Reducing effort is the foundation of delight

Hey folks,

Here are 10 things in the field of UX I recently found interesting:

1. "What if we made it delightful by making it effortless?” Marina Krutchinsky shared 3 approaches (stakeholder safari, cost calculator, and priority flip) to prioritize UX work that fixes the pain before adding the sparkle. Similarly, The Effortless Experience offers practical insights about measuring and improving customer effort."Instead of getting customers to say, 'You exceeded my expectations,' we really ought to be trying to get customers to say, 'You made that easy.’
   
   

2. For those on the job market: Jared Spool provided a comprehensive explanation of why it's such a mess right now."Those who adapt have a much higher chance of nailing their next opportunity faster. UXers who keep trying outdated approaches will likely only experience frustration without getting their desired outcome.” Edward Chechique offered a way to automate 90% of your search, but be mindful and find a way to offset the excessive energy/water consumption that AI requires.
   
   

3. “The more a person uses AI, the less critical thinking they exhibit, researchers find.” Read more insights from a robust mixed-methods study on the use of AI among 650+ UK residents where the effects observed were larger on young people and less on more educated people. Sam Ladner (h/t) put it best: “The future of work may be about mopping up the mistakes of over-reliance on AI.
   
   

4. “Customer interviews and support tickets provide the most comprehensive risk coverage across the value, usability, feasibility, and business viability categories.” If you don’t know where to start with managing risk, try the Feedback Risk Matrix via Aakash Gupta.
   
   

5. On product marketing: Anthony Pierri shared a simple positioning equation that UXers should advocate being a part of filling in (with research). Tim Stoddart provided an important reminder that we should be evolving call to actions into call to outcomes.
   
   

6. Iterations of high-profile resources: Jason Culbertson improved open design docs. Martin Backes offered an approach to run a 4-day design sprint. Michael Wandelmaier shared Dropbox’s new site for its visual identity system.
   
   

7. Explore the importance of hover states with Filipe Nzongo, who examined the UI design details of cursor-based and touch-based interactions with technical-academic rigor. "Hover states should be used sparingly and not be overly complex. They should be designed to be subtle and unobtrusive, and should be tested with users to ensure that they are effective and easy to use.”
   
   

8. The field of UX is emphasizing and wrestling with the idea of craft a lot lately, such as the death of craft, leading with craft, and good taste in design requires a focus on coherence and context. However, UX should equally focus on how AI tools are leaping over the intentional effort behind design craft by offering the giant leap from idea to code. (MiroAI automates sticky notes to prototype, Uizard automates text to prototype, etc.)
   
   

9. Caryn Marooney (former VP Global Comms at Facebook) shared a communications framework for big moments called S.W.I.M. (strategy, why, in action, mistakes). "It is just as important an internal framework
   for action as it is an external framework for communication.”
   
   

10. Recently, I revisited Shape Up by Ryan Singer. It might be worth piloting like Alexdebecker did, who shared lessons learned on Reddit: 1) shaping is hard, include the team in shaping, pause and reprioritize if discussing shape occurs mid-build, and more. See also Micaela Neus’ take on shipping faster with Shape Up.

Thanks for reading!

This newsletter is a free hand-crafted resource for the UX community and beyond. If you like it, browse the archive, subscribe, and consider forwarding it to a friend.

Sincerely,
Gerren