What if your favorite brand could change its logo, colors, and voice in real time — just for you? Generative branding is turning static identities into living, adaptive systems that evolve with context, mood, and audience. It’s the biggest shift in design since the logo itself — and it’s rewriting what “brand consistency” even means.
What actually goes into a good prompt, and why most advice skips thisIf you’re trying to learn how to write good Figma Make prompts, you’ve probably hit the same wall I did.Most advice stays abstract.Be clear. Add context. Explain intent.None of that helps when you’re staring at an empty prompt box wondering what actually needs to go in there.What’s missing in the industry right now isn’t more frameworks. It’s real examples. Full prompts. End-to-end inputs you can actually read and learn from.By
Hi, I’m Nikki. I run Drop In Research, where I help teams stop launching “meh” and start shipping what customers really need. I write about the conversations that change a roadmap, the questions that shake loose real insight, and the moves that get leadership leaning in. Bring me to your team.Paid subscribers get the power tools: the UXR Tools Bundle with a full year of four top platforms free, plus all my Substack content, and a bangin’ Slack community where you can ask
This article is a sponsored by PenpotImagine that your Penpot file contains a full icon set in addition to the design itself, which uses some but not all of those icons. If you were to ask an AI such as Claude or Gemini to export only the icons that are being used, it wouldn’t be able to do that. It’s not able to interact with Penpot files.However, a Penpot MCP server can. It can perform a handpicked number of operations under set rules and permissions, especially since Penpot has an extensive A
Hi HN,A few months ago we noticed a pattern. Every GTM, product, and marketing team we talked to had the same problem. They were drowning in external data from Reddit, Discord, Slack communities, competitor sites, and social channels. But turning all of that noise into something structured and useful took an enormous amount of time.We watched people spend days copying screenshots into spreadsheets, tagging posts, and checking competitor websites by hand. We were doing the same thing ourselves an
A story from the field: the day safeguarding became realLaptop, phone and book chained together, symbolising safeguarding and data security in user research fieldwork. Source: Pexels.During a discovery project, I was visiting education settings across England to run in‑person research. That meant working inside real-world constraints: safeguarding processes, visitor protocols, staff availability, young people moving through corridors, rooms that suddenly became unavailable, and the constant awar
We have decades of data proving design’s business value. So why do we still lose every budget fight?Generated using MidjourneyI’ve watched it happen too many times. You spend weeks researching, prototyping, testing. The users love it. The data backs it. Then someone in the room says “I don’t like blue” or “my wife thinks this is confusing” and suddenly everything’s back on the table. Design decisions get discarded like they’re optional decorations, not strategic choices backed by evidence.In mos
How researchers can define quality, guide prompts, and shape the value of AI outputs.AI agents, synthetic users, deep research, staying relevant as a UX researcher can feel like a challenge that resets every week. Teams across product, design, and engineering are moving faster than ever, often powered by the same underlying AI technologies. Prompt engineering and system design have quickly become central topics across disciplines, raising a familiar, and uncomfortable, question: where does UX re
Has work felt “different” to you? You show up, do your work, fix what needs fixing, and get the job done, but the excitement isn’t quite the same anymore. Maybe the work has become too routine, or maybe you’ve grown in a way your role hasn’t kept up with. You catch yourself thinking, “I’ve been doing this for years, but where do I go from here?”It’s not always about the burnouts or frustrations. Sometimes it’s just curiosity. You’ve learned a lot, built things, solved problems, and now a small p
I posted Julie here a few days ago as a weekend prototype: an open-source desktop assistant that lives as a tiny overlay and uses your screen as context (instead of copy/paste, tab switching, etc.)Update: I just shipped Julie v1.0, and the big change is that it’s no longer only “answer questions about my screen.” It can now run agents (writing/coding) and a computer-use mode via a CUA toolkit. ((https://tryjulie.vercel.app/))What that means in practice:- General AI assis
Hey HN,I recently built whatstype.org , a free personality test website that helps people explore their thinking, communication, and relationship patterns.Unlike most MBTI-style sites that only give you a short label, Whatstype digs deeper:The test adapts to your responses dynamicallyResults are structured around reasoning style, emotional pattern, and social interactionEach of the 16 personality types includes detailed analysis, strengths, challenges, and real-life adviceNo login, no tracking —
Hi HN,I built this last week after an experience at a bank branch that stuck with me. The rep literally said, “Don’t bother reading it, just scroll to the bottom so the button unlocks.”It hit me how routine and meaningless “consent” has become, not a decision, just a UI step everyone knows they’re supposed to get through.So I made PURE. It looks like a minimal fintech onboarding flow, but the ToS never actually ends. As you scroll, the text starts reacting to you, poking at the whole idea of bli
How writing can help tackle self-confidence issues in designContinue reading on UX Collective »
From chat to canvas to control panel: Understanding natural language interaction patternsFor much of the history of software, users had to build a mental model of the system before they could use it effectively. You learned where things lived like which menu contained which action, which screen held which information, how different parts of the interface connected to each other.Interaction followed a structured pattern: navigate screens by clicking buttons, type into fields, scroll through conte
Curious to hear what approaches people are taking, what the bottlenecks are, and whether anyone here is pushing toward the goal of "AI that understands you, the first time."I've been diving into the gap between benchmark ASR performance and real-world speech. Models like Whisper and Deepgram show impressive >95% accuracy in ideal conditions. But in the wild — accents, noisy environments, emotional speech, code-switching, overlapping speakers — accuracy often drops sharply, ofte
What General Motors figured out in 1924, Apple perfected it with your smartphoneContinue reading on UX Collective »
The next frontier of UX isn’t making everything smoother—it’s making it smarter. Designers who learn to shape friction, not just remove it, will create products that not only work efficiently but also think with us.
The essential (micro) copy rules I used at Google.Continue reading on UX Collective »
Getting to the bottom of why Apple products pair so naturally with SonyContinue reading on UX Collective »
“The medium is the message” — Marshall McLuhanBackground art by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, 1876.Every era of product design on the web brings with it new design tools, these tools change how we design websites and also influences the next generation of design tools to come.I know it seems like a novel idea for some of you reading this, you might think you design the websites you want to design and you’re only limited by your imagination, but you’re only half-right.That’s somewhat true but also you’r