Drew Bridewell, CHPC

I built an agent that analyses my website and sends me a report every two weeks.                                                                        First report found 4 issues I had been ignoring for months.                                                                                  One of them meant I had no reliable traffic data at all.                                                                                    Stack: Claude Code, PostHog, Lovable, GitHub.                                                          Full write-up on how I built it and what it found https://lnkd.in/enn9PUQe

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Telemetry and observability. Sounds technical? It is. But it's also deeply relevant for anyone making decisions about product, UX, or performance. I sat down with Andrew Tunall, President & CPO at Embrace, to break it down in layman's terms. If you're into product, design, or just want fewer mysteries in your next release, follow along! Episode drops soon 🎧

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As your business matures its experimentation program, it's important to align on: 👉 what metrics matter most, 👉 how they're defined, and 👉 who owns which ones. Check out the article Jonas Alves (Co-Founder at ABsmartly) shared to learn more about Metric Governance!

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Every DESIGNerd should know this—or learn this. Today’s trivia question is from Debbie Millman’s volume of DESIGNerd questions. Question:  How many design books has Steven Heller written? —10 —200+ —50 —100 Did you know?  In the early 1970’s, Steven Heller was an art director at Screw magazine, a pioneering weekly New York City tabloid, which featured reviews of porn movies, peep shows, erotic massage parlors, brothels, escorts and other local offerings of the adult entertainment industry. Heller described his time at Screw as part of his “growing up underground” era, during which he worked as a teenager and young adult for various counterculture publications in New York City. In 1974, he left Screw to become the youngest art director for The New York Times Op-Ed page, where he subsequently spent 33 years. DESIGNerd is the world’s first and only trivia app where the most influential designers in the world test your knowledge—and share theirs. Download the app on Apple or Google. www.designerd.gobal Follow on @designerd.global

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Miller’s Law People can hold about seven (plus or minus two) items in their working memory. Designers should chunk information and simplify content. #UX #UI #UXD #CUX #HCD #HCI #UserExperience #UserInterface #UserResearch #MillerLaw #UXTips #UXCommunity

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As design leaders, our responsibility with AI is clear: 🔹 Teach teams how to think, not just what to prompt 🔹 Encourage exploration—but demand reasoning 🔹 Protect originality & user empathy 🔹 Build ethics into design decisions AI literacy is now a core design skill. But leadership is about ensuring AI serves users—not shortcuts teams.

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The most expensive pixel on your manufacturing portal isn't your logo. It’s the "Submit RFQ" button. And the user experience leading up to that button is usually disastrous. From a UX perspective, an RFQ isn't just a data entry form. It's a high-stakes handoff between a stressed buyer and a busy estimator. If your UI is vague, the user gets anxious. They skip essential fields. They attach the wrong file formats. Bad UX creates bad data. Bad data kills quote velocity. Stop designing RFQs as if they are internal database intake forms. Design them as a guided user journey. The "Ideal RFQ" experience reduces cognitive load at every step: ✅ Kill the "Single Upload" Button - Don't make them guess what files you need. Use explicit, separate drag-and-drop zones: [Drop 3D STEP File Here] [Drop 2D PDF Print Here] - Guide the action physically on the screen. ✅ Smart Defaults > Empty Fields - If the user is logged in, why are you asking for their shipping address again? - Pre-fill everything you know. Friction is the enemy of conversion. ✅ Contextual Help, Not Tooltips Don't hide critical instructions behind tiny question mark icons. If "Material" is a required field, list common examples right below the input line. Don't make them hunt for instructions. ✅ Visual Status Tracking A generic "Thank You" page after submission is a UX dead end. The user feels dropped. Replace it with a visual timeline: Received > Under Review > Estimating. Give them visual certainty that the baton has been passed. Design for the tired engineer at 4:55 PM who just wants to get this task off their plate without making a mistake. 👇 When was the last time you watched an actual customer try to navigate your RFQ form? #UXDesign #B2B #UserExperience #ProductDesign #Manufacturing #DigitalForms #UI

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Design careers are being reimagined. On Episode 37 of the iNNOVATION Insights Podcast, Lindsay Vincent-Kulper discusses how AI enables new paths for creatives who once lacked access to the tools of the trade. ⚫ Don’t know CAD? AI’s got you. ⚫ Can’t sketch? Just upload a photo. ⚫ Got ideas? Now you’ve got tech to support them. AI is not just accelerating design—it’s rewriting the career roadmap. Watch: https://lnkd.in/g4-K9rpv #FuturePathways #CareerInnovation #DesignTech #iNNOVATIONInsights #FashionCareers

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Terminal Fluency: As AI becomes more central to Designer workflows, I’ve been seeing more questions about whether the terminal is still worth learning. I think it is, terminal is core skill that compounds and unlocks next-level control over agents. Make terminal your second brain with this tmux + vim cheatsheet (or just get started) and keep your hands on the keyboard. https://lnkd.in/eV5bAFhF

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Most redesigns focus on visuals. The meaningful ones focus on systems that aligning design, technology, and user experience into one framework that can scale. I break this down in my latest Forbes Agency Council piece: Design as a System: How Strategy Shapes Every Experience. https://lnkd.in/gekgMZyr

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We are about to repeat the "Google Glass" mistake with AI. History is littered with products that worked perfectly on a technical level but failed miserably on a human level. My partner Nick Eberhardt just published a brilliant breakdown of why this happens. He calls it "The Cassandra Paradox." Coca-Cola had data proving people preferred sweeter soda. They launched New Coke. It flopped. Google had data proving Glass was hands-free and efficient. They launched it. It got banned from bars. Ford had data proving the Pinto met cost targets. It... well, we know how that ended. In every case, the data was correct, but the question was wrong. They optimized for variables (taste, speed, cost) but broke the constants (trust, social norms, safety). We see companies making this exact mistake with AI right now. They are asking, "Can the model do this?" instead of "How will this make the human feel?" Read the full piece below. It’s a masterclass on why design breaks upstream. #AI #UXDesign #ProductStrategy #SystemsThinking

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Why does it feel like designers are more focused on mastering technical workflows and endless AI tools than actually designing?

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Cognitive load is the silent killer of educational XR. XR amplifies sensory input. Without strong UX governance, this leads to disorientation, split attention, and shallow learning. Executive XR strategy must treat cognitive load management as a design KPI—through clear affordances, progressive disclosure, and intentional pacing. References: Sweller et al. (2019). Cognitive Architecture and Instructional Design Makransky et al. (2021). The Cognitive Affective Model of Immersive Learning (CAMIL)

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What if instead of shaping designs in single screens, you could work across multiple at once, building functional, coded, and connected experiences on a single canvas? 👀 Figma

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"the hard work of understanding problems and creating meaningful solutions can't be easily automated away." That's the critical point here, IMO. And I might just take out the word "easily". The hard work of understanding problems and creating meaningful solutions can't be automated away. Consider one of the key insights from the latest DORA report: "AI doesn't fix a team; it amplifies what's already there." AI gives you more of what you have (faster), not more of what you want. So if you aren't effective at gathering insights, understanding problems, defining hypotheses and testing them, and then delivering meaningful, validated solutions, AI isn't going to get you there. If your team is already great at that, then I believe AI tools can augment parts of the process when targeted thoughtfully. This is not new. Some old principles don't die. Garbage in, garbage out. If all you have is a hammer...

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If you’re in the AI space in UX, you better be learning the AI prototyping tools to know what they can and can’t do. Just sayin’.

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𝟴𝟱% 𝗼𝗳 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗴𝗼 𝘁𝗼 𝘄𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲 🧠 Learning and Design Consultant Julie Dirksen breaks down why relevance beats flashy formats every time. Because when people have a reason to actually use what they’re learning, they don’t need “dancing cats and unicorns”. 🎧 New 𝘛𝘢𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘛𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘴 episode out now: https://lnkd.in/dZkdcynk 

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Low vision isn’t an edge case 👀 It’s the majority. When you design for low vision, you’re designing for: 🕶️ People with glasses 📱 People who bump up text size 👵🏽 People whose eyesight changes with age Most folks using “accessibility features” don’t call it that , they call it using their phone. Designing for low vision first: ✨ Improves clarity ✨ Scales across devices ✨ Lifts the whole system for everyone Accessibility isn’t extra. It’s how good design survives real life. #Accessibility #InclusiveDesign #A11y

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