Does the Double Diamond make sense for AI-enabled teams?by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, For twenty years, the Double Diamond has been our north star. Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver. It's elegant. It's teachable. It's in every junior's UX case study. And it made sense…when it was created. All that upfront research made economic sense when coding was the most expensive part of the process. Better to get it right before handoff because it's expensive for engineering to make changes later. But that was before AI. Before AI, making things was expensive. Every prototype required designers, developers, and hours of work. So we front-loaded everything but the making. We did interviews, we formed insights, we made problem statements, we got stakeholder input, and we checked feasibility with dev. Now, AI tools enable the making to be 10x cheaper and faster. If you can make three coded prototypes in 3 hours, rather than 3 days, do we still use the same process to design? I did a little cost comparison that challenges everything we thought we knew about the Double Diamond.
Until next week! ✌️ |
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7 Tells that a UI is AI-Generated by Jeff Humble Dear Reader, You can see a vibe-coded app from a mile away, if you know what to look for. Here are seven design patterns that scream amateur vibe coder. Learn them, avoid them, and stay above the rising tide of slop, my friends. 1. Neon color palette from IceWhistle If it's vibe-coded, it's gotta be neon. To slop this one up to the max, use 5+ neon colors and never pick a single one to focus. Why AI loves it: Neon-on-dark is overrepresented in...
The brief that keeps changing By Hannah Baker Dear Reader, There’s a particular kind of exhaustion I keep hearing about. It’s not burnout, exactly. It’s not being overworked. It’s something more specific, the feeling of being asked to plan something when the thing you’re planning for keeps shifting underneath you. I’ve been hearing it a lot lately. And more and more, it has AI somewhere in the middle of it. Here’s a version of a situation I keep encountering. Someone is working on two large...
OpenClaw Part 2: The 🦞 didn't replace Claude. It made me laugh instead. by Jeff Humble Dear Designer, In Part 1, I spent €590 on a Mac Mini, two days in Terminal, and $3.14 in API tokens I didn't mean to burn. I ended with a list of seven things I was going to automate with my OpenClaw agent 🦞. I only got to one of them. Getting an AI agent from zero to useful takes longer than any article will tell you. Most of the time since then has gone into figuring out how to make it reliable, not into...