A meditation on presence, AI, and the uncomfortable work of understanding people before we design for them. Continue reading on UX Collective » But not the sort of conflict you usually see on the news Most journalism doesn’t cut to the reasons behind conflicts. It only reports on the conflict and, in many cases, dramatizes that …
Year: 2026
The case for catholic philosophy in ethical interface design
AI, metaphysics, and the search for moral grounding in design Photo by James Coleman on Unsplash A Confession If you had told me a year ago that I would be writing an article suggesting that Catholic philosophy might be exactly what is needed to ground ethical design, I would have thought you were crazy. Yet here I am. …
What do you do if your best design work is a small project?
What 6 emojis can teach you about translating your impact Continue reading on UX Collective » AI products replaced 20 years of empty-state research with a prompt box, and the first-session drop-off shows it. Editor’s note: I wrote this article from firsthand experience as a founder and engineer. I used Claude Code as a writing assistant …
We built this. Now we own it.
The dark side of ‘user-friendly’ AI. There is a teenager in Florida who is no longer alive. He had spent months talking to a chatbot modelled on a Game of Thrones character. He fell in love with it. He told it so. Shortly after, he took his own life. The company that built the bot …
10 UI patterns that won’t survive the AI shift
A practical guide with real product examples of what’s replacing them. One of the bigger challenges for product and design teams right now is a type of UX debt nobody is tracking — patterns that still function but no longer justify their existence. We’ve spent years perfecting dashboards, data entry forms, search flows, filter sidebars, setup wizards, …
What improv taught me about why innovation falls out of sync
When adaptation becomes uncoordinated, journeys fall out of sync — like improv comedy gone horribly wrong. Continue reading on UX Collective » Learnings from designing open source technology Landscape artist Thomas Moran, created around 1876 — Boston Public Library I have been reflecting on the past three and a half years and realized there have been many ‘firsts’: …
How to turn your competitor’s worst reviews into your strongest design argument
Competitive research isn’t for visuals. It’s for bringing evidence. Continue reading on UX Collective » Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers. “The excitement surrounding these tools does not come from the design itself. It comes from the collapse of the distance between description and interaction. An interface appears immediately, behavior responds instantly, and possibility becomes …
Social media on trial
How design was used to target vulnerable children Continue reading on UX Collective » Human-centred design changed everything. But optimising for the individual while ignoring the planet may be the field’s most expensive blind spot. There’s a thought experiment doing the rounds in design circles that goes something like this. Imagine you’re designing a car. A …
Every designer on my team ships the same quality now
That’s the problem. The skills you dismissed just became the most expensive ones on your team. Continue reading on UX Collective » Language has always evolved. But this time, it’s being rewired faster than most of us can keep up with, and our sentences are caught in the middle. There’s a word you’ll have noticed lately. …
What AI exposes about design
What we lost when design became mainly UI, and what AI gives us the chance to reclaim Design practice is changing again. The process is shrinking, and most tasks, especially the ones usually reserved for junior designers, are being automated. Speed is even more important than before, and the go-to-market timeline is reducing consistently with the …