As a Product designer, I ask the goal for which people do certain things, rather than the methods people use to do them. Once the goal is known, the state in which a person wants to end up, then it becomes immediately easier to identify the bottlenecks of the existing solution(s). If you appreciate Google as a place where people find answers to their questions, answers in all their diversity and alternative viewpoints, different sources for those answers, then you must agree that Google is obsolete.

When Google produces search results, a very large part of the work is still left to the User. Namely, choosing the most relevant next dive step, comparing data from different sources, generating a conclusion about the topic, etc. Mankind knew that the next step would be some kind of AI that would take over that part of the work, there are plenty of dystopian movies about that.

But that this will happen in 2022 I don’t think anyone anticipated.

Let me explain on a real example

I am a Russian emigrant, my wife and I literally fled Russia in early March 2022 when the invasion of Ukraine began, we had two suitcases, documents, and some money. For six months we wandered between Turkey, Georgia, and Serbia in search of our new, though most likely temporary, home. Eventually, after six months of wandering, I was offered a move to Lithuania, a Baltic European country with very kind people, lots of delicious food, and cheap plane tickets to any European capital. We thought it was a great option for a temporary move. I tell this so that you can understand that our measured life in St. Petersburg was completely turned upside down in one day, and now we have to reinvent ourselves, put our lives in order.

We are not alone, over a million people left Russia after the war began, most for moral and political reasons.

Those who left are IT specialists, just to mention my friends with whom I used to play SmallWorld at home on weekends are now scattered all over the world, from San Francisco to Tokyo. In emigration, every familiar, routine task becomes more difficult, so the cognitive load increases manifold. Tired by the end of the year, I am now enjoying my vacation, learning new things, and even taking the time to write this post for you.

One of the new tasks I had to solve was opening a individual enterpreneurship in a new place. This in general is not the easiest process, each country has different systems of accounting and registration of entrepreneurs, and I had to deal with my tax status. I didn’t have the energy to find a script for entrepreneurship registration, I started googling the process several times, but I was inundated with a ton of legal information, not to mention that it all is in lithuanian language. I am a Product designer, often launching small business ideas and product hypotheses that make a profit and that profit I want to legalize. All of my projects have been on pause for almost a year due to moving and getting a residency permit in a new place.

And Chat GPT was able to solve my problem with one message, because it explained to me in human form the whole process for my certain case. That was a miracle and it cheered me up a bunch.

When I asked people about my problem, I got different opinions or did not get answers to some questions, because there were no people with relevant experience among my acquaintances. At the same time, ChatGPT knows the answer to every step regarding the process of obtaining IE (individual entrepreneurship) in Lithuania. I clarified some points, wrote out the procedure for myself and was able to open my IE in a couple of days.

Why ChatGPT is a New Google (but not yet)

Just look at this:

See how similar the user’s critical path in googling and in ChatGPT? But don’t let yourself be fooled, these identical sets of actions are actually very different in quality. ChatGPT, as I noted earlier, segments, chews, if you want, information and gives you an already analyzed answer. Google does not answer questions, Google gives you links to content that people have created on the Internet, and you have to analyze the search output, choose the most relevant next step(link), go deeper through the funnel, then evaluate the material itself and decide whether you have spent all this time in vain.

Speaking more strictly, it would be more correct to change the scheme of the user’s path in Google to something like this:

The only case when Google gives you a real answer is the widgets pre-created by Google, into which information is mapped. For example age of Stephen Fry.

Not much isn’t it? Well the interesting fact that ChatGPT’s answer is also not the exact one that i’ve expected, ChatGPT tries to respond in the form of a human response, which is why its messages may be unnecessarily long.

But hey, it’s not a problem at all, ChatGPT is not a product to use, it’s still just a toy that should start a new interaction between a person and the Internet.

In my first example with the opening of individual entrepreneurship, ChatGPT made my cognitive work easier by giving clear, correct instructions for action. While Google only tried to give me the most relevant data that I should study and evaluate myself. At the same time, ChatGPT itself has nothing close to a completed product, it is a tool, a toy in the Alpha version, which definitely gives rise to a new way of interacting with information. Products based on ChatGPT or any other advanced AI for queries should appear in the near future. This is how i see it.

Insted of Conclusion

This year has literally turned the table. For me, that’s right, I became a migrant, and MindJourney became publicly available and people are already using it for memes, concept art, but for the most part, of course, for memes. At the end of the year, ChatGPT appeared, these are high-profile examples, in this year a dozens of new AI became publicly available, which people already started to use in their projects (I use, and you?)

I wrapped up a quick thought of what ChatGPT AI approaching to boost your thoughts forward and imagine our next stop in this rapidly changing world. hAIppy new year!

Why you don’t consider ChatGPT as a new Google unless you try it was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

• Change Figma’s default Dash stroke of the component to Solid. It will make it look less noisy. It’s extremely helpfull when you have five and more of them on one board.
• Use the same border radius on the component itself as the border radius of the objects this size in your Design system.

• Apply Auto-layout to your component. When you work with AL in your variants of the component you won’t be able to set Horizontal stretching rule to it if the component itself doesn’t have AL. It’s especially painfull when you have more than one layer of enclosure and using instance of the component inside another component, which takes place all the time in complex Design systems.

That’s it for today. Add me on Linkedin to stay in touch and i’ll see you in the next one!

How to learn a UI trend

Have you ever wonder why designs on Dribbble made at daily challenges are looking good but the apps UX/UI which you are using day to day looking and working in a really different way? Is it because there’s not much of skilled designers in the world or because clients and product owners are too stick to the conventional design practices and frameworks so they get stuck in “past”? That may or may not be the case at the end of the day. The truth is, Dribbble’s designs are bubbly.They don’t work for real products because it’s a solid image out of context, they don’t disclose the product experience. It’s about UI on steroids and nothing clear about it’s product design. The contrast can be good, the animations look clear but that’s less than enough for a good product.

It’s a very, very close to Stock photos where you have a happy office worker and this image was using to show on hiring marketing campaign how fun and cool it is to work in your office, and now because photographers are developed, their skills and the industry grew, we have a visuals of offices which are looking good but don’t say anything about the company which this office is belongs to. It’s belittling of HR, Office manager, all the people around office vibes to you say that the picture clearly explains everything that the office does, no, there’s much more behind one poor image.

Same with UI’s. Good UI designer, UXd should be able to create any design from Dribbble, but it’s only about skill in your design software.

Now about UI trends

So UI trends are dangerous, and blindly following them can impact the career, especially when a junior designer makes first steps, because it can make a form to overweight the function. Glassmorphism or neo-Brutalism have a certain spirit and it can be only on a surface meet your product, business needs (users’ needs), although they broke Human interface guidelines and/or Material/MaterialU guidelines which juniors might be not good at.

Research on appropriate UI trend for a project should always correspond to what you know about your user, business and tech specs as well.

Although I’m not calling to get rid of trends, just seems to be important to mention that most of the products don’t need them, rather than good UX, so let’s talk about it next.

How to learn a UX trend

Well.. What is actually a UX trend? Would be good to mention that any UI trend is a sub-layer for UX, but that’s just for graphomancy. In the essence UX trend is riding new way to interact with information, inclusiveness for everyone and in every handy way. Voice assistants, chat bot, ADA compliance, VR, AR e.t.c. it’s all good, but even traditional interfaces are developing too! Those are platforms that can help make the information accessible at the right time in the right way. That’s why a lot of apps dying so fast while tried to ride AR (People plays Pokemon GO from 2016, but Minecraft Earth died less than in half of a year), a lot of money can be spent in trying to ride a trend, without deep research and fine business model.

When the deal is on product UX it is responsibility of a designer to pitch the right idea and get rid of unproven. The cost of riding the new undeveloped design trend which even might not fit users need can be critical. The cost of UX trends is higher than UI, and every single UX trend is half less expensive in the next year to implement, so designers can book more time to learn and research it and the final costs will be cheaper.

For an existing product it would be good to measure like did the team optimised the current experience (assume it performs well)?

Now about UX trends

So the general guidance from a man who were doing poor work on pitching trend upfront good UX research of users, guided just by faith and courage, pick a certain trend and spend enough time to be an expert in a trend, it will have a way more valuable than a beginner in every trend. If you want to be good at AR at the moment of writing this note it requires up to 3 months to get familiar with a set of tools for it. What is really valuable about articles on medium with a list of the nodes is that they show all the horizons altogether, cool spot to choose which one inspires you to spend next quarter/half of a year to learn.

Don’t be scared that learning new trend can take half year before qualified implementation (it only means impossibility to learn all the trends at the same degree). After 5 years in design, from the height of a product designer, I can cheer you up by saying, good designer definitely spend more time in learning than in producing.

How to avoid mistakes when learning UX/UI trend was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.