Information allows us to act more skillfully. Imagine you come to a fork on a road. Without a sign, you'd need a compass or a great sense of direction to choose correctly. But with a clear sign, you'd quickly know which road to take. The sign reduces ambiguity. The Moylan arrow, too, disambiguates a choice. Pulling in on the wrong side of the pump is an annoying inconvenience.
What's coming into sharper focus isn't fidelity, it's foresight. Part of the work of Product Design today is conceptual: sensing trends, building future-proof systems, and thinking years ahead. But besides the current momentum, we still have to focus on real problems that bring real value as of now. This balance is sometimes challenging, but also creates opportunities to reform our thinking and approaches.
In 2016, I presented at @Roblox Indie Game Developer Meetup about design strategy as an indie developer. Back then, I had no idea children as young as 5 were interacting with random adults on their platform. Today, the same company (NYSE: $RBLX) is filled with poorly moderated "games" like Bathroom Simulator and worse - all while letting adults animate their avatars for sexual role play.
The federated model suggests that design system work can be distributed across multiple teams without a central authority. It sounds democratic. It sounds efficient. It sounds empowering. In practice, it creates an ownership vacuum. Who's responsible for defining the architecture of the design system? Who establishes and evolves the processes needed to scale? Who ensures quality and consistency? Who maintains the infrastructure on which the system depends? Who deals with the unknown challenges that will inevitably
Greetings. Can someone please tell me how to get the image on the back of the flip card to fill the card like the image on the front of the card? See attachment with identical image on front and back. I have read the help documentation but did not fine the information needed. Basically, I need the images on the front and back to be the same dimensions. Thank you.
At 90 years old, the "Godfather of UX" isn't slowing down. Don Norman shares why our industry must shift from Human-Centered Design (HCD) to a more systemic, Humanity-Centered (HCD+) approach (image source: Yeo) The Transit That Changed Everything It's a true story: three years ago, a fortunate coincidence brought Don Norman to Singapore for a transit while travelling from San Diego to Shanghai. At that exact moment, Singapore Polytechnic was hosting its annual Design Thinking and User Experience (DT | UX) Summit.
AI tools are now embedded across almost every stage of product design. We use AI to generate ideas, summarize research findings, explore visual directions, write UX copy, and even ship working prototypes. Yet despite widespread adoption, many teams still struggle with a key question: How do you integrate AI into the design process without weakening design quality?
Technology moves fast, but 2025 feels like a distinct era. This year brought gadgets that challenged convention rather than followed it. From keyboards that fold into phone cases to power banks that communicate through light, these innovations prove that great design starts with questioning what we've accepted as normal. The products ahead represent a shift in thinking about portability, interaction, and what our devices should actually do for us.
As AI agents become embedded collaborators in our systems, designers face a powerful and pressing question: Who are we designing for now? Suddenly, we find ourselves in the middle of a new Experience dilemma: designing for both people and programs. That means exploring new personas and reconciling different approaches: emotional intuition, logical execution, and the coherence of both. Let's have a look at the pitfalls of this dilemma and explore what we have to consider while designing for both humans and machines.
When we think about people who are deaf, we often assume stereotypes, such as "disabled" older adults with hearing aids. However, this perception is far from the truth and often leads to poor decisions and broken products. Let's look at when and how deafness emerges, and how to design better experiences for people with hearing loss. Deafness Is A Spectrum Deafness spans a broad continuum, from minor to profound hearing loss.
Personalization tools allow users to configure the interface according to their preferences with customizable themes configurable shortcuts and adapted displays ensuring an optimal and intuitive user experience. Advanced search functionalities allow quick location of specific titles using keywords provider names or game mechanic characteristics while personalized recommendations based on gameplay history suggest alternatives likely to match individual preferences. The diversity of content
Microsoft Bing is testing loading more people also ask options as you click on them. This is something Google has done for a long time now. But now when you click on an option under the people also ask section within Bing, Bing may load more beneath them - to show you more options. Plus, they load these cards for the site it is referencing. I spotted this via both Sachin Patel and Khushal Bherwani on X - and I was able to replicate it.
The framework I use for writing prompts is called Zoom-Out-Zoom-In. I start by creating a proper context for my product and explaining its target user, then zoom in on the actual screen/page design I want to generate, explaining the goal of a particular screen/page, its layout hierarchy, and the design constraints the AI should consider when generating it. Finally, I mention expectations I have about the screen that AI will generate for me.
The Designer's Playbook for AI Products The old rules still apply (mostly) Here's something that surprised me: designing for AI isn't as alien as it sounds. The fundamentals (user needs, clear feedback, intuitive flows) don't disappear just because there's a language model involved. If anything, they matter more. When the system can generate unpredictable outputs, your job as a designer is to create enough structure that users don't feel lost.
Most design problems aren't 'design' problems. They're 'Thinking' problems.They're 'Clarity' problems.They're 'Too-many-tabs-open' problems. More prototyping. More pixel-shifting. More polish in Figma alone isn't going to help you with those. For me, without clear thinking, Figma just results in more confusion, more mess, and more mockups than I can mentally manage. The Problem: Figma wasn't the bottleneck - my thinking was
AI is disrupting more than the software industry, and is doing so at a breakneck speed. Not long ago, designers were deep in Figma variables and pixel-perfect mockups. Now, tools like v0, Lovable, and Cursor are enabling instant, vibe-based prototyping that makes old methods feel almost quaint. What's coming into sharper focus isn't fidelity, it's foresight. Part of the work of Product Design today is conceptual: sensing trends, building future-proof systems, and thinking years ahead.
Ulysses was a UX designer - or a "Product Designer," or maybe a "Digital Experience Architect," or a "Product Experience Manager," depending on which day you asked him. Currently, however, he felt more like a Figma monkey. He sat in his Scandinavian designer chair, bathed in the orangey light of a dual-monitor setup (because you gotta filter out that blue light), reading yet another hot take about how AI had rendered his so-called career - which was kind of a joke, anyway - obsolete.
All of these decisions shape how users experience your product or service. And most of them happen without any input from actual users. You do the research. You create the personas. You write the reports. You give the presentations. You even make fancy infographics. And then what happens? The research sits in a shared drive somewhere, slowly gathering digital dust.
Many people in the product community, including myself, actively share their experiences using AI tools to build products. However, far fewer conversations focus on a foundational phase: product research. The quality of product research directly impacts the outcome of the entire design process. As AI tools become increasingly embedded across different phases of the product design process, including the research phase, it's vital to establish a clear, intentional research process that maximizes design efficiency while reducing business risk from poorly informed or incorrect decisions
As designers of interactive products, we are often working with or designing for a specific technology that frames our work and enables interaction between users and systems. Many designers are used to designing for mobile, web, or smart TVs, yet few know how to design with sensors. This is partly because design education tends to focus on aesthetic, usability and ergonomic aspects rather than on the technological dimensions of design or on how designers can treat technology as a design material.
I had a client recently whose biggest issue was that users would get to the product dashboard and just... not know what to do. This is one of the most common problems I see in my consulting work, and it's almost never what the client thinks it is. They assume users need tutorials. They need tooltips. They need a help center with FAQ articles. What they actually need is scaffolding.
It worked so well that every December, if you check your inbox or phone notifications, you're probably flooded with all kinds of "Wrapped" from different companies. Apple, Reddit, Duolingo, YouTube, Discord, Miro, and Monzo are all "borrowing" the concept of Spotify Wrapped to bring delight to their users. You might love these recaps. Or you might roll your eyes and think, "Not another one."
Earlier this month, Strava, the popular fitness-tracking app, released its annual "Year in Sport" wrap-up-a cutesy, animated series of graphics summarizing each user's athletic achievements. But this year, for the first time, Strava made this feature available only to users with subscriptions ($80 per year), rather than making it free to everyone, as it had been historically since the review's debut in 2016.
Accessibility isn't a "nice-to-have" feature it's a fundamental pillar of user experience. For those of us working within the Adobe ecosystem whether you're building responsive modules in Adobe Captivate or designing resources in Illustrator here are the seven non-negotiables for your accessibility checklist. 1. Semantic Heading Structure Think of headings as the skeleton of your course. Screen reader users often "skim" a page by jumping from heading to heading to understand the hierarchy of information.