Fake care, flappy Figma, the other side of Dev Tools, native?tokens

“The UX profession has an aura of empathy and care for the people who use tech products. Businesses capitalize on this aura without having to entertain it.

Goodness in a product’s design tends to make more sense as a convenient side-effect of a business case. For Twitter, crowd-sourced image descriptions written for free can make a nice data set to sell for machine learning.

If we look at industry-wide examples we can see how intrinsic care replaced with business incentives leads to low-quality black-and-white photocopies of the original ideas. Everything becomes optimized to meet business requirements and any surviving sense of care that remains is there by chance.”

The fake aura of care in UX →

Can you redesign food? →

[Sponsored] Dovetail’s latest video looks at why food needs to be redesigned and the unique approach Vow, the creators of the Mammoth Meatball, are taking to enter the cultured meat market. Outlier by Dovetail celebrates the insights, people, and organizations behind the products and services shaping the future. Subscribe to our newsletter for more.

Editor picks

• The dark side of Figma’s Dev Mode . A cautionary tale of Figma’s latest release.
• Sample size obsession . Stop asking UX researchers to defend their sample size.
• Monetizing Duolingo . How Duolingo pushes users from freemium to premium.

This designer created a playable Flappy Bird using Figma variables →

Make me?think

• How AI can make software more intuitive . “AI is used as a link between the user’s mental model and the product’s conceptual model. Where previously gaps between the two models forced people to adapt to the product’s UI and/or suffer using it, AI now allows us to overcome it more easily.”
• AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born . “Generative AI models are changing the economy of the web, making it cheaper to generate lower-quality content. We’re just beginning to see the effects of these changes.”
• Humility: an essential value . “Humility, a designer’s essential value — that has a nice ring to it. When humility is our guiding light, the path is always open for fulfillment, evolution, connection, and engagement.”

Little gems this?week

The big problem with variables in Figma →

Write more, design less (and better) →

Why do people save their empty Apple boxes? →

Tools and resources

• Accessible overlays aren’t accessible . You can’t solve accessibility with a single line of code.
• Flowbite icons . A collection of 437 free and open-source SVG icons.
• Native design tokens in Figma . A guide to getting started.

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