Faster than thinking
First Thing Monday, edition #146
Hey readers,
I’ve been feeling it lately. AI Brain Fry, that is. Total exhaustion after hanging out with the LLMs all day. Glad to know I’m not the only one; HBR just published some data on this. Its a real thing.
Probably my favorite article of the week was by Designing AI Experiences People Actually Use by Buzz Usborne. A fascinating take on how trust, value perception, and cognitive effort are the key forces when designing AI systems. And also, how strange is it that we’re now designing products that ask the user to articulate the outcome before they’ve even started exploring.
But that’s because we’re all still learning the patterns. I know I link to him a lot, but Luke Wroblewski is a key learning source on AI interaction design for me. His latest writing is worth paying attention to.
I also really like this piece about Nouns & Verbs being the foundation of your data model and your mental model. Very OOUX-adjacent thinking and I’m here for it.
And ok, I admit it. I have a design-crush on Andy Allen from Not Boring Software. The Joy of Building Slow is a celebration of going deep and building delightful products, slowly. Two people, five years, having fun and designing beautiful software. Maybe that’s the future we all need.
Speaking of delight, all this talk about taste and craft and polish these days reminds me how much of a buzzword “delight” used to be. I’m bringing it back, with a little piece about it today: Delight in the Age of AI.
This weeks links are here, enjoy.
As we Reach the Feature Event Horizon, our Processes Start to Collapse
The last interface - Will AI agents kill design as we know it?
Thanks for following along.
Ben