Latest / The Feed & The Thread / The Feed & The Thread - May 11, 2026

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The Feed & The Thread - May 11, 2026 · The Feed & The Thread

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  AI shrinks customer discovery from months to days. That sounds
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  like a win for speed. But we lose the deep understanding that
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  actually makes products stick.
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  Welcome to The Feed and The Thread, brought to you by
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  Chicago Camps. Leadership By Design is on Thursday and
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  Friday, September 17 and 18 and tickets are available now! And
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  while you're at it, get caught up on UX fundamentals with five
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  minute UX at five emm UX dot com. The Feed & The Thread is
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  available online at feed and thread dot com to submit your
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  delivered right to your pocket.
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  Speed used to be a competitive advantage. Now it's table
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  stakes. And the real question is what you do with the time you
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  save. Gale Robins makes a sharp case at UX Design.cc in
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  "Discovery is the work AI gives back". She argues that most
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  teams treat AI as a productivity tool. That's a mistake.
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  Productivity gains just reset the floor. They don't create
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  advantage. If you use AI to ask the same questions faster, you
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  aren't innovating. You're just accelerating the status quo.
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  Discovery needs to challenge beliefs. It shouldn't just
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  confirm them quicker. Jeff Gothelf sees a similar trap at
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  his blog in "Customer development has an AI problem.".
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  He calls it a denial-of-service attack on discovery. AI
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  compresses timelines by ten times. Students build MVPs in
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  days. But that velocity floods teams with variants. They can't
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  validate them all. The bottleneck isn't the tool. It's
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  judgment. You need discipline to ignore noise. Otherwise, you
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  drown in data without insight. Roman Pichler offers a way out
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  at his blog in "The Product Strategy Framework: A Revised
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  Guide for Product Leaders". His revised framework puts vision as
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  the North Star. Strategy acts as guardrails for the next year.
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  You have to make hard choices. Pick a segment. Pick needs. Say
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  no to other ideas. Strategy isn't about doing everything.
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  It's about defining what matters. Without that focus,
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  speed is just chaos. Other reads today from UX Planet on
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  coding skills, Codrops on emotional design, and CSS-Tricks
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  on scroll accessibility.
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  Today's community chatter feels less like a productivity hack
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  and more like a structural crisis. Over on r/UXDesign,
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  designers are mourning the death of deep focus. The modern
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  workday is fragmented by Slack pings and quick fixes, leaving
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  thirty-minute windows as the new standard for sustained
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  attention. One user noted that blocked-out time is the only
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  defense against this chaos. But another pointed out the harder
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  reality: even if you do the work, your boss might still ask
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  what value you've actually delivered. The tension here's
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  real. We're trading creative depth for perceived busyness.
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  In r/UXResearch, there's a thoughtful look at healthcare
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  UX. Patients forget critical details during appointments
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  because they're trying to reconstruct context from
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  scattered notes and apps. It's like studying for an exam with
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  torn pages. This isn't just a memory problem. It's a design
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  failure to reduce cognitive load when users are stressed. If we
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  can't help them organize their own lives, we haven't solved the
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  problem. Back in r/UXDesign, the role of the designer is
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  shrinking. Product Managers are using AI tools to generate
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  flows, leaving designers to merely execute pre-approved
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  solutions. One commenter advised accepting this power dynamic and
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  focusing on demonstrating tangible outcomes quickly.
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  Another suggested revamping those AI artifacts against
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  proper design processes. The risk is clear. When design
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  becomes just execution, we lose the ability to question the
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  problem itself. Junior designers in r/UI_Design are
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  worried about skipping fundamentals. Relying on AI for
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  speed creates a loop where you can't critique the output
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  because you never learned the basics. It's professional
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  stagnation disguised as efficiency. And in r/UXDesign,
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  clients are rejecting static wireframes. The community says
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  you need to lead with ROI. Show the revenue impact on a single
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  slide. If you can't justify the change, they won't listen.
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  We're saving time with tools, but we're losing the space to
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  think.
• 4:05
  Chicago Camps is hosting Leadership By Design on Thursday
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  & Friday, September 17 & 18. It's an online event, so you can
• 4:11
  join from anywhere in the world! Tickets are free, thanks to the
• 4:15
  generosity of the community! If it's within your budget, you can
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  purchase a general admission ticket for only twenty six
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  dollars - with limited early bird tickets at only fifteen
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  dollars. Get tickets now at Chicago Camps dot org.
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  Gale Robins calls AI a denial of service attack on discovery. She
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  argues we're just accelerating the status quo by asking the
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  same questions faster. That connects directly to Roman
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  Pichler's point about strategy. Speed is now table stakes.
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  Without a vision to act as guardrails, that speed is just
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  chaos. Exactly. But look at the junior designers in r/UI_Design.
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  They're worried about skipping fundamentals. If you rely on AI
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  for speed, you can't critique the output. You lose the ability
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  to judge what's actually good design. It's professional
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  stagnation disguised as efficiency. So the bottleneck
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  isn't the tool. It's judgment. Jeff Gothelf says teams drown in
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  variants because they can't validate them all. We need
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  discipline to ignore the noise. Strategy isn't about doing
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  everything. It's about saying no to ideas that don't fit the
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  vision. I see it differently. Saying no is easy when you have
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  a clear ROI. Clients in r/UXDesign are rejecting static
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  wireframes anyway. They want to see revenue impact. If you can't
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  justify the change, they won't listen. AI gives us the speed to
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  test more, but only if we tie it to business value. That's a
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  fair pivot. But testing more variants without a strategy is
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  still noise. You're just flooding the zone with data. You
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  need the North Star first. Otherwise, you're optimizing for
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  speed, not for the right outcome. Maybe. But I think the
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  opportunity is in the compression. We've ten times the
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  velocity. That means we can fail faster and learn sooner. The
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  risk isn't the speed. It's the lack of a framework to handle
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  that velocity. We need to build that framework now. Velocity
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  without a framework is just expensive noise. True. But
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  velocity with a framework is the only way to survive the next
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  decade.
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  That's The Feed and The Thread for today. We'll catch you next
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  time!