Product Design

Ai is going to make business majors out of all of us.

That’s what Design Dept’s Mia Blume argues. Humans can no longer solely “make stuff” in the age of Ai.

Creative teams that are solely focused on quality and craft as their outcome are going to find themselves fighting a losing battle.

It’s true. Maker tasks are already disappearing, but there’s one thing humans will always know better than Ai: Humans.

We’re an wildly erratic, unpredictable bunch. While Ai can help with research and do the boring parts of our job, only humans can make sense of it all and make the right decisions about what to make and how people will react.

Product designers are especially well positioned for this. It’s what the “product” in “product designer” is for. We’re expected to have decent product and business acumen. With Ai eating away at other aspects of our job, now is a good time to lean into the product and business aspects of being a product designer.

Ai will either push us up or push us out. Which one, that’s up to us.

Email Geeks

The Email Markup Consortium released it’s second accessibility report and the results are not good.

99.97% of HTML emails tested contain accessibility issues categorized as “Serious” or “Critical”.

Big yikes.

You can question their data and methods, but suffice to say the overwhelming majority of emails being sent today have major accessibility issues. We can safely say the same about web pages too.

In response, Parcel made a tool that automatically changes an email’s code to make it more accessible. This is exactly the kind of thing that machines should be doing for us. When we don't have to spend as much time making routine design and code adjustments, we can focus on bigger things.

Yes, it’s the same argument from the section above 😉

Parcel’s tool only scratches the surface since it only touches an email’s code and without altering its visual design. I expect more progress will come. I’ll be watching this space.

Climate

After returning from a family vacation in Aruba, I learned the tiny island nation recently took the first steps to amend its constitution to recognize nature as having inherent legal rights to exist and regenerate. If the process is successful, Aruba would join Ecuador as the only countries with such a law.

We don’t need to be politicians to recognize nature in our work. As designers, we can include environmental considerations into the design process. Sandy Dähnert suggests including nature as a stakeholder when creating user journey maps.

For example, if we’re creating a new Ai feature, we could note the energy it takes to train the data modal and the extra processing power required each time the feature runs. Using a template like Sandy’s helps identify areas where we can minimize the environmental footprint of their products. What may have been overlooked before is now visible.

“Without nature, there is no economy, no health and no tourism. If we don’t have those things, there is no Aruba, no us.” - Ursell Arends

It’s same same for us all.

Fun

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