Process over product, and better batteries for your rabbit (not that one)

Morning! Welcome to this week’s Whiteboard Roundup.

It’s been a varied week of writing articles, running a few marketing campaigns, facilitating workshops and lots more. I’ve even recorded a little video on LinkedIn to intro one of this week’s articles. I can’t guarantee that I’ll do lots more of that. Not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

Found some interesting articles for you this week. Hope you enjoy it, do leave a comment and give this a like - and even better, share it with your pals.

Cheers.

Tom HaczewskiDirector, The User Story

News

Fix your process, not your product

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I’ll always advocate for process over product if you’re going to focus on fixing one thing. Improving the maturity of your product and UX team is a way to develop evangelism, get better decisions happening in general, and provide for better outcomes through design as a part of the culture.

There’s a great articulation of this concept by Pavel Samsonov of AWS, on UX Collective that I spotted this week. He redesigns and reexplains design critiques as an essential activity of not just the design process but one of the business as a whole that should extend out from the silo of the design team. It’s a brilliant read.

Have a look here.

One design system to rule them all

Brad Frost of Atomic Design fame posed an interesting call-to-arms across the entire design community this week to develop a Global Design System to improve the accessibility and quality of the entire world’s web experience.

Design, for the most part, should be about solving the unsolved problems in the world. It should move a person from where they are now to a desired future end state.

In many instances of endless designs and redesigns worldwide, this isn’t really happening. Solved problems are resolved infinitely for no reason, leading to millions of hours of frankly wasted human effort. Interestingly, AI is making this incredibly visible in many areas. Automating the repetitive grunt work from many jobs has freed up countless hours of human time for other endeavours - to improve products further, have more time for innovation, or actually pursue other things (or have a god-damn break once in a while).

Brad argues that we should eliminate boring work by creating a worldwide design system that frees up our time to spend on more pressing issues.

It feels like what HTML5 and the semantic web were ambitiously hoping, but ultimately failed, to achieve. He also suggests that it should be structured but without aesthetic. It feels very much like an extension or a layer over HTML5.

See what you think. Have a look at the post here.

Better batteries might be on the way

Whether it’s AI, mobile communication or electric vehicles, our current limiting factor appears to be batteries. They take too long to charge, don’t last long enough, are heavy, bulky, and, in some cases, dangerous.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could solve batteries?

Well, it looks like researchers in the States have made a breakthrough new lithium metal battery that can be recharged in minutes, have ten times the capacity of current batteries, and be recharged 6,000 times.

Have a read.

A world-first AI rabbit

It’s the handheld rabbit gadget that you won’t be arrested for playing with in public!

This rather out-there device is an AI-powered, er, thing. It connects to all your favourite services and uses LLM (Large Language Model) to speak and listen, like Chat GPT, and an apparently revolutionary LAM (Large Action Model) to carry out your actions.

For example, you could ask it to order you your favourite pizza - and it will do just that. Advanced understanding, using multiple apps, and actually doing the actions for you as well.

It’s got a scroll wheel and a push-to-talk button for interacting with it, and a little camera so it can look at the world around you too - so it can suggest what recipes you can make by looking in your fridge. Or perhaps whether you look nice today in your outfit.

They have already sold out of their first four batches. It’s one of the most talked about new gadgets out of CES this year, and I’m excited to see how it works - especially at the price point of $199.

I’m only slightly worried that this feels analogous to the Genisys system from one of the Terminator films, but until I see a launch countdown on their homepage, I’ll hold my concerns.

Take a look and preorder one here.

What we’re up to.

🖥️ Creating Sticky Experiences webinar30 Jan, 4pmI’ll be going through the basics of how you can start creating more sticky experiences for users of your product.Sign up here

🖥️ Usability testing for agencies webinar6 Feb, 4pmUsability testing is awesome for everyone, but especially agencies. If you’ve never done it before, come and see why selling this service to your clients could be the best thing you ever did.Sign up here

Other stuff

• 🧠 The Business of Learning25 Jan, 12pmI’ll be heading to Norfolk Network’s next event. If you happen to be there to, do come and say hello!

• 💬 ProductTank Meetup30 Jan, 7pmIf you like product stuff as much as we do, come along to ProductTank on 30 Jan for a nice chat with other product folks.Sign up here

Thanks for reading.

Despite all the stuff that wasn’t in your favour, you did a great job this week.

As you’re here to the end, here’s my thought for the week to leave you on:

See you next time, friends!

Brought to you by Tom Haczewski, director of The User Story. We’re a product strategy, research and UX agency based in Norwich, working with SaaS teams and startups.