Expert articles about user experience, mobile, Web applications, usability, interaction design and visual design.
A few years ago I wrote about the upcoming shift from canvas-centric image and video editing tools to object-centric ones. At the time it was mostly early demos and research projects hinting at what object-centric editing interfaces could be. Reve's new layout model makes them real. Digital image editing has always been canvas-centric. In Photoshop (used by something like 90% of creative…
Large scale AI models can produce an innumerable variety of output (text, images, code). In most applications, though, teams want very specific output aligned with brand, design, and coding guidelines. An intentional steering layer can not only help but is increasingly needed in software today. When building, and even more-so maintaining, websites and software applications, cohesion matters. A…
There's a growing sentiment that AI lets you do everyone else's job: designers picking up Claude Code, developers spinning up Figma Make. But maybe the most interesting question isn't "what other jobs can I take on?" but "how do I make the thing I do well reach further?" When I instruct a coding agent to write a large chunk of code, I can roughly tell what's happening, but I don't have years of…
Today, AI tools are mostly solo sports. Developers write more code. Designers create more images. PMs crank out more docs. That's cool... but it's more cool to work together. So how does that work with AI? Many AI-driven productivity tools have evolved from chatting with an AI model to guiding the work of agents capable of a lot more than just answers. But when everyone on a team runs their own…
With AI, anyone on a team can generate mockups in minutes. That was never the hard part. The difficult work is, and always has been, maintaining coherency and intention across a product so it works for people, not the other way around. And perhaps unintuitively, everyone making mockups can help. I was recently in a meeting discussing improvements to a specific part of a product. The backend…
About a hundred senior designers and leaders from AI labs, big tech companies, and startups got together in San Francisco last week for the Design Futures Assembly . The public conversation about AI and design tends to live at the extremes: either everything is about to be automated or none of this works and we're killing the planet. The conversation in that room was different. Changing Tools,…
The designer/developer handoff has been with us for years. And even though today's AI tools are dramatically increasing everyone's output, the walls between disciplines haven't changed. So now we're throwing more stuff over the wall, faster. We've been iterating on a different workflow, which Amelia Wattenberger and I demoed at Design Futures Assembly . Most companies have years of cemented…
I recently sat down with Mark Swaine on the UX Institute podcast to talk about where interfaces are heading, what's changing for designers, and why most of the software we use today is still kind of crappy. Here's some of the threads we pulled on. You're Not a Hammer User We don't call carpenters "hammer users." We call them carpenters. We focus on what they make. Yet the tech industry turned…
There's lots of ways to build a website. Most of them involve designers working in one tool, developers working in another, and a painful handoff process somewhere in between. We recently used Intent to design, build and ship a well-crafted website in about three weeks, and the collaboration model that emerged shined a light on how things could (no, should) be. Design First We started the way most…
There's a question that never goes away in design: should designers code? My answer has always been yes. But for a decade or so, the complexity of front-end development made it impractical for most. Thankfully, AI coding agents have reopened the door. Just like a sculptor needs to know how marble chisels, breaks, and buffs, a Web designer should know how CSS, HTML, and Javascript construct…
A couple months ago, I wrote about how design tools are the new design deliverables and built the LukeW Character Maker to illustrate the idea. Since then, people have made over 4,500 characters and I regularly get asked how it stays consistent. I recently updated the image model, error-checking, and prompts, so here's what changed and why. New Image Model Google recently released a new version of…
In my recent Designing AI Products talk, I outlined several of the lessons we've learned building AI-native companies over the past four years. Specifically the patterns that keep proving durable as we speed-run through this evolution of what AI products will ultimately become. I opened by framing something I think is really important: every time there's a major technology platform shift, almost…
As AI products have evolved from models behind the scenes to chat interfaces to agentic systems to agents coordinating other agents, the design question has begun to shift. It used to be about how people interact with AI. Now it's about where and how people fit in. The clearest example of this is in software development. In Anthropic's 2025 data , software developers made up 3% of U.S. workers but…
I’ve always believed in the power of small teams. The start-ups I co-founded never exceeded five employees, yet achieved a lot. With today's technology, even more companies can remain extremely small and be extremely effective. And that's awesome. When Twitter acquired Bagcheck in 2011, Sam (CTO) and I were shipping multiple times a day. We started with a command line interface that let us figure…
As AI products lean more heavily into agentic capabilities, the same design challenges keep surfacing across projects. Here's a look at how we've approached one of these recurring debates: showing the work of agents, or not. An AI product becomes agentic when the model doesn't just respond to a prompt, but plans which tools to use, configures them, and decides its next steps based on the results.…