105 - April '25 edition

Good morning everyone,

It's a rainy and warm Saturday morning in NYC - kinda perfect.

My last email was really critical about AI and overall I stand by that point of view.

I mean, look at this. The people in power are going to do what they can to stay there.

But this week, I want to talk about a couple of things that feel important for designers.

Implications of AI on interfaces
The short version goes like this...

Old World: Client give you images and copy for a poster, the content is fixed, you design a poster and print thousands.

Recent World: Client gives you images and copy for a website that live in a database, the content is fixed for now, but will change regularly. That's fine because screens are infinitely long. So you design something that can be updated to fit the content. The website also needs to fit multiple screen sizes. Your design has to be dynamic, but the boundaries are fairly well known.

New World: There is no database. People are asking computers for things that could be one sentence, a book length, a video, an image, all, none, you don't know. Content is being created in-real-time by request.

What do you design? How do you approach that problem?

My friend Josh and I are working on a problem in this space right now. One thing that we've noticed is how important it is to give people feedback about what the product is doing. Loading states aren't new, but this is different.

Interaction design is doing a lot now. Giving feedback to people about what the computer is doing and what to expect next.

This is a fun read about how current designs for AI products might be getting it wrong. We're taking old software design approaches to a fundamentally new technology - horseless carriages.

And this podcast by the Open AI head of product is really interesting too if you're wondering how they are thinking about designing for this new world. 

A lot of that resonates with me. There are a lot of new challenges to come here. I'm looking forward to sharing more about what we're working on soon :) 

A few weeks ago I took a day to explore a bunch of these AI tools that do 'prompt-to-website/app'.

The summary is that I found Loveable really impressive and useful.

I asked the app to show me a search experience that let me set a date range, location and price for sublets in NYC (think Airbnb). I hit enter and it made something that was really tight.

I kept going for like 3 - 4 hours and by the end I'd got it to build out the front end for a pretty much fully functioning Airbnb type product. The link is live, take a look here.

It's insanely fast to product really good quality front ends that you can use for testing. For anything that is interaction heavy, this is great. You get error states, and interaction feedback for users out of the box and it tacks a few mins.

The reason this is so good is that it's just referencing what is already online. If you look at my link above, it basically mimic's Airbnb, which means you're only going to get things that look like other peoples work. So if you're trying to do something novel, this isn't the tool.

However, in product design and ux, we are often not trying to do novel things. Design patterns are there for a reason and so leveraging them makes sense. For that reason, I can see a place for this in my practice.

If you try it out, let me know what you think.

Nick xx 
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Architectural Digest interviewed Lenny Kravitz at home in Paris. The house is insane. Having your own underground club would be cool I guess. Link

10 years ago, a short haired and baby faced Jamie xx preformed at one of the early Boiler Rooms in London. I rediscovered it recently and loved it. Link

More Jamie, this time 30 mins of him walking through an enormous archive room of records in Paris, talking through a lot of his samples and inspiration. Link

Last night I was trying to explain how old I was by sharing that the first game I ever played on PC (circa 1997) was the Simpsons Cartoon Studio. You could animate short Simpsons episodes. I loved it. It was my first experience creating anything with a PC. And looking back, it wa obviosuly very formative for me. Youtube Link

When people are like, "wow that quote is so expensive", I'm going to show them this. The Computational Complexity of Air Travel Planning. Try designing a search experience for that! PDF Link

Tonight I'm DJ'ing a house party in the city and the challenge I've set myself is to try and play this track. Maybe I'll close with it? Spotify Link