Company acquisition, AI agents as personas, how might things go wrong
Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.
“Three years ago, during the hard Covid lockdown in The Netherlands, the news arrived at our company; we were going to be acquired by a competitor. At that point, my reference to company acquisitions was Meta buying Instagram or movies depicting evil corporations pushing local shops into bankruptcy.
I had no idea how common mergers and acquisitions are all around the world, across many industries. Naturally, questions piled up in my mind: Will I still have a job? Will my colleagues still be around? Will I be replaced by their own designers? Will we lose all the hard work we’ve put to get the product where it was?”
How did a company acquisition feel like for a product designer →
By Teisanu Tudor
Editor picks
- Designing for “how might things go wrong?” →
Anticipating and designing for failure.
By Elvis Hsiao - How to build a legendary park →
Applying UX to transform green spaces.
By Rita Kind-Envy - Gentrified by design →
Reflections on the role of algorithms in creative work.
By Kristina Gushcheva-Keippilä
The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.
Make me think
- Care doesn’t scale →
“We’re pretty limited when it comes to care. In any given moment, you can only really care deeply and individually for one person. There was some pain in that realization.” - The best prompts start as conversations →
“But my breakthroughs with the new technology started when I realized I was thinking about it all wrong. I needed to stop treating AI like a search engine and start treating it like a jam session.” - How did you pick that typeface? →
“I think the most important and difficult thing about being a designer is making decisions. (…) There are around 500,000 fonts available; designers have to choose 2 or 3 for any given project.”
Tools and resources
- Treating AI Agents as personas →
The Agent Computer Interaction era.
By Paz Perez - Can you design it more like Apple? →
Stakeholders’ favorite question and how to respond.
By Andrea Grigsby - Designing errors for workflow automation platforms →
Pushing for more accessible error resolution.
By Rucha Abhyankar
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