Turning an oil tanker, 21 UX strategies, body language in AR, Figma rollbacks

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.

“Just as a tanker cannot make sudden movements without causing disruption, organizations are slow to adapt and change due to their size complexity and established structures. Shifting the course of a company requires careful planning, coordination, and patience.

I lead the Momentum Design System team at Cisco where I’ve spent the last three years trying to generate buy-in for a dedicated engineering team. It’s been an uphill battle. There have been lots of times where my arguments have fallen on deaf ears. But, I’ve been patient and continued to push, bringing a voice to my vision of what our design system could become.”

You’re trying to turn an oil tanker →
By Trip Carroll

Editor picks

• The perfectly beautiful imperfection →
  Life in a world obsessed with being polished.
  By Himanshu Bharadwaj
• Onboarding a complex product →
  A case study of Grammarly.
  By Rosie Hoggmascall
• Is your company productwashing? →
  How tech orgs become impostors in the product world.
  By Paolo Lacche

Isocons: carefully crafted isometric icons →

Make me think

• Sketch and AI →
  “We feel strongly that AI should not exploit the work of you or anyone else. We will never consider it in Sketch. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever. Training an AI on your designs, for the benefit of everyone else, is not for us. Not even in an opt-out or opt-in scenario.”
• The intelligence age →
  “With these new abilities, we can have shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable today; in the future, everyone’s lives can be better than anyone’s life is now. Prosperity alone doesn’t necessarily make people happy — there are plenty of miserable rich people — but it would meaningfully improve the lives of people around the world.”
• The deceptive UX pattern you never saw coming →
  “Sneaking exists because it can drive immediate business growth by increasing sales or subscriptions. However, it does so by misleading users, sacrificing transparency, and damaging long-term customer loyalty.”

Little gems this week

What’s next on Figma’s mind? Redesigning design systems →
By Darren Yeo

Body language in AR: Designing socially aware interactions →
By Ruoyong (Eli) Hong

The user experience of developer tools →
By Sara Kaandorp

Tools and resources

• 21 UX strategies to maximize engagement without exploitation →
  Ethical strategies that keep your products engaging.
• Figma scrapes UI3’s floating panels →
  The gaps were distracting.
• Setting up UX office hours in your organization →
  Extend your impact beyond your capacity.

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