Issue #762: Designing with AI
What you don't build, 100 UX methods ranked by value, The rules travel, the eye doesn't, Design tokens need more than semantics, and more.
Highlights of the week
- Don’t type, just speak - The voice-to-text AI that turns speech into clear, polished writing in every app. - Wispr Flow promoted
- Designing with AI - Prompt-to-code interfaces don't create better ideas by themselves. But what they do is reduce the cost of execution to almost nothing — giving us more time to remain in the unknown, play with the problem and discover which ideas are actually worth pursuing. - Buzz Usborne
- The 100 most common UX design methods - 100 top UXD methods ranked by breadth, altitude, persuasion, and cost. AI prototyping wins as the highest-value method. - Jakob Nielsen
Read all week, picked once. The best design links, every Tuesday.
Product design, UX/UI and PM
- The most important product decision is what you don’t build - Be extremely choosy about what you let be added to your system. And be militant about taking things out. - Liam Nugent
- You can hand it the rules, not the eye - Go back to the fundamentals. Study them until you can apply them, then until you can see them — in your own work, in other people’s, in whatever a model hands you. Build the habit of naming what’s wrong and why. - Christopher Butler
Design engineering
- Design tokens need more than semantics - What started as an effort to refine our spacing tokens ultimately changed how we think about semantic tokens altogether. - Nate Baldwin
Tools and resources
- Built by designers: No explanation needed - Designers now turn ideas into working products. Explore a curated collection of apps, tools, websites, and experiments designed, built, and shipped by designers. - Juliette Karapetyan, Phil Hedayatnia
Inspiration and creativity
- The new cost of creation - As execution gets cheaper, the new cost of creation becomes your judgment, your willingness to keep going, and your ability to see something worth making in the first place. - Gabriel Valdivia
- That crisp interface is going to date - What worries me is that we have started to accept the smooth, flat average without questioning it. - Marie-Claire Dean
Last but not least
- Who will taste the cherries? - Taste, both as a physiological process and an aesthetic preference, is subjective. It's contextual and belongs to the individual. - Liam Spradlin