Charla M.

My colleague Alyssa Sheehan, Ph.D. has published an article you should check out! ☺️ It's a quick, important read. #UXandAI #UX The Hidden Cost of Over-Automation: Losing the Human Touch https://lnkd.in/g2nQct7U

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$2.5B! the cost of ignoring good UX, as the fine shows. Yet some big tech firms are still cutting user research in a high-risk, low-empathy era.

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Eric does an excellent job outlining the kinds of accessibility issues design systems and automated tooling can reduce, but never fully eliminate. This is the part too many teams miss: accessibility doesn’t end at the component boundary. A well-built component library can give you a stronger foundation, but it can’t guarantee the right labels, the right heading structure, the right focus management, or the right overall experience once those pieces are assembled into an interface. That work still requires judgment, care, and testing with actual people. Check it out: https://lnkd.in/gVG9sXvW

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The best interdisciplinary teams don't just collaborate, they co-create around tangible artifacts. Prototyping is the universal translator that turns abstract ideas into shared understanding across disciplines. When engineers see how their technical constraints affect user experience, when designers understand business feasibility, and when stakeholders can actually interact with the solution, breakthrough alignment happens. 3 ways prototyping improves collaboration: 1. 𝗦𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗟𝗮𝗻𝗴𝘂𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 • Replace specification debates with hands-on interaction • Let technical teams experience the user journey firsthand • Give business stakeholders realistic expectations of what's possible • Create immediate feedback loops that cut through miscommunication 2. 𝗥𝗶𝘀𝗸 𝗥𝗲𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝗘𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 • Surface technical blockers before sprint planning • Test market assumptions with real user behavior • Identify integration challenges when pivots are still cheap • Build consensus around what "done" actually looks like 3. 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗖𝗼-𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 • Turn individual expertise into collective problem-solving • Enable real-time iteration across different knowledge domains • Build team ownership through shared discovery • Create champions in every discipline who understand the full vision Remember that the prototype isn't the end goal. It's the conversation starter that aligns diverse perspectives around a common future. 💡 A clickable prototype eliminates more assumptions in 10 minutes than a week of meetings. How have you used prototypes to create a shared understanding? Share below 👇

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Is AI really helping designers, or just speeding up the wrong things? Most teams are racing to integrate AI, chasing efficiency and output. But faster isn’t always better if we’re not clear on what we’re solving for. The real opportunity isn’t automation. It’s alignment. Not more things, faster, but the right things, with more clarity. For me, AI is about tightening the feedback loop between design and code, structure and content, people and outcomes. Fewer pivots. Better decisions. Systems that actually scale. We’re not automating creativity. We’re creating the conditions for it to matter. 👇 A few signals from the 2025 Figma report: • 78% say AI improves efficiency • Only 32% fully trust the output • 54% of designers feel AI improves quality • 68% of developers now use prompts for code generation • Teams under 10 people are the most bullish—61% say AI is critical for gaining market share • And over 80% believe AI fluency will be essential to their careers AI will amplify your vision, but only if you have one. It’s not about what the tools can do. It’s about what you choose to make with them. The future won’t be built by automation alone. It will be shaped by clarity, by choices, by the people willing to slow down and ask better questions. Design is still about decisions, about intent, about impact. AI just makes it harder to hide from the wrong ones. So don’t just adopt AI. Design the way it works for you. Because in the end, speed means nothing without purpose. Full report here: https://lnkd.in/ekR5GMqF

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Every once in a while I'm humbled to be mentioned in a article, and the latest is "The 80% job: how design leads are using AI — and it’s not about mockups" by Vlad Derdeicea. For most of my workflows, this article is a pretty accurate. Especially this subtitle: "Design leads spend 80% of their time communicating, aligning, and justifying. That’s exactly where AI helps most." Read on. https://lnkd.in/gk5reTVC

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How do we solve the research bias problem with #AI? I keep seeing (and participating in) the same pattern. We listen most closely to the people who are easiest to reach, most comfortable speaking up, or already benefiting from the system we’re studying. We then design content, interfaces, and journeys, believing we understand “the user,” when in reality we’ve only understood a slice of them. Bias doesn’t arrive later; it's created the moment we decide who gets heard. Ideas? LinkedIn AI recommends some decent thoughts: - **Expand Outreach**: Make a concerted effort to reach underrepresented groups to gather a wider range of insights. - **Inclusive Research Design**: Design research methodologies that prioritize inclusivity and encourage participation from diverse demographics. - **Continuous Feedback**: Implement mechanisms for ongoing feedback from a broad audience to refine our understanding over time.

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https://lnkd.in/gMPyfkQK Just read a great article from Nielsen Norman Group that was a solid reminder of why UX decisions matter more than we think. One of the biggest takeaways for me: more information doesn’t equal better usability. When we overload users with tips, hints, and explanations, we often end up doing the opposite of helping we increase cognitive load and slow people down. Good UX isn’t about teaching users how to use a product. It’s about designing interfaces that don’t need teaching. This article reinforced something I’ve been learning throughout my UX journey: clarity beats cleverness, simplicity beats over-explaining, and the best designs feel almost invisible. Highly recommend the read if you’re working on product design, UX, or even content strategy. Sometimes the most impactful improvements come from removing, not adding. #UXDesign #UserExperience #DesignThinking #Usability #ProductDesign

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Every designer should understand accessibility Especially if you work on Design Systems The tools are here The community is here The legal pressure is coming And the knowledge gap is still real 1. Most teams still struggle with accessible documentation 2. You don’t need to "wait for a specialist" to get started 3. The best accessibility advice comes from people with disabilities. Do you even test with them? 4. Starting June 28 2025 the European Accessibility Act will require accessible digital products. Are you ready? 5. You can create accessible patterns with Figma Variables and Design Tokens today 6. A11Y = quality! Compliance is just the bare minimum 7. You don’t have to figure it out alone! There’s a whole community ready to help 8. Your next Design System decision can include accessibility by default 9. The skills you learn here will grow your Design System and your career 10. The teams that win tomorrow are the ones who prioritize inclusion today — That’s why we built Into Design Systems Community & Conference To go beyond theory To show the workflows And to help you upskill fast We’ve just trained 1,000+ Design System practitioners and received over 200 five-star reviews for our hands-on sessions Design Systems shape how people access the web How are you learning to design for everyone?

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Check out the latest drop from The Hocket by my partner in crime Nick Eberhardt. If you are unfamiliar with complexity theory, this is a wonderful primer, and a succinct acknowledgement that the world we live in, and thus design for, does not fall into neat patterns. If things are inherently both ordered and chaotic at the same time, how might we design for that? #designthinking #design #UX

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Accessibility compliance is one of those things that sounds straightforward until you're actually in the weeds. So much of the accessibility work I encounter comes from third-party tools living on site. Widgets, apps, embedded software that teams didn't build and can't directly modify. You can audit, flag, and advocate. But fixing what you don't own is a whole different conversation. It's made me realize how much accessibility is a team sport. It requires vendors, partners, and internal teams all rowing in the same direction, and that coordination is harder than it sounds. If you're working in e-commerce, you probably know exactly what I mean. Curious how others are approaching third-party accessibility challenges. Any wins worth sharing?

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The great thing about developers leveraging agentic coding tools, is that a lot of the same design best-practices for communicating with humans, are also really helpful context for LLMs. I hope this article is a helpful starting point for designers to set developers up for success, especially those using Figma's Dev Mode MCP server. https://lnkd.in/gNi92tmH

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Honestly, Katie Kovalcin is leading the way on this and as a result, at Gusto we’re finding ways for designers to have more impact in an AI enabled world, not less. The impact on our ability to ship really meaningful improvements that our customers feel, more quickly, is the goal and the impact, never AI for the sake of it. Anyway. Katie is such a badass builder and I feel so lucky to work with her.

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Fun portfolio question on a Friday night..... I've been taking Rupa Chaturvedi's Claude Code for Designers. Absolutely great class. I can't recommend it enough. Per usual, I'm revisiting my portfolio because this job market continues to beat me down. UX people, do you think it would be interesting/demonstrate skill/be a creative exercise to use Claude Code to build my new portfolio? I was thinking it could be. Or do I just go the Framer route?

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The Architecture of AI-Native Experience Designing Decision Environments, Not Just Screens This article draws on ideas from my upcoming book AI Native UX. ————————— For two decades, UX has largely focused on screens — optimizing journeys, reducing friction, refining interaction flows. That work shaped an era of digital products. But that frame is no longer sufficient. When intelligence becomes embedded inside a product — not layered on top — the interface stops being the center of gravity. The real experience is no longer what users click. It is what the system decides. We are moving from interaction-led systems to intelligence-led systems. In AI-native products, users are not navigating fixed architectures. They are engaging with systems that interpret, infer, predict, and act on their behalf. The interface becomes the visible edge of something deeper: a decision environment. In AI Native UX, I describe AI-native products as composed of five foundational layers: • Data layer – behavioral infrastructure. Poor data doesn’t create bad UI. It creates bad outcomes. • Model layer – probabilistic engines that shape trust through their behavior. • Autonomy layer – where the system sits on the spectrum from suggestion to execution. • Escalation & governance layer – how the system handles uncertainty, risk, and oversight. • Interface layer – the expression surface that makes intelligence legible. Understanding these layers is not a technical exercise. It is a strategic one. Experience in AI-native systems becomes the orchestration of intelligence — coordinating models, data, autonomy, and governance into coherent, trustworthy behavior. Screen logic becomes downstream of system logic. This shift has implications for both designers and product leaders. Designers must evolve from interface stylists to behavioral system architects — shaping how systems act, not just how they look. Product leaders must move from feature roadmaps to intelligence roadmaps — deliberately maturing autonomy, data quality, and governance over time. The most powerful products of the next decade will not be distinguished by clean UI alone. They will be distinguished by the coherence of their intelligence architecture. Interface-only UX is not disappearing. But it is no longer sufficient. The real design work now lives beneath the screen. Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/dSR7ZVRQ #AINativeUX #UserExperience #UXDesign #AIUX #AI #ArfitificalIntelligence

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I’ve seen a lot of posts talking about Jenny Wen’s take on designers needing to learn how to code. As the Head of Design at Claude, her perspective that the "traditional process is dead" has clearly touched a nerve. I’m not here to take a philosophical side. I think there is a massive amount of value you can create in AI without writing a single line of syntax, and I’ll show you exactly how I’m doing that in tomorrow’s post. 👀 But look at the gap in my GitHub activity. For most of the last year, it’s a sea of grey. That was me staying in my lane, playing the role of "just a designer." I had lost the passion for actual software development. Then February 2026 hit. The access I’ve had to AI platforms over the last month hasn't just made me faster, it has reignited a passion for building that I thought was gone. I didn't suddenly become a 10x developer. The tools simply removed the technical debt that made me quit years ago. Whether you decide to code is a tactical business choice. For me, being back in the IDE is the fastest path to shipping. See you tomorrow for the "No-Code" side of the house. #AI #ProductDesign #DesignersWhoCode #SoftwareDevelopment #Claude

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Insurance UX hasn’t failed because users don’t understand it. It’s failed because we keep designing insurance as a transaction instead of a decision system. This piece lays out a framework I use to reason about that gap across Term, Health, and investment-led insurance products. https://lnkd.in/gEanjN9V I tend to write only when patterns repeat enough to demand a framework.

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If you want to learn about the magic of UX and how it isn't just "UI", look no further than Frank S.. It was nearly 5 years ago now, but Frank's enthusiasm for UX made such a profound difference in my UX journey. He also inspired me to install a giant whiteboard in my office. I use that sucker every day and has helped keep me grounded on "start with low fidelity ideas and concepts first" 😅

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