Free NN/G webinar starting up on YouTube in an hour. Designing filters is a deeper problem then you may realize, and you'll get a framework to help you make great, usable decisions. I'll be moderating the chat, highly recommended! www.youtube.com/live/BfVWcom...

Designing Filters: A 4-Step Framework | NN/G LIVE

YouTube video by NNgroup

youtube.com

What is the role of product/UX design and user research in an agentic workflow? In my first ever write-up for @nngroupux.bsky.social I'm excited to discuss UX-Context Design. Is it the future of UX design and user research? 👇

A reminder that my free agent skills are now available, all designed to help you avoid skill atrophy and maintain accountability for you and your team as you engage in AI-assisted development. Don't imitate, understand! github.com/AnthonyPAlic...

GitHub - AnthonyPAlicea/skills: Skills for Devs Who Want to Understand

Skills for Devs Who Want to Understand. Contribute to AnthonyPAlicea/skills development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

If you want to experiment with AI-assisted dev, do fun side projects! This is my snazzed up version of QBasic Gorillas, a game I played a ton with friends back in the day. Anyone else remember it? gameswithtony.com/gorillas/

This idea that you can now constantly change software based on 'feedback' with no up-front research assumes that users will stick around while you keep changing software under their feet. If people have to constantly re-learn your software, what's keeping them from moving on?

I'm addicted. 18words.com

18 Words - Daily Word Challenge

A fast daily word challenge. Can you survive all 18 words?

18words.com

I used Fable to help me build a daily puzzle game inspired by one of my favorite board games (Vital Lacerda's On Mars). Check out Oppy (in beta): gameswithtony.com/oppy

It's extraordinary to me to watch professional people use AI to generate a three sentence comment in their native language. It takes more effort to prompt the AI to write the comment than it does to write it yourself. And the comment is obviously AI-written. It's sad.

There's a lot of devs who are trying to become product engineers and forward-deployed engineers and will be sent to go talk to users...and have no idea that talking to users, getting them to open up, and not biasing them is a learned skill. For example, contextual inquiry.

Announcing my new agent skill: /de-div It cleans up div soup and helps you author semantic, accessible HTML, working with you when a semantic choice is unclear and generating a report for you to learn from at the end. 👇

If you're familiar with the board game "On Mars" by Vital Lacerda, I've made a daily puzzle homage to it called Oppy. It's in beta, check it out: gameswithtony.com/oppy

Got this nice comment on my new do-i-understand agent skill: "Thanks for this skill — it's genuinely useful, and we got real value from it while adopting it in one of our repos." Running this skill benefits your knowledge and your app security. github.com/AnthonyPAlic...

GitHub - AnthonyPAlicea/skills: Skills for Devs Who Want to Understand

Skills for Devs Who Want to Understand. Contribute to AnthonyPAlicea/skills development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Claude's current favorite words seem to be "gap" and "quietly". I start zoning out whenever I read them now.

Remember when "slop" meant bad food?

I just released my first agent skill: /do-i-understand As a technical educator for many years, I want to maintain my own skill and that of those around me. This agent skill makes sure you understand what you're shipping before you merge it. Here's how it works 👇

"Here's the thing..." <short pithy sentence> "Quietly..." "Nobody..."

If your process is now to make feature requests into tickets and have your agent constantly turn tickets into PRs...with no triage of those feature requests or root cause analysis...you are going to end up with terrible, terrible software.

Devs: in the age of AI you need to differentiate with good user experience, know how to talk to your users, and build product taste and sense...to do that you should be getting familiar with Nielsen Norman Group (if you aren't already). Seriously: www.nngroup.com

Nielsen Norman Group: UX Training, Consulting, & Research

A leader in the user experience field, NN/g conducts groundbreaking research, trains and certifies UX practitioners, and provides UX consulting to clients.

nngroup.com

Zero LLM is an effort to take some time without an LLM. 1) Agree to some time without AI. Do things yourself. 2) Start a session to track your time. 3) When you feel the addictive itch to ask AI for help, go to the site instead. 4) End your session and share with #0llm.

I had this idea. We are using LLMs too much. We need a recalibration sometimes. A bit of time where you agree with yourself to do things manually, keep your skill and your voice. Check out 0llm. If you use it, share it with the hashtag #0llm.

Making content is cheap now. The question is if you have something to say.

A problem with AI output is what we’ll call “effort bias”. Because an output (text, image, video, etc.) looks like things that have historically taken a lot of human effort and thinking, we assume a degree of correctness.

AI has caused a current trend of output over outcomes. That can only last so long.

Words matter. Let's stop calling human evaluation of AI output a "bottleneck." It's human review *tempering* AI output. This isn't holding back a wave of progress, it's stacking sandbags as a storm surge hits.

The current problem is that what everyone is calling product "taste" actually needs to be "experience and training in user research" which most devs don't have.

It's interesting to watch devs who couldn't be bothered to stop making div soup and write accessible HTML suddenly call themselves "product engineers" who worry about the user.

I'm incredibly excited to announce I've joined Nielsen Norman Group (@nngroupux.bsky.social) as a Senior Experience Specialist. I'll be helping shepherd curriculum and content for their new self-paced courses. This role sits at the intersection of my entire career and I couldn't be happier.

I have a huge personal announcement to share next week. I'll be joining an amazing organization in a fantastic role. Stay tuned!

AI can produce faster than humans can evaluate. That gulf is widening, and it's causing burnout, apathy, and missed errors at scale. This isn't a skill problem. It's a design problem. In my new write up, I'm calling it the evaluability gap.👇

Hot take: sometimes it better to do things yourself and not have the AI do it.