit through the savings associated with running a team remotely. This is working out so well that we’re considering continuing with a similar model even after the lockdown ends!

So why hadn’t we moved to remote working before? We considered the idea quite a bit at my old design agency a few years ago; We theorised about the many benefits it could bring and felt it could be an interesting and viable option. Many other businesses were already working remotely and evangelistic about the results, but whenever it came time to commit we didn’t go for it. A fear of the unknown, lack of impetus and the perceived potential risks were just too much to see it through. We never had a big enough constraint to make us do it!

There’s always potential for better ways to do things. Transformational change and particularly ‘digital transformation’ is something I’ve been involved in delivering for a number of organisations over the years. It’s usually a difficult, expensive, complex and time consuming exercise, yet here we are watching countless businesses adapt, change and transform (in many cases to be more ‘digital’) much more rapidly and cheaply than could ever have been thought possible. All as the result of an enormous, almost incomprehensible set of constraints brought about by a pandemic that no-one saw coming.

Australian futurist, Steve Sammartino, describes the situation nicely in a recent post on his website, saying:

“Never has business been so open-minded to change. While humans are the most innovative species on earth, we’re inconsistent. If things are cruising along nicely in life — then don’t expect much change. We’re creatures of habit and naturally risk averse. Currently it is riskier to not change, hence the embrace of change.”
- Australian futurist, Steve Sammartino

While not ideal circumstances, in an odd way we needed something like this to happen to force the change. A situation where we’re forced into adapting because there is simply no other option.

Observing the numerous examples of innovation brought about by the COVID-19 situation has reminded me of another extreme example, that brought about through the constraints of prison life. Being locked up in a prison cell means having no resources whatsoever — the ultimate constraint — yet there are many wonderful examples of innovation as a result of — not in spite of — these conditions, including cigarette lighters and devices for cooking, as shown below.

Cigarette lighter made from a battery and wire.

Stove/grill using a broken heater, aluminium foil and wire.

Tattoo gun made from a battery, a small motor, a sewing needle and a few wires.

These ingenious examples were brought to my attention back in 2015 by Ben Keenan, a Melbourne-based creative who gave a talk entitled “No time, no resources and no budget is the most creative brief ever” at Pause Fest. The talk is on YouTube and I’d heartily recommend giving it a look. In it, he talks about ingenuity needing constraint in order to exist. He goes so far as to suggest that we should seek to create our own constraints in order to be truly innovative, citing Scarcity, Urgency and Purity as the required ingredients. Elements that feature heavily as catalysts for change due to COVID.

In talking about the restrictive socio-political environments that led to the formation of Hip Hop and Punk during his talk, Ben suggests that the constraints of the time led to “The foundation of some of our biggest cultural movements.” He’s not wrong, and with the changes we’re witnessing to almost every aspect of how we live, work and communicate in real time, right now, I’d say we’re witnessing ourselves in the middle of another.

This was originally posted on my own site.

A design student recently asked me “What 3 skills are the top things to master in UX?”. It’s hard to limit an answer to just three, but this is how I replied…

• Empathy.
  In order to truly design something that’s going to be useful and meet the needs of a person, you really need to understand the problems you’re trying to solve for them, from their perspective. You need to do your research and try to get a feel for what it’s like to walk in their shoes for a while.

• Keeping a curious, open mind and thinking laterally .
  The first solution you come up with is rarely the best. It’s important to open yourself up to exploring new and left-of-field ideas. Collaboration with others is a key component to help with this, and don’t feel limited to just brainstorming with other UX designers either; you never know who might come up with the gem that turns into the killer solution.

• The ability to think in ‘spaces’ and ‘flows’ rather than just ‘pages’.
  My background’s in Industrial Design and I believe that the ability to understand 3-dimensional space and ergonomics really helps in terms of interaction design. It’s more than a series of individual, independent pages; it’s about understanding the bigger picture — how the information architecture, content, page structures, UI components and transitions all work together to deliver the whole experience.

Lastly (I’m cheating now — this is clearly a fourth!), I added that in relation to UX design for digital products, I think it’s really important to have an appreciation of basic UI principles such as visual hierarchy, grids and typography, as well as a some form of basic HTML/code understanding. I’m of the belief that it’s important to understand the medium you’re working with, even if you’re not writing the actual code. Much like a designer of furniture should understand the basic properties and mechanics of materials such as wood and steel.