Ōkupe Lagoon
Ōkupe Lagoon
DesignAday
My name is Jack Moffett. I am a UX leader and educator with 20+ years of experience building global design organizations. I post here about design and adjacent topics five days a week. Learn more about me at jackmoffett.com.
Latest posts
The customers, the visitors, the patients, the readers, the guests, whatever you call them—their…
The customers, the visitors, the patients, the readers, the guests, whatever you call them—their experience is what determines the company’s success or failure. So focus first on the overall experience. It’s strategic, not tactical. It’s about the people, not the tool. Focusing on the larger picture first will set a better context in which to work—later—on usability tactics. Mark Hurst
Ultimate Playlist: Road Trip, 16–20
She Drives Like Crazy by “Weird Al” Yankovic Weird Al takes the metaphor out of Fine Young Cannibals’ “She Drives Me Crazy” and replaces it with a terrifyingly literal interpretation. Yankovic later admitted that he had trouble imitating Roland Gift’s unusual vocal style, so he abandoned accuracy and went for a cartoon voice somewhere between Dudley Do-Right and Peter Puma instead. The result is…
Darts in the Dark
One of my product agents recently reported that it had used my design principles but couldn’t invoke the design skills I installed through Impeccable. The skills weren’t registered as available commands, so the agent followed a fallback rule and read their instruction files directly. Now, wait just one minute. Those skills have been installed since the beginning of these projects and are supposed…
North Island Robin
North Island Robin
Right is Wrong and Fast is Slow
One of my recent development loops ended with all of the automated tests passing. That’s actually fairly common, as I have my agentic workflow pretty well sorted. But when I opened the product in a browser, I found that part of the interface was wrong. Actually, that happens frequently as well. Unit tests can’t catch every visual or interaction problem. That’s exactly why my workflow requires…
The role of the designer is that of a good, thoughtful host anticipating the needs of his guests.
The role of the designer is that of a good, thoughtful host anticipating the needs of his guests. Charles Eames
Seeded, Not Settled
One of the more interesting patterns that emerged during my latest milestone involved how my agents make decisions. When a task is created, it often includes a recommendation about which design system components are likely to be needed. The workflow “seeds” an implementation path to give the coding agent a head start, but it’s only a hypothesis. During my last milestone, those seeded…
Breaking What Was Broken
After planning a task, and before implementation, my workflow recommends an AI model based on the task’s complexity. The agent is supposed to compare the recommended model with the one currently active and pause if they don’t match. One of my agents was repeatedly getting that comparison wrong. It would finish implementation and report that it used Sonnet when it should have used Opus, even though…
Bellbird
Bellbird
Complete. Again.
I completed Milestone 26… for the fourth time. The milestone originally contained four tasks. When my workflow agent completes the last task in a milestone, it automatically conducts a review to ensure that all requirements have been met and all tasks have been completed. Of course, while the agents were implementing the work, I was reviewing the output and taking notes on things that needed to be…
Institutional Memory
One of the rituals of Agile development is the retrospective, or retro for short. At the end of a sprint—typically two weeks—the team takes time to discuss what went well and what could improve. There are many different methods of facilitating a retro, all intended to get team members thinking about different parts of the process and recording their observations. From my experience, most teams…
Good News is News
I closed another milestone on the skill mapping app I’ve been building, which means one of my agents ran the full milestone retrospective. It checked the requirements, mapped the completed tasks back to the specification, reviewed the evidence, looked for drift, identified process problems, and recommended any changes that should carry forward into future work. Most of the report was confirmation…
A Model Selection Fable
One of my agents recently recommended using Claude’s Fable, my most expensive model, for nine of its last sixteen development loops. At first, I assumed it was doing some heavy lifting. After all, the gamebook companion is a relatively complicated application. It has combat rules, inventory, save states, dialogs, action menus, and a lot of conditional interaction logic. Maybe the agent really did…
Tūī
Tūī
Token Withdrawal
I was on vacation for a week, and when I got home, I felt like I was behind. Nothing had actually fallen behind. My agents had simply been sitting idle for nine days. No tasks had accumulated. No coworkers were waiting for me. No deadlines had slipped. Still, I was acutely aware that I had paid for a week’s worth of tokens that I hadn’t used. I also knew I had another family trip coming up in a…
…usability is about people and how they understand and use things, not about technology.
…usability is about people and how they understand and use things, not about technology. Steve Krug
DivAIde and Conquer
Maybe it’s just my preference to compartmentalize things and keep them organized, but one of the most effective decisions I’ve made in my agentic product development workflow was to separate workflow management from product implementation. Each of my product agents stays focused on its own application. It plans and implements tasks, reviews the work, updates project documentation, and runs a…
Tell It Like It Is, ChatGPT
I’ve been using Codex to automate some of my job hunting tasks. I built out a workflow that ingests job descriptions, evaluates them against a bunch of criteria and then ranks them in a priority order. It keeps track of what I’ve applied to when, rejections, and so forth. Last week, I had just entered some new positions and noticed that an update was available. So, I hit the Update button. The app…
Kōkako
Kōkako