“As AI becomes more capable of assembling interfaces from established patterns, this distinction deserves more attention. We are getting better at telling tools what belongs to our product. We also need to decide what belongs to the moment.”

AI can generate the interface. What makes it worth caring about? →
By Dolphia

Editor picks

• Who’s designing the stop button? →
  The hardest design decisions happen where that autonomy ends.
  By Michał Krztoń
• Design by numbers →
  Is AI ruining UX or just pouring gasoline on the fire?
  By Russell Pinkston
• Context is the new interface →
  The future of design lies in what happens between products.
  By Aurélie Radom

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

Samia Halaby and the Amiga 1000 →

Make me think

• Digital minimalism →
  “Digital minimalism is about being intentional about ways that you access digital technology, making each use a conscious choice rather than something that you get sucked into by default. In this post, I will describe some experiments that I’ve done in this direction.”
• Pick three →
  “Cut to 2026. AI has made good work fast and cheap. Now we can have all three… I’m genuinely producing the best work of my career, and I’m having fun doing it. But I’m working long hours, and there’s something familiar about that personal cost from 20 years ago. I’m not alone, either. I speak to designers across the industry regularly, and this seems to be the new normal. I’ll bet you’re feeling it too.”
• Great but painful →
  “People are notoriously bad at knowing what they want. If you ask someone what they want, then they will typically tell you what they think a socially virtuous person is expected to want. They will tell you that they want to eat healthier, understand people with different political opinions, know whether news stories are reliable, make more friends, be a better parent, and serve their community.”

Cool finds

Paper Mono →

Nubank Rebrand →

Stageshow →

Careers & more

• What I learned teaching AI prototyping at university →
  And how non-tech people can create apps.
  By Jay Aragones
• Everyone’s got a quick question →
  And you shouldn’t have to answer them all.
  By Bill Guo
• Native is a floor, not a ceiling →
  With AI, a polished look costs nothing.
  By Mathieu Poli

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Design by numbers, Teaching AI prototyping, Context is the new UI was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Open any product you pay for and look at the top right corner. There is a sparkle. Behind it is a panel that slides in from the right, says “Ask anything”, and offers three suggestions you did not ask for. Close it and it comes back after the next update, sometimes with a new name.”

Nobody asked for the sparkle button →
By Jon Sabutis

Editor picks

• Who gets to name the future? →
  A field guide to AI’s boys’ club.
  By Nicole Alexandra Michaelis
• Autonomy by design →
  How gamification and AI can respect (or rewrite) our choices.
  By Melinda Jacobs
• The AI reckoning in UX was 20 years in the making →
  The field has done this to itself twice before.
  By Dan Maccarone

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

Does Apple’s HomeView reduce effort, or ask for our attention? →
By Heenesh Patel

Make me think

• Struggle together →
  “i learned programming and design by trying, failing, and trying again. when i hit a wall, i figured out how to climb it. read something i barely understood. took things apart. asked someone for help. started over. it became like water.”
• Design as a garden →
  “Let different things cross-pollinate. Interesting work comes from unexpected combinations. Go watch a movie. Read a book outside your field. Talk with someone who sees the world differently.”
• The software factory forgot about design →
  “Usually design shows up as a few inspirational screenshots pasted into a ticket to direct the agent on how to design. Or it doesn’t show up at all and the agent is left to decide what the thing should look and feel like. And it will decide, pretty confidently.”

Cool finds

Hairline: line drawings that answer the pointer →

The New York Times turns 175 with an identity, events and a campaign →

Decoy Font: a TTF font that hides what you’re typing from AI →

Careers & more

• How I stopped dreading AI and started studying it full-time →
  I had to get serious about learning.
  By Lisa Liu
• Smaller teams want design leaders who make, again →
  What a leader has to bring.
  By Patrick Neeman
• Code → Figma with MCP →
  Building an AI-ready design system library.
  By Christine Vallaure

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Sparkle buttons, Autonomy by design, AI reckoning in UX, Figma with MCP was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Designers are skipping steps of the process in a rush for faster outputs. But the contest that really matters is the race towards stakeholder alignment. Designers are both uniquely vulnerable to losing this race and uniquely positioned to win it.”

The fastest gun in UX: Why your team is telling the wrong story →

Editor picks

• Design in the material you ship →
  Understanding code the way an architect understands stone.
  By Jon Sabutis
• Design v ADHD →
  The myth of “ADHD-friendly design.”
  By Kristian Mikhel
• A founder with a tool is not a founder with a clue →
  Who wins and who fails.
  By Dan Maccarone

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

How post-war France invented the future, and then stopped →

Make me think

• Your product is not the center of the universe →
  “Some classic traits of product-centric thinking:
  - Expecting people to come to you to get work done.
  - Building integrations so other products plug directly into you.
  - Asking people for context and preferences they’ve already shared somewhere else.
  - Trying to own AI access by building your own agent inside the product.”
• Fast is a design decision →
  “In Enterpriseland bureaucracy runs the show: designers deliberate with PMs and engineers on the final state, and eventually they get what they want. But the users suffered: they would spend up to minutes at a time waiting for their dashboards and applications to load up.”
• Everyone is starting over →
  “It’s the question rattling around in the head of every designer whose hair is now more gray than not. The careers that thrive now are the ones willing to become someone new, over and over.”

Cool finds

Interfere Design System →

Moving objects in 3D space →

Apple Music’s new logo was shaped by a bath of mineral oil →

Careers & more

• What if AI sets us free? →
  What can destroy us can also save us.
  By Nicole Alexandra Michaelis
• AI doesn’t care about your job title →
  How to measure your exposure to AI and lower the risk.
  By Patrick Neeman
• Creative intention →
  Is a chef less of a chef if someone else plates the dish?
  By Irene Álvarez Lorenzo

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Telling the wrong story, Design v ADHD, AI doesn’t care about your job title was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

AI companies have spent the past year hiring forward-deployed engineers: engineers who sit inside a customer’s team, hear the problem firsthand, and ship against it. One count of 1,000 listings found the role grew 1,165% in a single year. This year I did a version of that job for my own newsroom, without the title, and it changed how I think about listening.

Being heard runs on two clocks. Listening should be slow. Response should be fast.

Nobody feels heard by a report →

Editor picks

• Borrowed slopes →
  When newsrooms reach for the oldest kit in digital design.
  By Wira Indra Kusuma
• What I told the CFO when he asked why design matters →
  How to show the impact of design outcomes.
  By Arin Bhowmick
• Designing for an idea before it exists →
  On the useful parts that don’t quite fit.
  By Hiroshi Sato / 佐藤 仁

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

On M.F. Husain and the meanings of orange →

Make me think

• Worth building →
  “Before, a project like this needed justifying. I’d have asked whether I’d use it enough to make the time worthwhile. If I expected to spend weeks on it, I’d have started thinking about other users, pricing, how it could pay for itself.”
• Design owns coherence →
  “Established functions are defined not only by their activities, but also the decision rights they own to something that the business considers important. Finance owns capital allocation. Legal owns risk. Marketing owns demand. Sales owns revenue. Engineering owns reliability. What UX/Design typically owns feels like small potatoes — consistency, usability, accessibility. None of which addresses meaningful business value at scale.”
• Grieving the loss of details →
  “Before the term “vibecoding” was coined and the industry shifted to valuing programmers primarily for designing architecture, I proudly called myself a coder as opposed to an engineer. In my eyes, this highlighted the way I focused on the details, performance optimization, knowing the intricacies of the language, and being able to explain how things work, as opposed to juggling Java-esque abstractions.”

Cool finds

Energy icons: a free, open-source library →

Prompt motion: videos made with Claude Opus 5.5 →

The convergence of design →

Careers & more

• Getting good at your job can stop you getting better →
  Many experienced people plateau out of sight.
  By Dora Czerna
• The AI experience doesn’t care about your org chart →
  Our ways of working haven’t caught up.
  By Kate Agena, PhD
• Taste is not a design methodology →
  Our favorite answer to AI-generated sameness.
  By Patrick Neeman

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Why design (still) matters, Taste is not a methodology, Borrowed slopes was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Today, my house and life are painfully void of craft. I live in a new build with pumped out, builder-grade (aka cheap) materials. I have plastic wood lookalikes rather than hand-carved wood. None of my furniture causes that moment of awe where you stop to marvel at it. My dining room table is a constant reminder of how far we’ve departed from the craft and moments of splendor when creating fast furniture.”

AI-generated UI is fast design, not UX →
By Sophie Shrimpton

Editor picks

• What the AI era owes you →
  No one is going to save your career from AI.
  By Dan Maccarone
• Are synthetic users (really) the future of UX research? →
  Limited use, if at all.
  By Arin Bhowmick
• How apps know us better than we do →
  And how they influence our decisions.
  By Bas Wallet

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

Is Meta’s new AI agent easier to trust because it’s cute? →

Make me think

• AI invasive design →
  “Businesses, teams, and people are performing cargo cult rituals to market themselves as AI native, while working from a definition that’s driven by mechanics and not outcomes. It’s isomorphic mimicry, adopting the outward appearance of successful peers as an empty signifier of your own credibility.”
• Chat is AI’s command line →
  “Let me directly change the thing we’re working on! What if AI automatically visualized the day we’re planning on a timeline? Let me move lunch a little later, make room for the zoo, swap between dinner options. The computer keeps track of travel time and opening hours while I tweak things directly.”
• On being anything other than a designer →
  “My frustration around the debates of right now — regardless of your sector — is we’re centering the wrong stories, the wrong people and the narratives that place the technologist (engineer, strategists, managers, transformers) at the heart of the solution rather than the people we purport to care about.”

Cool finds

Creative Intelligence Report →

Freaking Good Libraries →

Amazing Glass →

Careers & more

• The taste paradox →
  Why the skill everyone says matters is the one we’ve stopped building.
  By Nicole Alexandra Michaelis
• Jev: How to use it for UX →
  And how to put a decision model to work.
  By Patrick Neeman
• Beyond streaks and nudges →
  Ethical gamification & AI design.
  By Melinda Jacobs

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AI-generated UI, What the AI era owes you, Amazing Glass, Jev for UX was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Every prompt is a confession. Before the model returns a word, the box has read me back: the clarity of my thinking, the range of my references, the questions I didn’t think to ask. I think I am describing a task, while in reality I am describing myself, my aspirations, the place I work, the assumptions my team has, the knowledge my organization did or didn’t bother to write down.”

Prompting as self-portrait →
By Caio Braga

Get interview depth at survey speed with Marvin AI Interviews →
[Sponsored] Surveys tell you what. Interviews tell you why. Marvin’s AI Interviewer holds real conversations, probes for deeper answers, and runs hundreds of interviews at once in 40+ languages. No scheduling, insights in hours. Learn more.

Editor picks

• The economics of attention in the age of AI →
  When machines pay attention, what deserves ours?
  By Aurélie Radom
• The next larger context →
  Designing beyond the UI, the product, and the prompt.
  By Chris R Becker
• Intelligent accessibility →
  What if accessibility could adapt to you?
  By Dulanjala Aluthge

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

On losing the ability to see anything whole →
By Pedro A. Brêtas

Make me think

• AI is a boring technology →
  “Electricity did not arrive boring. It became boring over decades, through standardization and public investment and regulation and a great deal of argument about who should own the wires and who was owed service.”
• The default is not a design decision →
  “The second was the tool. Figma didn’t invent the sameness, but it made copying frictionless, and cheap imitation spreads in a way expensive imitation never could.”
• The age of the soft skill →
  “The worst thing you can do in 2026 is take a question somebody asked you, paste it into an AI, and paste the answer back. It is the laziest move available, it’s annoying, and it wastes everybody’s time, because I can do that. I have the same tools you do.”

Cool finds

Bringing emoji into the next era of expression →

Is your app ready for iPhone Duo? →

The four tiers of tab importance →

Careers & more

• How to de-slopify your designs →
  Tips for anyone who vibecodes.
  By Maya Brennan
• Design’s consensus was AI’s first casualty →
  The same evidence about AI is being read two opposite ways.
  By Anamol Rajbhandari
• The strategic designer →
  Navigating the Jevons paradox in the AI age.
  By Daniel Ruston

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Prompt as self-portrait, De-slopifying your designs, The strategic designer was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Congress is still writing in waterfall, stuck in a world that is quickly passing them by. It wants one comprehensive (dare I say beautiful) AI bill, fully specified, passed once, ideally after everyone agrees, which is to say never.

The internet’s builders would have found that laughable. They governed a technology that was changing under their feet, and they did it by treating governance the way good teams treat a product, as a living thing you steer, not a monument you unveil.”

The lie we keep telling ourselves about regulating AI →
By Dan Maccarone

Editor picks

• What is a screen made of? →
  Flat design was right that the screen isn’t leather.
  By Takuma Kakehi
• The variance problem in AI products →
  Fast one day, slow the next.
  By Adi Leviim
• Where does your work go when the tool shuts down? →
  Who’s archiving it?
  By Dora Czerna

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

A player that needed to do more than play video →
By Milan Manojlović

Make me think

• I am often wrong →
  “I apply something like these six steps for pretty much every problem, and pretty much every product (a product solves a problem for users). I apply this rough framework many times on most days.”
• Making software hurts now →
  “Now, every act of giving is treated with suspicion. The gift of openness is no longer trustworthy on its own. The receivers of free software want to know how the gift came to be. Is it pure, or was it made with dirty machinery?”
• I don’t want the details →
  “A few months ago I was dragged into a call with my engineering counterpart and their boss (who happens to be our SVP of engineering). Something had gone wrong that shouldn’t have. Nothing catastrophic, but important enough that I was now on a call with an SVP. I started to explain how it happened when they cut me off with “Michael, I don’t want the details.”

Cool finds

I gave my website a boss fight →

A lightweight library full of beautiful loading indicators for React →

Image to ASCII converter →

Careers & more

• Nobody starts as an accessibility expert →
  Designers, leave your intimidation at the door.
  By Hope Turner
• Should the job of a UX designer be reserved for humans? →
  What happens when AI does it better.
  By Slava Polonski, PhD
• Can stress be quantified? →
  The science and design behind wearable stress tracking.
  By Catherine Chu

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Regulating AI, Quantifying stress, The variance problem was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“A designer is not an artist. A designer is a commercial problem-solver, hired to take a client’s half-formed intent — a vibe, a feeling, a vague sense of “make it look professional” — and give it form. That is the job whether the tool is a pencil, Photoshop, or a prompt box. AI has not changed what a designer does. It has changed who can now attempt to do it themselves.

Who-can-now-attempt-it is not one group, though. It’s three, and the current debate around AI usage is weaker for not differentiating between the different needs of these groups.

Together, I’ll call them ‘the designless’: not a single condition, but an absence of design in three different ways — lacking the access to hire it, the awareness to know what to ask for, or the motivation to bother when the means are already there.”

For the Designless →
By Joshua Leigh

Editor picks

• The hidden culture layer in AI →
  How AI is becoming the most culturally saturated technology ever built.
  By Slava Polonski, PhD
• The death of the deliverable →
  The wireframe was never really the point.
  By Luis Hermosilla
• You’re not behind →
  The feed is built to make you feel that way.
  By Dora Czerna

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

Optical vs. Mathematical Alignment →

Make me think

• If coding is solved, what now? Measuring the sloppiness of code →
  “LLMs are able to write almost perfectly correct code. This is because of the scalability and the verifiability of code. It is pretty straightforward to let LLMs generate code and then let that code be checked by hidden tests, which results in a clear reward signal. In stark contrast to that, checking the ‘sloppiness’ of this code often requires human intuition and taste, and is an extremely difficult task in general.”
• The most important product decision is what you don’t build →
  “Except every stakeholder involved wants to do a Columbo and add just one more thing. By the end you’ve essentially rebuilt Google Drive, with tagging, archiving, printing and sharing across several channels, each with its own quirks. Not to mention clearing the security and authentication hurdles so the right person sees only the right documents. And so on, and so on.”
• We are all Product Engineers now →
  “In March this year I found companies substituting compute for labor at record rates. In July I looked into labor statistics and found that the market for junior programmers had been savaged while the market for senior ones was fine, in fact growing.”

Little gems this week

Don’t let AI build a Winchester Mystery House →
By Patrick Neeman

The real reason everyone hates the viral AI food slop →
By Slava Polonski, PhD

A short history of logos made of data →
By Louis Charron

Tools and resources

• Please don’t stretch your app for foldables →
  What happens when the screen isn’t a fixed constraint?
  By Allie Paschal
• iPhone Duo’s UX →
  Making foldables useful, but also missing the mark.
  By Punit Chawla
• How to say no when a friend asks for a discount →
  Thinking about price can connect to much bigger things.
  By Hiroshi Sato

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For the Designless, The death of the deliverable, iPhone Duo’s UX was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“There are two famous lines about history, and UX earns both. George Santayana wrote that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The version usually credited to Mark Twain is gentler: history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. I like that one better.”

Five eras of UX design and the lessons to keep in the AI era →
By Patrick Neeman

Editor picks

• Villains plan. Heroes react. →
  Learning from the people who want to take over the world.
  By Wira Indra Kusuma
• What a 1980s photocopier reveals about Agentic UX →
  Persistent lessons in human-centered automation.
  By Meg Kurdziolek
• AI in product teams →
  In 2026, the growing impact on collaboration.
  By Anna Lefour
• Your first draft now has a log →
  Workplace surveillance has reached the one place it couldn’t.
  By Pedro A. Brêtas

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

Opensource UI: a free React UI and Next.js component library →

Make me think

• Your product didn’t get worse →
  “Your product didn’t get worse. It still does the job, works the way your customers expect and gives them no compelling reason to switch. Then those customers start using agents elsewhere, and the standard around your product changes. They ask an agent to research a trip or organize some files. They use it to make a change in another product. Jobs that used to require opening an app and completing a workflow across several screens turn into a sentence.”
• Burnt out on a three-day week →
  “The most common advice I see for product leaders facing burnout is to rest. Take PTO. Meditate. Lighten the calendar. When rest doesn’t work, the next piece of advice is to quit and find a different company. In coaching, I’ve watched enough people follow both playbooks to know they don’t always fix the problem.”
• Limit the number of details →
  “The first half gets your attention. The second half is what makes it possible. Fewer details allow you to care more deeply about each one. By details, I don’t just mean the small visual decisions. Every feature, control, mode, state, exception, and bit of behavior becomes something a team has to design, and someone has to understand. There’s only so much attention to go around. Same for time, taste, and patience.”

Little gems this week

A short history of logos made of data →
By Louis Charron

Tetris had to cheat to feel random →
By Takuma Kakehi

Death of the iPod →
By Neel Dozome

Tools and resources

• The model is behaving impeccably →
  Your information architecture isn’t.
  By Adrian Levy
• The sycophancy trap →
  What happens when feelings become the metric.
  By Vadym Grin
• 8 voice AI UX patterns →
  Emerging voice patterns and limitations.
  By Sharang Sharma

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Five eras of UX, First drafts, Logos made of data, Voice AIUX patterns was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“AI coding agents are bringing some of that interaction model back. You can describe an outcome and let the agent decide which commands to run, which files to change and which tests to execute. You no longer have to operate the software step by step, but a familiar design problem comes back in another form: What did the system understand? What is it doing? What has it changed? What can I stop? What should I review?

The interface is no longer just something we operate; it can act.”

When the canvas starts acting, who’s really in control? →
By Aurélie Radom

Editor picks

• Beyond the corporate stairs →
  Rethinking success in the world of design.
  By Darren Yeo
• AI took away engineering’s right to say no →
  The power to say what’s possible.
  By Dan Maccarone
• The call for an agentic standard →
  We need to stop shipping the same form four different times.
  By Patrick Neeman

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

Step inside Teddy Blanks’ film title design process →

Make me think

• How AI-ready is your design system? Now you can measure it. →
  “Every design system team is having the same conversation right now, and nobody can back it with numbers. We built the eval, ran it against four real systems, and published the harness.”
• A good move is enabling →
  “Product strategy is expressed in the moves your team makes on the field of play. Or as above, the path you take at each fork, one after the other. Bad moves waste work, overcommit resources, and close future possibility, to say nothing of the toll they take on team members stuck out in the wild.”
• You have to beat the models at something →
  “Today, value over replacement is even more important. A replacement-level engineer in the 2010s was fine: maybe not worth promoting, but still worth paying, because writing code had a high fixed cost. Now writing code costs a hundred bucks a month. What are you doing that GPT-5.6-Sol or Claude Opus 5 wouldn’t do in your position? Why is it worth paying an extra two or three orders of magnitude for?”

Little gems this week

Users don’t see your design system →
By Chris R Becker

Neuroqueering design practice →
By Kristina Gushcheva-Keippilä

Your synthetic self belongs to strangers →
By Anamol Rajbhandari, MSc

Tools and resources

• The prompt is the product →
  What I learned teaching Claude to build the tool I actually meant.
  By Sophia Hee
• A larger responsibility for designers →
  UX in 2027 may be less about interfaces and more about behavior.
  By Lucas Camara
• Making kyōwa possible with AI →
  Words that work as sketches.
  By Hiroshi Sato

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AI canvas, Synthetic self, The prompt is the product was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.