Fake care, flappy Figma, the other side of Dev Tools, native tokens

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.

“The UX profession has an aura of empathy and care for the people who use tech products. Businesses capitalize on this aura without having to entertain it.

Goodness in a product’s design tends to make more sense as a convenient side-effect of a business case. For Twitter, crowd-sourced image descriptions written for free can make a nice data set to sell for machine learning.

If we look at industry-wide examples we can see how intrinsic care replaced with business incentives leads to low-quality black-and-white photocopies of the original ideas. Everything becomes optimized to meet business requirements and any surviving sense of care that remains is there by chance.”

The fake aura of care in UX →
By Stephen Farrugia

Editor picks

• The dark side of Figma’s Dev Mode →
  A cautionary tale of Figma’s latest release.
  By Darren Yeo
• Sample size obsession →
  Stop asking UX researchers to defend their sample size.
  By Chris Liu
• Monetizing Duolingo →
  How Duolingo pushes users from freemium to premium.
  By Rosie Hoggmascall

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and illuminates the path to design mastery and critical thinking. Here’s how we’re boosting stories through our partnership with Medium.

This designer created a playable Flappy Bird using Figma variables →

Make me think

• How AI can make software more intuitive →
  “AI is used as a link between the user’s mental model and the product’s conceptual model. Where previously gaps between the two models forced people to adapt to the product’s UI and/or suffer using it, AI now allows us to overcome it more easily.”
• AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born →
  “Generative AI models are changing the economy of the web, making it cheaper to generate lower-quality content. We’re just beginning to see the effects of these changes.”
• Humility: an essential value →
  “Humility, a designer’s essential value — that has a nice ring to it. When humility is our guiding light, the path is always open for fulfillment, evolution, connection, and engagement.”

Little gems this week

The big problem with variables in Figma →
By Paavan

Write more, design less (and better) →
By Calo Amico

Why do people save their empty Apple boxes? →
By Elvis Hsiao

Tools and resources

• Accessible overlays aren’t accessible →
  You can’t solve accessibility with a single line of code.
  By Camryn Manker
• Flowbite icons →
  A collection of 437 free and open-source SVG icons.
• Native design tokens in Figma →
  A guide to getting started.
  By Lukas Oppermann

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Fake care, flappy Figma, the other side of Dev Tools, native tokens was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.