Rethinking Your Portfolio in the AI Era

📰 3 THINGS TO CHECK OUT

Rebuilding Your Portfolio for the AI Hiring Market

• In this 90-minute session, Designlab mentor Deb Howell will show attendees how to look at an existing UX case study through an AI-era lens — identifying where AI could meaningfully improve the experience, where it doesn’t belong, and how to communicate the judgment behind those choices.
• Deb is a principal product designer with 20 years of experience across insurance, fintech, healthcare, and staffing. She currently works on AI architecture and blueprint design in insurance and previously designed an agentic staffing copilot at Indeed Flex. She also mentors Designlab’s Designing AI Products course.
• Want Deb to work through your portfolio live? During the event, Deb will use several real portfolio case studies to show how she identifies opportunities to rethink or strengthen them for the AI era. If you’d like yours to be considered, register for the event and email hello@designlab.com with your LinkedIn profile and portfolio. We’ll contact you if your case study is selected.

Why AI Makes the Double Diamond More Important Than Ever

• UX writer Xavier makes the case for revisiting the Double Diamond in the age of AI. When it’s easier to turn an idea into something tangible, teams can be tempted to jump too fast into building before fully understanding the user, the problem, or even the idea.
• That's where the Double Diamond still earns its place. Talking to users, reviewing evidence, and questioning assumptions can change the original idea — or reveal that you should do something else entirely.
• "Most organizations already have more ideas than they can responsibly pursue. The mistake is assuming the value lies in bringing those ideas to life faster."

Information Foraging Theory: Why Users Behave Like Animals

• UX expert Jakob Nielsen discusses information foraging theory, a 30-year-old model that explains how people seek information by weighing potential value against the time and effort required to find it.
• His take: the environment has transformed from the early web to Google to generative AI, but the underlying behavior hasn’t changed. When answers are instant and alternatives nearly effortless to reach, users have even less reason to tolerate low-value experiences.
• “People adapt their information-seeking behavior to maximize the rate of gain of valuable information per unit cost of interaction.”

💜 PORTFOLIO SPOTLIGHT

After more than a decade in apparel, textile, and surface design, Dane Palmieri brings a strong sensitivity to material, structure, and detail into his UX/UI work. What stands out across his portfolio is how he pairs that visual instinct with a research-led approach. For a documentary archive app, user research led him to rethink the experience around curation and discovery rather than just redesigning navigation. For an ethical sourcing website redesign, he translated a relationship-driven business into a clearer digital experience built around the information buyers needed to take action. Across his work, visual refinement supports the system rather than becoming the point of it — a fitting evolution from designing physical experiences to digital ones.

💡 INTERESTING STUFF...

• 5 Rules for Building Your Own Product
• What MCP and Skills Are, and When to Use Each
• When Good Isn't Good Enough
• You Don't Have to Ship it to Everyone

I’m tired of people talking as if there’s one correct version of good taste...not every design has to be for everyone. — Marisa Chentakul, designer and creative technologist

🧪 FROM THE LAB

Last Chance to Join AI Prototyping Camp

The next AI Prototyping Camp cohort launches Monday, September 14, and there are still a few seats left.

Over four fast-paced weeks, you'll dive into two of the leading tools in the space, Figma Make and Lovable, as you learn to rapidly build, test, and refine functional prototypes with AI. Save your seat now.

The course is also part of the AI Product Design Certification, so you can take it on its own or put it toward a broader path for building end-to-end AI product design skills.