AI can’t simulate human research participants yet, but it can help interviewers practice before meeting real users | AI answers can drain users’ cognitive budgets through several kinds of complexity | Let users type distant dates | Simplifying the NASA-TLX instrument for measuring task load | The “why” is the true value of user research | Activity theory recommends designing for the whole job | Filter overload swamps users | Who will hold the “commanding heights” of the AI economy?

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.

By Marcos Eliades and Réginald-Jérome de Mans French tailors have never enjoyed the same recognition as the English or the Italians. England became pre-eminent due to its style setters in royalty and its military preeminence post-Waterloo; t... > Read more

My feed is mostly designers talking about AI, and the temperature of all of it is the same: Something is coming. You need to get out in front of it. You need to be the one doing the changing rather than the one being changed. I don’t disagree with most of the individual advice. But read enough of it in one sitting and what surfaces underneath is competition — ordinary competition, of the kind that has always been there. The worry takes two shapes. Either the client no longer needs a designer, because the tool supplies the design. Or another designer, holding the tool, takes the job you would have had. Both are worth taking seriously. Neither is new. The Permanent Condition There has always been someone faster than me, someone cheaper than me, and someone better than me. This was true the day I started my career and it will be true on the day it ends. It describes a market, not an era. Designers — actually, all in the professional services — have a folk theorem for living with this reality: Fast, cheap, good — pick two. I’ve heard it said and read it written countless times. I’ve said it and written it, too, to win arguments and contracts. Today I got curious about where the saying comes from, and went looking. Nobody knows. The phrase itself gets attributed to something called the Common Law of Business Balance, and from there to John Ruskin — an attribution with no evidence behind it whatsoever. The idea underneath has a slightly better paper trail: an engineer named Martin Barnes drew it as a triangle, with cost, time and quality at the corners, for a project management course in 1969. Even that isn’t an origin. Versions of it were in use by the 1950s, and no one can say who put it that way first. This beaten-to-cliché piece of professional wisdom is a cipher. Which is useful to remember because it’s also, often, wrong. There are as many designers who are fast and cheap and good as there are those who are slow, expensive, and bad. I have worked with some of each. Thinking back on this now, I am surprised that no one ever responded to the “pick two” challenge by saying, “I want all three, I just won’t be getting them from you.” Faster and Cheaper My entire career has been punctuated by tools that sped up production. Desktop publishing collapsed typesetting and layout into something one person could do in an afternoon. Then Photoshop. Then the rest of the Adobe suite, Illustrator and InDesign. Then Sketch. Then Figma. Each one arrived, each one made producing the work materially faster, and each one set off a race to master it before everybody else did. Each of them may have changed what a day at work felt like, but none ended the profession. What makes faster feel dangerous is that we convert it immediately into cheaper, and we do that because most designers price their time. If the work takes four hours instead of twelve, charging the twelve-hour price feels indefensible, and somebody else will happily charge for four. That’s a pricing problem rather than a technology problem, and it’s been the same pricing problem through every acceleration I just listed. A practice that charges for outcomes absorbs a speed increase as margin. A practice that charges for hours absorbs it as a pay cut. As for cheaper, it arrived long before any of this, and it arrived by geography. I work closely with a designer who lives in the Balkans. They are, by some distance, among the most talented people I have ever worked with. They didn’t go to design school. I went to the Rhode Island School of Design, which bought me a credential the marketplace still reads as shine, and I’m clear-eyed about the fact that on the measure that actually matters they aren’t behind me. They can also charge less than I can, because rent where they live isn’t rent where I live. None of that has anything to do with AI. It has been available to every client I have ever had as long as we all had an internet connection. And just in case anyone thinks that professional design competition from overseas is a more recent phenomenon, the first designer I met when I visited Malaysia in 2004 was born and raised in Penang, had no design degree, and had dozens of clients most of whom were headquartered in the United States. He was fast, cheap, and good. That’s why they paid him, rather than someone else. What Better Means There is an objection to what I’ve said so far. I’ll try to put it in its best form rather than a convenient one. Every tool I listed made production faster without making the thing. Desktop publishing didn’t design the page. Photoshop didn’t choose the image. Figma doesn’t know what the product should be. AI, as a design tool, is different in kind, because it produces the artifact. So the comparison to Sketch and Illustrator is a weaker argument than it sounds. I think that objection is right about the tool and wrong about the job. It only holds if the artifact itself is better. Imagine two designers given the same brief — an identity system for the same client. Put the results in front of a panel, blind, with no knowledge of how either came to be. The panel picks a winner. They’re qualified to do it and their reasoning will be sound. Now ask the client which designer they’d hire again. It is by no means a given that the panel and the client will agree. The two answers can fork, and when they do it isn’t because the client has poor taste. The panel is assessing an artifact. The client went through something. They were asked questions nobody had asked them before. They had a position drawn out of them that they couldn’t have articulated on their own. At some point they were told that the thing they wanted was the wrong thing, by somebody who had earned enough credit to say so. None of that is necessarily visible in the file — nor should it be. I wrote recently that expertise is becoming subjective — that where knowledge is cheap, experience is what differentiates. If that’s true, it cuts in both directions. Experience doesn’t only distinguish you; it aligns you with some people and not others. A prospect’s fit with how you’ve worked, what you’ve lived through, and how you talk about it is doing as much work as the expertise itself. Which means there’s no better in the abstract. There’s better, for them. There’s also a posture question here, and it matters more than it looks. To believe that your prospect couldn’t do better than you is a level of audacity that runs counter to how every designer I know actually thinks — and yet it’s close to what we’re advised to project. In a world this populous it’s absurd to imagine you’re the best at anything, and more absurd still to build a public persona on the premise. That advice persists because it works on a seductive technicality: whether or not you believe you’re the best, behaving as though you are turns out to be convincing to other people. Notice who that advice is sold to. We’re the market for it; our clients have never heard of it. Rejecting that is accuracy rather than modesty. The world is too crowded with designers to spend a second ranking yourself among them. Beside the posture, the same feed sells a tempo, and that carries its own irony. All that commentary argues that you should move faster in order to stay ahead. But if experience is the differentiator, speed is the thing eroding it. Going slowly through a problem — getting it wrong, trying it on a real client, finding out — is where the differentiation was built all along. The race is being run on the wrong road, and running it costs you the one you needed. Nobody Asks About Tools When I moved from Sketch to Figma I thought it mattered. I had reasons. I argued about it. Designers I respected stayed on Sketch for years afterward and we all thought the other was wrong. In the end, it didn’t really matter. I know designers who still work primarily in Photoshop. In the last twelve months, I saw a website design produced in Illustrator. Of course I think these are mistakes, bordering on the absurd. But it’s also none of my business, and as far as I can tell it hasn’t cost them a job. Isn’t that interesting? But it makes some sense. After all, nobody has ever asked me what tools I use. Except another designer. I don’t know what this technology does to the profession over twenty years, and I notice that the people who claim to know are usually the ones with something to sell. What I can see from here is smaller and steadier than that. Somebody out there is faster than me. Somebody is cheaper. Somebody is better — that isn’t modesty, it’s the realism that comes from decades in the work, and I have met them. All three have been a phone call away from every client I have ever worked with. Any prospect can have them, faster, and at a cheaper price. But they don’t have me. And they don’t have you.