📰 3 THINGS TO CHECK OUT
- Our Memorial Day Sale is on now. Through May 28th, experienced designers can take $150 off ALL courses. If you want to level up your skills and make a bigger impact, now is the perfect time to save on the course(s) you've been eyeing, from AI for UX Design to Advanced Figma and more. Use code MEMORIAL26 at checkout to claim your discount.
- New designers and those transitioning into UX or product design can also take $150 off UX Academy Foundations, our beginner-friendly course that prepares students for UX Academy. Click here to claim the discount or use code MEMORIAL26 at checkout.
- Experienced designers looking to sharpen their craft can get $250 off Advanced Design Craft, our most in-depth certification program. Build the visual polish, systems thinking, and judgment to deepen your expertise and advance your career. Claim the discount here or use code MEMORIAL250 at checkout.
Most AI Tools Make Users Faster, But the Best Ones Make Them Better
- Product designer and design technologist Daisy Chen argues that the next challenge in AI UX is designing better relationships between humans and AI systems. As AI becomes more autonomous, designers need to think carefully about trust, oversight, skill retention, and when users should stay actively involved in decision-making.
- Chen outlines a framework for designing human-AI collaboration, including choosing the right level of automation and designing systems that help users grow rather than lose expertise over time. She points to products like Claude and NotebookLM as examples of interfaces that intentionally keep users engaged through transparency, checkpoints, citations, and moments of human judgment.
- As AI products become more agentic, the design challenges shift and require a different approach. If you're interested in learning the frameworks and craft behind great AI products, our Designing AI Products course (launching 5/29) may be the perfect fit. Learn more and enroll here.
- Designer Fund and Foundation Capital’s new AI in Design 2026 report found that AI use among designers has surged dramatically: 91% now use AI weekly for design work, and the average designer uses 7 AI tools regularly, up from 3 in 2025.
- Interestingly, the research shows a higher-than-ever percentage of designers (75%) taking on more product and engineering responsibilities. The report describes designers moving “up a layer,” from producing deliverables to shaping systems.
- "Compared to a few years ago, there’s less focus on narrow specialization and more demand for designers who can navigate ambiguity, connect disciplines, and shape direction."
💜 PORTFOLIO INSPIRATION
UX Academy graduate Ashlyn Palmero, aka, Dash the Designer, brings a strong sense of empathy, community, and visual storytelling to her UX work. Her projects consistently reflect a thoughtful understanding of niche communities and user motivations. In her evo Community Hub redesign, she explored how clearer hierarchy, transparency, and discoverability could strengthen trust around a brand’s community impact efforts. Her website project The Climb Hub draws directly from her passion for climbing, using research-backed data to design a more approachable, social, and encouraging onboarding experience for new climbers. Across her work, Ashlyn demonstrates a strong instinct for designing experiences that feel useful, welcoming, and human.
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Got a portfolio you love that you’d like to share with our audience? Email your suggestions to hello@designlab.com.
💡 INTERESTING STUFF...
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Designers engineer relationships, not simply technology. — John Lee & Katrina See, co-authors, Trust in Automation
🧪 FROM THE LAB
Join Our Info Session on Designing AI Products
The inaugural cohort of Designing AI Products launches on May 29. Earlier this week, course instructor Chris Risdon joined our live webinar to talk about this moment and how designers who learn this new set of considerations will shape the next decade of AI product design.
If you missed the session, you can catch our next one on Tuesday, May 26th at 12pm ET. Register here to attend in person or get the recording.
AI for Visual Design Starts Next Week
One of our most popular courses, AI for Visual Design, launches May 29. Whether you’re a designer, art director, creative, or other professional, this course shows you how to use today’s top AI models to create and scale production-quality images and video. Across four weeks, you'll move beyond generating one-off images and build a repeatable AI-driven design practice you can apply across branding, visual design, and your creative process.
