📰 3 THINGS TO CHECK OUT
Designing With Uncertainty: How AI Changes Product Thinking
- Pratik Joglekar, Senior Product Designer working with HubSpot, argues that one of the most important skills in the AI era is learning to think probabilistically. AI systems don't produce facts—they produce likelihoods, predictions, and confidence scores.
- Instead of asking "Will this work?", designers should ask "How likely is this to work?" and build products that communicate uncertainty, support experimentation, and keep humans involved in high-stakes decisions.
- Learning how to think probabilistically, calibrate trust, and keep humans appropriately involved are all core skills you'll learn in our Designing AI Products course. The next cohort launches July 10.
What the Design Industry Gets Wrong About Good Taste
- Designer, author, and professor Sterlin L. Mosley challenges the claim that in the AI era, taste is the thing that differentiates great design. Mosley argues that refined aesthetics are given too much value and something more important is being missed.
- The real differentiator isn't taste, Mosley says. It's coherence. While taste helps designers curate references and trends, coherence comes from deeply understanding a client's values, audience, and context, then using that understanding to create a visual system that feels inevitable rather than purely attractive.
- "Taste is curatorial; it sorts and selects. Coherence is relational; it listens and translates."
How Wilson Dow Upskilled in AI and Built a Strategy for Adoption
- The design team at creative production agency Wilson Dow recently partnered with Designlab to upskill in AI and build an intentional strategy for AI adoption as a team.
- Through team training in AI for Visual Design, Wilson Dow learned to build production-ready AI workflows and developed a common language for evaluating new tools, discussing tradeoffs, and identifying where AI could meaningfully support their client work.
- "We need to be good stewards of this. We don't want to bring AI into it just for the sake of saying we did. It needs to be smart and intentional."
💜 MENTOR SPOTLIGHT
Longtime UX Academy mentor Elizabeth Morello brings a background spanning fine arts, psychology, graphic design, UX, instructional design, and enterprise SaaS to her mentorship. To date, she's mentored more than 200 Designlab students, helping aspiring designers navigate career transitions, strengthen their portfolios, and build confidence in their craft. Her own career has included designing educational products at Pearson and McGraw-Hill, leading UX work on a large-scale B2B SaaS platform and, more recently, supporting students in WGU's new UX program. What Elizabeth enjoys most about mentoring is meeting students where they are. "Students come to Designlab from all kinds of backgrounds, with different strengths and different challenges, so I try to tailor my mentorship to where each person actually is." While the tools have evolved dramatically, she believes the fundamentals remain unchanged. "Good design and strong user experience are still at the center of everything we do."
💡 INTERESTING STUFF...
- How AI Products are Like Traditional Board Games
- Gen Alpha Requires a Different Design Approach Than Gen Z
- The AI Context Ecosystem
- While Everyone Talks About AI, Design is Gaining Power
Design is art optimized to meet objectives. — Shimon Shmueli, professor, product designer, and strategist
🧪 FROM THE LAB
Running Back Our AI Enablement for Design Teams Webinar
We hosted AI Enablement for Design Teams a few weeks and got a number of requests to run it again for those who couldn't make it. So we're hosting another session on Wednesday, June 24 at 12pm ET. This webinar is for design leaders, design managers, and design ops folks thinking about how to bring AI into their team's workflow. We'll walk through what we've learned working with thousands of designers across 100+ design teams and talk about how Designlab works with teams directly. If you're considering team training (or just trying to figure out what a good AI practice would look like for your team), this is for you. Register here to join live or get the recording.
Save $200 on The AI Product Design Certification
Most designers are learning AI in fragmented, ad hoc ways that don't always translate into meaningful progress. The AI Product Design Certification was created to fix that, combining AI for UX Design, AI Prototyping Camp, Designing AI Products, and (optionally) Vibe Coding into a single program culminating in a portfolio-worthy capstone project. You'll learn both sides of modern AI design: how to use AI effectively throughout your workflow and how to design AI-powered products well. Save $200 when you enroll by June 30. Learn more and get started.
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