Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga, in their annual The State of UX report:

Despite all the transformations we’re seeing, one thing we know for sure: Design (the craft, the discipline, the science) is not going anywhere. While Design only became a more official profession in the 19th century, the study of how craft can be applied to improve business dates back to the early 1800s. Since then, only one thing has remained constant: how Design is done is completely different decade after decade. The change we’re discussing here is not a revolution, just an evolution. It’s simply a change in how many roles will be needed and what they will entail. “Digital systems, not people, will do much of the craft of (screen-level) interaction design.”

Scary words for the UX design profession as it stares down the coming onslaught of AI. Our industry isn’t the first one to face this—copywriters, illustrators, and stock photographers have already been facing the disruption of their respective crafts. All of these creatives have had to pivot quickly. And so will we.

Teixeira and Braga remind us that “Design is not going anywhere,” and that “how Design is done is completely different decade after decade.”

UX Is a Relatively Young Discipline

If you think about it, the UX design profession has already evolved significantly. When I started in the industry as a graphic designer in the early 1990s, web design wasn’t a thing, much less user experience design. I met my first UX design coworker at marchFIRST, when Chris Noessel and I collaborated on Sega.com. Chris had studied at the influential Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy. If I recall correctly, Chris’ title was information architect as UX designer wasn’t a popular title yet. Regardless, I marveled at how Chris used card sorting with Post-It notes to determine the information architecture of the website. And together we came up with the concept that the website itself would be a game, obvious only to visitors who paid attention. (Alas, that part of the site was never built, as we simply ran out of time. Oh, the dot-com days were fun.)

“User experience” was coined by Don Norman in the mid-1990s. When he joined Apple in 1993, he settled on the title of “user experience architect.” In an email interview with Peter Merholz in 1998, Norman said:

I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual. Since then the term has spread widely, so much so that it is starting to lose its meaning.

As the thirst for all things digital proliferated, design rose to meet the challenge. Design schools started to add interaction design to their curricula, and lots of younger graphic designers were adapting and working on websites. We used the tools we knew—Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop—and added Macromedia Director and Flash as projects allowed.

Director was the tool of choice for those making CD-ROMs in San Francisco’s Multimedia Gulch in the early 1990s. It was an easy transition for designers and developers when the web arrived just a few years later in the dot-com boom.

In a short span of twenty years, designers added many mediums to their growing list: CD-ROMs, websites, WAP sites, responsive websites, mobile apps, tablet apps, web apps, and AR/VR experiences.

Designers have had to understand the limitations of each medium, picking up craft skills, and learning best practices. But I believe, good designers have had one thing remain constant: they know how to connect businesses with their audiences. They’re the translation layer, if you will. (Notice how I have not said how to make things look good.)

From Concept to Product Strategy

Concept. Back then, that’s how I referred to creative strategy. It was drilled into me at design school and in my first job as a designer. Sega.com was a game in and of itself to celebrate gamers and gaming. Pixar.com was a storybook about how Pixar made its movies, emphasizing its storytelling prowess. The Mitsubishi Lancer microsite leaned on the Lancer’s history as a rally car, reminding visitors of its racing heritage. These were all ideas that emotionally connected the brand with the consumer, to lean on what the audience knew to be true and deepened it.

When I designed Pixar.com, I purposefully made the site linear, like a storybook.

Concept was also the currency of creative departments at ad agencies. The classic copywriter and art director pairing came up with different ideas for ads. These ideas aren’t just executions of TV commercials. Instead, they were the messages the brands wanted to convey, in a way that consumers would be open to them.

I would argue that concept is also product strategy. It’s the point of view that drives a product—whether it’s a marketing website, a cryptocurrency mobile app, or a vertical SaaS web app. Great product strategy connects the business with the user and how the product can enrich their lives. Enrichment can come in many forms. It can be as simple as saving users a few minutes of tedium, or transforming an analog process into a digital one, therefore unlocking new possibilities.

UI Is Already a Commodity

In more recent years, with the rise of UI kits, pre-made templates, and design systems like Material UI, the visual design of user interfaces has become a commodity. I call this moment “peak UI”—when fundamental user interface patterns have reached ubiquity, and no new patterns will or should be invented. Users take what they know from one interface and apply that knowledge to new ones. To change that is to break Jakob’s Law and reduce usability. Of course, when new modalities like voice and AI came on the scene, we needed to invent new user interface patterns, but those are few and far between.

And just like how AI-powered coding assistants are generating code based on human-written code, the leading UI software program Figma is training its AI on users’ files. Pretty soon, designers will be able to generate UIs via a prompt. And those generated UIs will be good enough because they’ll follow the patterns users are already familiar with. (Combined with an in-house design system, the feature will be even more useful.)

In one sense, this alleviates having to make yet another select input. Instead, opening up time for more strategic—and IMHO, more fun—challenges.

Three Minds

In today’s technology companies’ squad, aka Spotify model, every squad has a three-headed leadership team consisting of a product manager, a designer, and an engineering or tech lead. This cross-functional leadership team is a direct descendent of the copywriter-art director creative team pioneered by Bill Bernbach in 1960, sparking the so-called “creative revolution” in advertising.

Ads by DDB during the creative revolution of the 1960s. The firm paired copywriters and art directors to create ads centered on a single idea.

When I was at Organic in 2005, we debuted a mantra called, Three Minds.

Great advertising was often created in “pairs”—a copywriter and an art director. In the digital world, the creation process is more complex. Strategists, designers, information architects, media specialists, and technologists must come together to create great experiences. Quite simply, it takes ThreeMinds.

At its most simplistic, PMs own the why; designers, own the what; and engineers own the how. But the creative act is a lot messier than that and the lines aren’t as firm in practice.

The reality is there’s blurriness between each discipline’s area of responsibility. I asked my friend, Byrne Reese, Group Product Manager at RingCentral, about that fuzziness between PMs and designers, and here’s what he had to say:

I have a bias towards letting a PM drive product strategy. But a good product designer will have a strong point of view here, because they will also see the big picture alongside the PM. It is hard for them not to because for them to do their role well, they need to do competitive analysis, they need to talk to customers, they need to understand the market. Given that, they can’t help it but have a point of view on product strategy.

Shawn Smith, a product management and UX consultant, sees product managers owning a bit more of everything, but ultimately reinforces the point that it’s messy:

Product managers cover some of the why (why x is a relevant problem at all, why it’s a priority, etc), often own the what (what’s the solution we plan to pursue), and engage with designers and engineers on the how (how the solution will be built and how it will ultimately manifest).

Rise of the Product Designer

In the last few years, companies have switched from hiring UX designers to hiring product designers.

The Google Trends data here isn’t conclusive, but you can see a slow decline for “UX design” starting in January 2023 and a steady incline for “product design” since 2021. In September 2024, “product design” overtook “UX design.” (The jump at the start of 2022 is due to a change in Google’s data collection system, so look at the relative comparison between the two lines.)

Zooming out, UX design and product design had been neck and neck. But once the zero interest-rate period (ZIRP) era hit and tech companies were flush with cash, there’s a jump in UX design. My theory is because companies could afford to have designers focus on their area of expertise—optimizing user interactions. At around March 2022, when ZIRP was coming to an end and the tech layoffs started, UX design declines while product design rises.

Looking at the jobs posted on LinkedIn at the moment, and you’ll find nearly 70% more product designer job postings than ones for UX designer—1,354 versus 802.

As Christoper K. Wong wrote so succinctly, product design is overtaking UX. Companies are demanding more from their designers.

Design Has Always Been About the Why

Steve Jobs famously once said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Through my schooling and early experiences in the field, I’ve always known this and practiced my craft this way. Being a product designer suits me. (Well, being a designer suits me too, but that’s another post.)

Product design requires us designers to consider more than just the interactions on the screen or the right flows. I wrote earlier that—at its most simplistic—designers own the what. But product designers must also consider why we’re building whatever we’re building.

This dual focus on why and what isn’t new to design. When Charles and Ray Eames created their famous Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman in 1956, they aimed to design a chair that would offer its user respite from the “strains of modern living.” Just a couple of years later, Dieter Rams at Braun, would debut his T3 pocket radio, sparking the transition of music being a group activity to a personal one. The Sony Walkman and Apple iPod are clear direct descendants.

The Eameses and Rams showed us what great designers have always known: our job isn’t just about the surface, or even about how something works. It’s about asking the right questions about why products should exist and how they might enrich people’s lives.

As AI reshapes our profession—just as CD-ROMs, websites, and mobile apps did before—this ability to think strategically about the why becomes even more critical. The tools and techniques will keep changing, just as they have since my days in San Francisco’s Multimedia Gulch in the 1990s. But our core mission stays the same: we’re still that translation layer, creating meaningful connections between businesses and their audiences. That’s what design has always been about, and that’s what it will continue to be.

I recently read a post on Threads in which Stephen Beck wonders why the New York Times needs an external advertising agency when it already has an award-winning agency in-house. You can read the back-and-forth in the thread itself, but I think Nina Alter’s reply sums it up best:

Creatives need to be free to bring new perspectives. Drink other kool-aid. That’s much of the value in agencies.

This all got me thinking about the differences between working in-house and at an agency. As a designer who began my career bouncing from agency to agency before settling in-house, I’ve seen both sides of this debate firsthand. Many of my designer friends have had similar paths. So, I’ll speak from that perspective. It’s biased and probably a little outdated since I haven’t worked at an agency since 2020, and that was one that I owned.

I think the best path for a young designer is to work for agencies at the beginning of their careers. It’s sort of like casually dating when you first start dating. You quickly experience a bunch of different types of people. You figure out what your preferences are. You make mistakes. You learn a lot about your own strengths and weaknesses. And most importantly, you grow. This is all training for eventually settling down and investing in a long-term relationship with a partner.

Playing the Field: Becoming a Swiss Army Knife

My first full-time design job was for Dennis Crowe, a faculty member at CCA (California College of the Arts, fka CCAC, California College of the Arts when I attended there). To this day, he’s still my favorite boss I’ve ever had. He’s the one who taught me that design is design is design. In my four years at Zimmermann Crowe Design, I worked on packaging, retail graphics, retail fixtures, retail store design, brochures, magazine ads, logos and identities, motion graphics, and websites. The clients I got to work on included big brands like Levi’s, Foot Locker, and Nike. But I also worked with local clientele like Bob ’n’ Sheila’s Edit World (a local video editing company), Marin Academy (a local private high school), and the San Francisco International Film Festival.

There was a thrill in walking into the studio and designing for multiple clients with varying sensibilities on their projects. I really had to learn how to flex not only my design aesthetics but also my problem-solving skills.

I’d juggle multiple projects at a time. I might work on a retail fixture for Levi’s, specifying metals and powder coats, while also sketching on a logo for a photo lab.

The reason I left ZCD was that I had learned all that I could and wanted to work on websites. It was 1999 in San Francisco, at the peak of the multimedia Gold Rush. I wanted to be a part of that. So, I joined USWeb/CKS and began working on Levi.com. Despite having designed only two websites by that point in my career—my portfolio site and ZCD’s site—I was hired at a digital agency. To be fair, back then, CKS did a lot of print still; Apple and Kinko’s were both clients, and the firm did all their marketing.

During my tenure at USWeb/CKS (which then became marchFIRST), I worked on digital campaigns for Levi’s—including the main dot-com, microsites, and emails—web stuff for Apple and Sega, website pitches for Harley-Davidson and Toys “R” Us, and Pixar.com. Again, very different aesthetics, approaches, and strategies for each of those brands.

My career in agencies led to more brands, both consumer and B2B. My projects continued to include marketing sites but soon encompassed intranets, digital ads (aka banners), 360-degree advertising campaigns (brand and product launches), videos, owner events and experiences, and applications.

Working in agencies was exceptional training for me to become a generalist and a multipurpose Swiss Army knife.

Agencies: Built for Perfection

The other great thing about working at agencies is the built-in structure. If you’ve watched Mad Men you’ve seen it. On one side is account, or client services. Like Roger Sterling, they ensure the client is happy, but they’re also the voice of the customer internally. They’ll look at the work, put on their client hat, and make sure it’s on strategy and the client will be satisfied. On the other side is creative. Like Don Draper and his merry pranksters, they come up with the ideas. Extrapolate that to today’s world, and it’s just slightly more complicated. Strategy or planning, production, technology, and delivery, i.e., project management, are added to the mix. And if you’re in an ad agency, you also have media. (Harry Crane’s gotta go somewhere!)

As a creative, you must sell your work through a gauntlet of gatekeepers. Not only will your creative higher-ups approve the work—or at least give input—but so will all the other departments, including account. They’ll poke holes in your strategy and force you to consider the details. You’ll go back and iterate and do it all over again. By the time the client sees it, it’s pretty damn near perfect.

Back then, design agencies rarely had retainers and weren’t agencies of record like most advertising shops. The industry soon changed as the stability of being an AoR for a brand meant being able to hire dedicated teams. One hundred percent allocated creatives meant solutions improved through deeper familiarity with the client’s brand. The benefit of the perspective of the agency was still present because of the way they’re organized. Day-to-day designers, copywriters, art directors, project managers, and account managers are dedicated. But as you go up the hierarchy, creative directors, group creative directors, executive creative directors, and their departmental peers are on multiple accounts. They use this more “worldly” perspective to ensure their teams’ output is on trend, following industry best practices, and relevant. When I was GCD at LEVEL Studios, I oversaw design across many Silicon Valley enterprise brands simultaneously—Cisco, NetApp, VMware, and Marvell.

In-House: Go Deeper

Eventually, whether it’s because of age, maturity, wisdom, or just plain exhaustion, I realized agency life is a young person’s game. The familiarity of working on the same brand, talking to the same audience, and solving similar problems is comforting. I’m not alone, as so many friends have ended up at Salesforce, Apple, and Meta.

Agency life is about exploring different creative identities—just like dating. But in-house work lets you go deeper, building a shared creative language with a single partner: your brand.

While I worked for Apple and Pixar in-house for a few years, that was in the middle of my career. I’d soon return to agency life at Razorfish, PJA, and Rosetta. By the time I got to TrueCar, I had done and seen so much. It was easy for me to take on inforgraphics, pitch decks, publications, motion graphics, and more. I built a strong creative team of nine to take on nearly everything except for above-the-line advertising.

That’s not to say there’s nothing new to learn in a marriage—or working in-house. There’s a ton. But it requires the maturity to want play the long game.

It’s about building relationships and the buzzword I keep hearing these days—alignment. Alignment is about influence, selling your work, and building consensus. Instead of the gauntlet of creative gatekeepers I mentioned earlier, being in-house gives you more design and creative authority and ownership, as long as you can convince others of your expertise.

For me, I can. I’ve spent more than half my career in agencies and worked on dozens of brands across hundreds of projects. I’ve seen a lot and done a lot.

Many designers new to UX or product design rely on user research for many decisions. This is what is taught in schools and boot camps. It’s a best practice that should only be used when the answers aren’t obvious. I suppose obviousness is relative. More senior designers who’ve designed a lot will arrive at answers more quickly because they’ve solved similar problems or seen other apps solve similar problems. Velocity is paramount for startups. Testing something obvious, i.e., has been previously solved, slows the business down. Don’t reinvent the wheel.

From Boot Camps to Product Teams

I’m not quite sure what the state of the agency is today. I see a rise in boutique shops but also a consolidation in the large players. Omnicom and IPG have announced a $20 billion merger to compete against Publicis Groupe and WPP. A report from Forrester last year predicted that generative AI might eliminate as many as 30,000 jobs from ad agencies by 2030. So, what are the prospects for young designers who want to work at agencies first? I don’t know, but it might be much harder to get a job than when I was coming up.

Early-career designers can still get agency-like experience in startups or tech companies, where wearing multiple hats provides a crash course in breadth. They’ll have opportunities to level up quickly. But without mentors or structured guidance, the learning curve can be steep.

Breadth and Depth

While I might be stretching this metaphor of short-term versus long-term relationships a bit—and I do apologize—there are other ways of thinking about this. Medical students rotate through many different specialties to get a feel for which one they might want to focus on. Heck, I would argue it’s similar for undeclared college students as well.

There’s value in the shotgun approach when you’re early in your career. (Sorry for mixing my metaphors again!) In the early stages of your career, variety helps you explore. Later, you’ll face a choice: stick with variety or embrace stability. Not that there can’t be variety in being client-side. Of course, that can happen via different product lines, audiences, and even sub-brands. The sandbox will be just a little smaller.

Stephen Beck wasn’t questioning the value of agencies. He wondered why the New York Times would have an external one since they already have an internal one. Agencies give perspective, which you need for brand campaigns. It’s easy for in-house creatives to get sucked into the company’s mission and forget how the outside world sees them. Perspective through breadth is the currency of agencies. In contrast, you get more profound insights via depth by being in-house.

I believe working in both types of organizations is part of a designer’s journey. Dating teaches you breadth and adaptability, while commitment lets you dive deep and create lasting value. The key is knowing when it’s time to shift gears.

I’ve always been a maker at heart—someone who loves to bring ideas to life. When AI exploded, I saw a chance to create something new and meaningful for solo designers. But making Griffin AI was only half the battle…

Birth of an Idea

About a year ago, a few months after GPT-4 was released and took the world by storm, I worked on several AI features at Convex. One was a straightforward email drafting feature but with a twist. We incorporated details we knew about the sender—such as their role and offering—and the email recipient, as well as their role plus info about their company’s industry. To accomplish this, I combined some prompt engineering and data from our data providers, shaping the responses we got from GPT-4.

Playing with this new technology was incredibly fun and eye-opening. And that gave me an idea. Foundational large language models (LLMs) aren’t great yet for factual data retrieval and analysis. But they’re pretty decent at creativity. No, GPT, Claude, or Gemini couldn’t write an Oscar-winning screenplay or win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, but it’s not bad for starter ideas that are good enough for specific use cases. Hold that thought.

I belong to a Facebook group for WordPress developers and designers. From the posts in the group, I could see most members were solopreneurs, with very few having worked at a large agency. From my time at Razorfish, Organic, Rosetta, and others, branding projects always included brand strategy, usually weeks- or months-long endeavors led by brilliant brand or digital strategists. These brand insights and positioning always led to better work and transformed our relationship with the client into a partnership.

So, I saw an opportunity. Harness the power of gen AI to create brand strategies for this target audience. In my mind, this could allow these solo developers and designers to charge a little more money, give their customers more value, and, most of all, act like true partners.

Validating the Problem Space

The prevailing wisdom is to leverage Facebook groups and Reddit forums to perform cheap—free—market research. However, the reality is that good online communities ban this sort of activity. So, even though I had a captive audience, I couldn’t outright ask. The next best thing for me was paid research. I found Pollfish, an online survey platform that could assemble a panel of 100 web developers who own their own businesses. According to the data, there was overwhelming interest in a tool like this.*

Notice the asterisk. We’ll come back to that later on.

I also asked some of my designer and strategist friends who work in branding. They all agreed that there was likely a market for this.

Testing the Theory

I had a vague sense of what the application would be. The cool thing about ChatGPT is that you can bounce ideas back and forth with it as almost a co-creation partner. But you had to know what to ask, which is why prompt engineering skills were developed.

I first tested GPT 3.5’s general knowledge. Did it know about brand strategy? Yes. What about specific books on brand strategy, like Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler? Yes. OK, so the knowledge is in there. I just needed the right prompts to coax out good answers.

I developed a method whereby the prompt reminded GPT of how to come up with the answer and, of course, contained the input from the user about the specific brand.

Through trial and error and burning through a lot of OpenAI credits, I figured out a series of questions and prompts to produce a decent brand strategy document.

I tested this flow with a variety of brands, including real ones I knew and fake ones I’d have GPT imagine.

Designing the MVP

The Core Product

Now that I had the conceptual flow, I had to develop a UI to solicit the answers from the user and have those answers inform subsequent prompts. Everything builds on itself.

I first tried an open chat, just like ChatGPT, but with specific questions. Only issue was I couldn’t limit what the user wrote in the text box.

Early mockup of the chat UI for Griffin AI

AI Prompts as Design

Because the prompts were central to the product design, I decided to add them into my Figma file as part of the flow. In each prompt, I indicated where the user inputs would be injected. Also, most of the answers from the LLM needed to be stored for reuse in later parts of the flow.

AI prompts are indicated directly in the Figma file

Living With Imperfect Design

Knowing that I wanted a freelance developer to help me bring my idea to life, I didn’t want to fuss too much about the app design. So, I settled on using an off-the-shelf design system called Flowbite. I just tweaked the colors and typography and lived with the components as-is.

Building the MVP

Building the app would be out of my depths. When GPT 3.5 first came out, I test-drove it for writing simple Python scripts. But it failed, and I couldn’t figure out a good workflow to get working code. So I gave up. (Of course, fast-forward until now, and gen AI for coding is much better!)

I posted a job on Upwork and interviewed four developers. I chose Geeks of Kolachi, a development agency out of Pakistan. I picked them because they were an agency—meaning they would be a team rather than an individual. Their process included oversight and QA, which I was familiar with working at a tech company.

Working Proof-of-Concept in Six Weeks

In just six weeks, I had a working prototype that I could start testing with real users. My first beta testers were friends who graciously gave me feedback on the chat UI.

Through this early user testing, I found that I needed to change the UI. Users wanted more real estate for the generated content, and the free response feedback text field was simply too open, as users didn’t know what to do next.

So I spent another few weekends redesigning the main chat UI, and then the development team needed another three or four weeks to refactor the interface.

The revised UI gives more room for the main content and allows the user to make their own adjustments.

AI Slop?

As a creative practitioner, I was very sensitive to not developing a tool that would eliminate jobs. The fact is that the brand strategies GPT generated were OK; they were good enough. However, to create a real strategy, a lot more research is required. This would include interviewing prospects, customers, and internal stakeholders, studying the competition, and analyzing market trends.

Griffin AI was a shortcut to producing a brand strategy good enough for a small local or regional business. It was something the WordPress developer could use to inform their website design. However, these businesses would never be able to afford the services of a skilled agency strategist in addition to the logo or website work.

However, the solo designer could charge a little extra for this branding exercise or provide more value in addition to their normal offering.

I spent a lot of time tweaking the prompts and the flow to produce more than decent brand strategies for the likes of Feline Friends Coffee House (cat cafe), WoofWagon Grooming (mobile pet wash), and Dice & Duels (board game store).

Beyond the Core Product

While the core product was good enough for an MVP, I wanted to figure out a valuable feature to justify monthly recurring revenue, aka a subscription. LLMs are pretty good at mimicking voice and tone if you give it enough direction. Therefore I decided to include copywriting as a feature, but writing based on a brand voice created after a brand strategy has been developed. ChatGPT isn’t primed to write in a consistent voice, but it can with the right prompting and context.

Screenshots of the Griffin AI marketing site

Beyond those two features, I also had to build ancillary app services like billing, administration, onboarding, tutorials, and help docs. I had to extend the branding and come up with a marketing website. All this ate up weeks more time.

Failure to Launch

They say the last 20% takes 80% of the time, or something like that. And it’s true. The stuff beyond the core features just took a lot to perfect. While the dev team was building and fixing bugs, I was on Reddit, trying to gather leads to check out the app in its beta state.

Griffin AI finally launched in mid-June. I made announcements on my social media accounts. Some friends congratulated me and even checked out the app a little. But my agency and tech company friends weren’t the target audience. No, my ideal customer was in that WordPress developers Facebook group where I couldn’t do any self-promotion.

I continued to talk about it on Reddit and everywhere I could. But the app never gained traction. I wasn’t savvy enough to build momentum and launch on ProductHunt. The Summer Olympics in Paris happened. Football season started. The Dodgers won the World Series. And I got all but one sale.

When I told this customer that I was going to shut down the app, he replied, “I enjoyed using the app, and it helped me brief my client on a project I’m working on.” Yup, that was the idea! But not enough people knew about it or thought it was worthwhile to keep it going.

Lessons Learned

I’m shutting Griffin AI down, but I’m not too broken up about it. For me, I learned a lot and that’s all that matters. Call it paying tuition into the school of life.

When I perform a post-mortem on why it didn’t take off, I can point to a few things.

I’m a maker, not a seller.

I absolutely love making and building. And I think I’m not too bad at it. But I hate the actual process of marketing and selling. I believe that had I poured more time and money into getting the word out, I could have attracted more customers. Maybe.

Don’t rely on survey data.

Remember the asterisk? The Pollfish data that showed interest in a product like this? Well, I wonder if this was a good panel at all. In the verbatims, some comments didn’t sound like these respondents were US-based, business owners, or taking the survey seriously. Comments like “i extremely love griffin al for many more research” and “this is a much-needed assistant for my work.” Instead of survey data with a suspect panel, I need to do more first-hand research before jumping into it.

AI moves really fast.

AI has been a rocket ship this past year-and-a-half. Keeping up with the changes and new capabilities is brutal as a side hustle and as a non-engineer. While I thought there might be a market for a specialized AI tool like Griffin, I think people are satisfied enough with a horizontal app like ChatGPT. To break through, you’d have to do something very different. I think Cursor and Replit might be onto something.

I still like making things, and I’ll always be a tinkerer. But maybe next time, I’ll be a little more aware of my limitations and either push past them or find collaborators who can augment my skills.

Apple finally launched its Vision Pro “spatial computing” device in early February. We immediately saw TikTok memes of influencers being ridiculous. I wrote about my hope for the Apple Vision Pro back in June 2023, when it was first announced. When preorders opened for Vision Pro in January, I told myself I wouldn’t buy it. I couldn’t justify the $3,500 price tag. Out of morbid curiosity, I would lurk in the AVP subreddits to live vicariously through those who did take the plunge.

After about a month of reading all the positives from users about the device, I impulsively bought an Apple Vision Pro. I placed my order online at noon and picked it up just two hours later at an Apple Store near me.

Many great articles and YouTube videos have already been produced, so this post won’t be a top-to-bottom review of the Apple Vision Pro. Instead, I’ll try to frame it from my standpoint as someone who has designed user experiences for VR. 

Welcome to the Era of Spatial Computing

Augmented reality, mixed reality, or spatial computing—as Apple calls it—on a “consumer” device is pretty new. You could argue that Microsoft HoloLens did it first, but that didn’t generate the same cultural currency as AVP has, and the HoloLens line has been relegated to industrial applications. The Meta Quest 3, launched last October, also has a passthrough camera, but they don’t market the feature; it’s still sold as a purely virtual reality headset.

Vision Pro Home Screen in my messy home office.

Putting on Vision Pro for the first time is pretty magical. I saw the world around me—though a slightly muted and grainy version of my reality—and I saw UI floating and pinned to reality. Unlike any other headset I’ve tried, there is no screen door effect. I couldn’t see the pixels. It’s genuinely a retina display just millimeters away from my actual retinas. 

The UI is bright, vibrant, and crisp in the display. After launching a weather app from the home “screen” and positioning it on a wall, it stays exactly where it is in my living room. As I move closer to the app, everything about the app remains super sharp. It’s like diving into a UI. 

The visionOS User Interface

The visionOS UI feels very much like an extension of macOS. There’s a lot of translucency, blurred backgrounds for a frosted glass effect, and rounded corners. The controls for moving, closing, and resizing a window feel very natural. There were times when I wished I could rotate a window on its Y-axis to face me better, but that wasn’t possible. 

Admittedly, I didn’t turn on the accessibility feature. But as is, a significant issue that the UI presents is contrast. As someone with no accessibility issues, it was hard to tell half the time when something was highlighted. I would often have to look at another UI component and then back again to make sure a button was actually highlighted.

When you launch a Vision Pro app, it is placed right in front of you. For example, I would look at the Photos app, then click the Digital Crown (the dial for immersion) to bring up the Home Screen, which is then overlaid on top of the app. The background app does get fainter, and I can tell that the new screen is on top of Photos. Launching the Apple TV app from there would bring up the TV window on top of Photos, and I would run into issues where the handles for the windows are really close together, making it difficult to select the right one with my eyes so I can move it.

Window management, in general, is a mess. First of all, there is none. There’s no minimizing of windows; I would have to move them out of the way. There’s no collecting of windows. For instance, I couldn’t set up a workspace with the apps in the right place, collapse them all, and bring them with me to another room in my house. I would have to close them all, reopen them, and reposition them in the new room.

Working in Apple Vision Pro

I was excited to try the Mac Virtual Display feature, where you can see your Mac’s screen inside Vision Pro. Turning this on is intuitive. A “Connect” button appeared just above my MacBook Pro when I looked at it.

The Mac’s screen blacks out, and a large screen inside Vision Pro appears. I could resize it, move it around, and position it exactly where I wanted it. Everything about this virtual screen was crisp, but I ran into issues.

First, I’m a pretty good typist but cannot touch-type. With the Mac Virtual Display, I need to look down at my keyboard every few seconds. The passthrough camera on the headset is great but not perfect. There is some warping of reality on the edges, and that was just enough to cause a little motion sickness.

Second, when I’m sitting at my desk, I’m used to working with dual monitors. I usually have email or comms software on the smaller laptop screen while I work in Figma, Illustrator, or Photoshop on my larger 5K Apple Studio Display. If I sit at my desk and turn on Mac Virtual Display, I also lose my Studio Display. Only one virtual display shows up in Vision Pro. 

I tried to mitigate the lost space by opening Messages, Spark Email (the iPad version), and Fantastical in Vision Pro and placing those apps around me. But I found switching from my Mac to these other apps cumbersome. I’d have to stop using my mouse and use my fingers instead when I looked at Spark. I found that keyboard focus depended on where my eyes were looking. For example, if I were reading an email in Spark but needed to look at my keyboard to find the “E” key to archive that email, if I pressed the key before my eyes were back in the Spark window, that E would go to whatever app my eyes happened to cross. In other words, my eyes are my cursor, which takes a while to get used to.

Spatial Computing 1.0

It is only the first version of visionOS (currently 1.1). I expect many of these issues, like window management, eye tracking and input confusion, and contrast, to improve in the coming years. 

Native visionOS Apps

In many ways, Apple has been telegraphing what they want to achieve with Vision Pro for years. Apple’s API for augmented reality, ARKit, was released way back in June 2017, a full six years before Vision Pro was unveiled. Some of the early AR apps for Vision Pro are cool tech demos.

There’s a jet engine in my living room!

The JigSpace app plunks real-world objects into your living room. I pulled up a working jet engine and was able to peel away the layers to see how it worked. There’s even a Formula 1 race car that you can load into your environment.

The Super Fruit Ninja game was fun. I turned my living room into a fruit-splattered dojo. I could even launch throwing stars from my hands that would get stuck on my walls.

That’s half a floor plan on top of a low-resolution 360° photo.

Some Vision Pro apps were rushed out the door and are just awful. The Zillow Immerse app is one of them. I found the app glitchy and all the immersive house tours very low-quality. The problem is that the environments that ship with Vision Pro are so high-resolution and detailed that anything short of that is jarringly inferior. 

UX Considerations in Vision Pro

Apple Vision Pro can run iPad apps, at least the ones where the developer has enabled the capability. However, I found that many of the touch targets in iPad apps were not sufficient. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines specify that hit targets should be at least 44x44 pts. But if opened in Vision Pro, that’s not enough. For visionOS, Apple recommends controls’ centers be at least 60 pts apart. 

I would further recommend that controls for visionOS apps should have large targets. In Apple’s own Photos app, in the left sidebar, only the accordion arrow is a control. Looking at and selecting the accordion label like “Spatial” or “Selfies” does not work. I had to look to the right of the label, to the arrow in order to select the item. Not great.

Eye and hand tracking in Vision Pro are excellent, although not perfect. There were many times when I couldn’t get the device to register my pinch gesture or get my eyes to a point in a window to resize it.

Some apps take advantage of additional gestures like pinching with both hands and then pulling them apart to resize something. I do believe that more standard gestures need to be introduced in the future for visionOS.

Steve Jobs famously once said, “God gave us ten styluses. Let’s not invent another.” Apple eventually introduced the Pencil for iPad. I think for many applications and for users to be productive with them, Apple will have to introduce a controller.

IMAX in My Bedroom

The single most compelling use case for Apple Vision Pro right now is consuming video content, specifically movies and TV shows. The built-in speakers, which Apple calls audio pods, sound fantastic. Apple has been doing a lot of work in Spatial Audio over the years and I experienced really great surround sound in the Vision Pro. The three apps that currently stand out for video entertainment are IMAX, Disney Plus, and Apple TV. 

Watching content in the IMAX —only a couple of trailers were free—reminded me of the best IMAX screen I’ve ever been to, which is the one in the Metreon in San Francisco. The screen is floor-to-ceiling high with a curved railing in front of it. On either side is a backlit IMAX logo, and I could choose from a few different positions in the theater!

Watching a Star Wars movie on Tatooine.

Disney leverages its IP very well by giving us various sets to watch their content. I could watch Avengers: End Game from Avengers Tower, Monsters, Inc. from the scare floor, or The Empire Strikes Back from Luke’s land speeder on Tatooine. 

With Apple TV, I could watch Masters of the Air in a window in my space or go into an immersive environment. Whether it’s lakeside looking towards Mount Hood, on the surface of the moon, or in a discrete movie theater, the content was the star. My wife goes to sleep before me, and I usually put on my AirPods and watch something on my iPad. With Vision Pro, I could be much more engrossed in the show because the screen is as big as my room.

From the Apple commercial “First Timer”

I rewatched Dune from 2021 and was blown away by the audio quality of my AirPods Pro. The movie has incredible sound and uses bass and sub-bass frequencies a lot, so I was surprised at how well the AirPods performed. Of course, I didn’t feel the bass rumble in my chest, but I could certainly hear it in my ears.

Vision Pro Industrial Design

The Vision Pro hardware is gorgeous.

As many others have pointed out, the hardware is incredible. It feels very premium and is a technological marvel. The cool-looking Solo Knit Band works pretty well for me, but everyone’s heads are so different that your mileage may vary. Everyone’s face is also very different, and Apple uses the Face ID scanner on the iPhone to scan your face when you order it. This determines the exact light seal they’ll include with your Vision Pro.

There are 28 different models of light seals. Finding the right light seal to fit my face wasn’t as easy as taking the recommendation from the scan. When I went to pick it up, I opted for a fitting, but the 21W that was suggested didn’t feel comfortable. I tried a couple of other light seal sizes and settled on the most comfortable one. But at home, the device was still very uncomfortable. I couldn’t wear it for more than 10 minutes without feeling a lot of pressure on my cheeks.

The next day, I returned to the Apple Store and tried three or four more light seal and headband combinations. But once dialed in, the headset was comfortable enough for me to watch an hour-long TV show.

I wonder why Apple didn’t try to develop a method that requires less variation. Wouldn’t some memory foam cushioned light seal work?

Apple’s Ambitions

The Apple Vision Pro is an audacious device, and I can tell where they want to go, but they don’t yet have the technology to get there. They want to make AR glasses with crystal-clear, super-sharp graphics that can then be converted to immersive VR with the flick of a dial.

That’s why EyeSight, the screen on the front of the headset, allows people in the surrounding area to see the user’s eyes. The device also has a passthrough camera, allowing the user to see out. Together, these two features allow Vision Pro to act as a clear two-way lens.

But Apple seems to want both AR and VR in the same device. I would argue that it might be physically impossible. Imagine an Apple device more like the HoloLens, where they are truly glasses with imagery projected onto them. That eliminates the smaller-than-their-competitors’ field of vision, or FOV. That would eliminate the ridiculous fitting conundrum as the glasses could float in front of your eyes. And that would probably reduce the device’s weight, which has been discussed at length in many reviews.

And then, for VR, maybe there’s a conversion that could happen with the AR glasses. A dial could turn the glasses from transparent to opaque. Then, the user would snap on a light-blocking attachment (a light seal). I believe that would be a perfectly acceptable tradeoff.

What $3,500 Buys You

In 1985, when I was 12 years old, I badgered my father daily to buy me a Macintosh computer. I had seen it at ComputerLand, a computer shop on Van Ness Avenue. I would go multiple times per week after school just to mess around with the display unit. I was enamored with MacPaint.

After I don’t know how many months, my dad relented and bought me a Macintosh 512K. The retail cost of the machine in 1985 was $2,795, equivalent to $8,000 in 2024 dollars. That’s a considerable investment for a working-class immigrant family. But my wise father knew then that computers were the future. And he was right.

With my Mac, I drew illustrations in MacPaint, wrote all my school essays in MacWrite, and made my first program in HyperCard. Eventually, I upgraded to other Macs and got exposed to and honed my skills in Photoshop and Illustrator, which would help my graphic design career. I designed my first application icon when I was a senior in high school.

Of course, computers are much cheaper today. The $999 entry model MacBook Air is able to do what my Mac 512K did and so much more. A kid today armed with a MacBook Air could learn so much!

Which brings us to the price tag of the Apple Vision Pro. It starts at $3,499. For a device where you can’t—at least for now—do much but consume. This was an argument against iPad for the longest time: it is primarily a consumption device. Apple went so far as to create a TV spot showing how a group of students use an iPad to complete a school project. With an iPad, there is a lot of creation that can happen. There are apps for drawing, 3D sculpting, video editing, writing, brainstorming, and more. It is more than a consumption device.

More than a Consumption Device? Not So Fast.

For Vision Pro, today, I’m not so sure. The obvious use case is 3D modeling and animation. Already, someone is figuring out how to visualize 3D models from Blender in AVP space. It’s tied to the instance of Blender running on his Mac, though, isn’t it? 3D modeling and animation software is notoriously complicated. The UI for Cinema 4D, the 3D software that I know best, has so many options and commands and so many keyboard shortcuts and combinations that it would be impossible to replicate in visionOS. Or take simpler apps like Final Cut Pro or Photoshop. Both have iPad apps, but a combination of the keyboard and mouse can make a user so much more productive. Imagine having to look at precisely the right UI element in Vision Pro, then pinch at exactly the right thing in a dense interface like Final Cut Pro. It would be a nightmare.

Being creative with djay in Apple Vision Pro

I do think that creative apps will eventually find their way to the platform. One of the launch apps is djay, the DJing app, of course. But it will take some time to figure out.

Beyond that, could a developer use Vision Pro to program in? If we look to the iPadOS ecosystem there are a handful of apps to write code. But there is no way to check your code, at least not natively. Erik Bledsoe from Coder writes, “The biggest hurdle to using an iPad for coding is its lack of a runtime environment for most languages, forcing you to move your files to a server for compiling and testing.” The workaround is to use a cloud-based IDE in the browser like Coder. I imagine that the same limitations will apply to Vision Pro.

The Bottom Line

For $3,500, you could buy a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M3 Pro chip and an iPhone 15 Pro. Arguably, this would be a much more productive setup. With the Mac, you’d have access to tens of thousands of apps, many for professional applications. With the iPhone, there are nearly five million apps in the App Store.

In other words, I don’t believe buying an Apple Vision Pro today would open a new world up for a teenager. It might be cool and a little inspirational, but it won’t help the creator inside them. It won’t do what the Mac 512K did for me back in 1985.

Vision Pro’s Future

Clearly, the Apple Vision Pro released in 2024 is a first generation product. Just like the first-gen Apple Watch, Apple and its customers will need to feel their collective way and figure out all the right use cases. We can look to the Meta Quest 3 and Microsoft HoloLens 2 to give us a glimpse.

As much as people were marveling at the AR vacuum cleaning game for Vision Pro, AR and VR apps have existed for a while. PianoVision for Meta Quest 3 combines your real piano or keyboard with a Guitar Hero-like game to teach you how to play. The industrial applications for HoloLens make a lot of sense.

Now that Apple is overtly out of the closet in the AR/VR game, developers will show great enthusiasm and investment in the space. At least on Reddit, there’s a lot of excitement from users and developers. We will have to see if the momentum lasts. The key for the developers will be the size of the market. Will there be enough Vision Pro users to sustain a thriving app ecosystem?

As for me, I decided to return my Vision Pro within the 14-day return window. The only real use case for me was the consumption of media, which I couldn’t justify spending $3,500 for a room-sized TV that only I could watch. Sign me up for version 2, though.

We communicate in stories. Storytelling has been around as long as our species has existed. From paintings on cave walls in Lascaux, to hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt, to radio dramas like “War of the Worlds” that cause city-wide panic, to the fantastical Game of Thrones television series on HBO, stories impart culture, history, information, and ideas. Stories are primal so we are receptive to them, and we remember them.

Today when we think of storytelling, we think of our modern day’s Golden Age of Television or the Marvel Cinematic Universe (“MCU”) movies. Comic-Con in San Diego is the Mecca of pop culture storytelling, and this year brought an estimated 135,000 fans from over 80 countries. Attendees packed over 2,000 panels and screenings and lined up for more than 250 autograph events from their favorite actors, writers, and artists. Fans lined up for hours, often overnight, for a chance to get into the infamous 6,500-seat Hall H where they were able to get a glimpse of their favorite star talking about their latest film or TV project. Many came to the con dressed as their favorite characters, often constructing their own elaborate costumes. That is fandom, otherwise known as brand loyalty.

What lessons for design and branding can we learn from Comic-Con and its pilgrimage of rabid fans? Storytelling has power, and design is storytelling.

In this article we’ll take the primary elements of storytelling and apply them to design, namely branding, marketing, and product design:

1. Worldbuilding: Where does the story take place?
2. Main characters: Who are the people we’ll care about?
3. The plot: What will happen in the story?​

PANTONE Colors and Worldbuilding

Stories have to exist in a self-contained universe, one that follows its own defined rules. Sometimes that world is familiar, reflecting our reality, and other times the environment is foreign, futuristic, or magical.

In Star Trek, transporter technology allows the teleportation of a person or thing from one place to another.

Internal logic is essential to building a believable world. In other words, it’s about defining the rules and consistently following them. For instance in the Star Trek universe, transporter technology exists—being able to teleport a person or thing from one place to another—but there are rules around its use. It has a limited range, i.e. you can’t beam a person from one end of the galaxy to the other; it cannot be used to or from warp-moving vehicles; and there are certain materials the technology cannot penetrate. And while there are faster-than-light-traveling vehicles in the show and aliens with extra capabilities, humans remain human and don’t have any extraordinary abilities.

I believe that branding, specifically brand identity is the world a brand builds for its customers to live in.

Target’s advertising lives in a world of red, white, and Helvetica.

Target has built a world of red, white, and Helvetica. Its customers know that world and trust it. But if Target decided to suddenly throw in blue, straying from the rules they’ve consistently followed, its customers would scratch their heads.

When creating your own brand, your customers need to see consistency. They need to feel they are in the right place when they interact with your brand. Use brand identity guidelines to document your brand world’s internal logic. Every touchpoint a customer sees should have the same colors, typography, and art direction.

The Hero and the Guide

Our world has been established, so now we need characters to be in our story. All stories have a protagonist, the main character. Many stories pair that character up with a guide or mentor. For our purposes we’ll call them the hero and the guide.

Donald Miller in his book Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen, says that the hero is not the brand! Instead, the hero should be the customer, and the brand should be the guide. This makes sense when you stop to think about it: customers seek out new brands to buy from because they have a problem to solve. And by playing the part of the guide, brands have the opportunity to be the mentor, the facilitator.

Captain Marvel has Nick Fury to show her around S.H.I.E.L.D. and Earth in the 1990s.

Luke Skywalker is mentored by Obi-Wan Kenobi who introduces him to the ways of the Force.

In fiction we all want to be the hero, not someone who is the helper to the hero. We want to be Captain Marvel who has Nick Fury to show her around Earth in the 1990s, or Luke Skywalker who is mentored by Obi-Wan Kenobi who introduces him to the ways of the Force. The guides are characters the heroes trust and look up to.

Nike’s ad campaigns celebrate the athlete within each of us.

Apple’s “Think Different” campaign wasn’t about how they had the best computers, but about celebrating geniuses like John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Plotting User Experience Design

All stories have a plot, something that happens. Sometimes those plots are thin, simple, or dense and convoluted. But the best, most popular stories can be distilled to a very simple formula. Miller in his book outlines this structure as follows:

1. A character
2. Has a problem
3. And meets a guide
4. Who gives them a plan
5. And calls them to action
6. They avoid failure
7. And end in a success

StoryBrand Framework by Donald Miller.

Let’s apply it to one of my favorite movies, Star Wars:

1. Luke Skywalker
2. Wants to defeat the evil Galactic Empire
3. Meets Obi-Wan Kenobi, former Jedi Knight
4. Who teaches Luke to trust the Force
5. Luke helps deliver the Death Star plans hidden in R2-D2 to the Rebels
6. Without the plans the Rebels would be obliterated by the starbase
7. With Luke trusting in the Force, he’s able to destroy the Death Star, thus saving the Rebels

StoryBrand framework applied to Star Wars

While Miller’s StoryBrand framework is geared towards marketing and messaging, I believe we can extend it to user experience and product design as well. Remember that the hero is the customer or the user. And our product is the plot through which our hero can solve their problem.

For fun, let’s apply this framework to Dropbox:

1. An information worker
2. Has multiple devices and often can’t access her files when she needs to
3. Meets Dropbox
4. Whose product can sync and store all her files in the cloud
5. Encourages her to sign up and install their product
6. So she can stop forgetting to email herself files to/from work
7. And access her files instantly from any device anywhere, impressing her bosses

For the user to trust Dropbox with her files, Dropbox’s brand identity needs to be consistent from its advertising and marketing, to its landing page and website, and finally to its application. Remember their world needs to stay internally logical by using the same color, fonts, imagery, and even brand voice.

Using Design as Storytelling to Create Fans

In 2008 Marvel began their incredibly ambitious MCU movies with Iron Man. But from that very first movie, they started to build their world. They introduced us to new characters with subsequent films and wielded familiar story beats while bringing something new. Ultimately over the course of 23 interconnected movies, they created millions of fans worldwide who collectively spent more than $22 billion at the box office.

We’ve already mentioned Nike, Apple, Target, and Dropbox, but what about a newer brand that’s doing this right? Slack.

From day one Slack built personality into the design of their product. Their quirky plaid pattern and colors in their hashtag logo made its way to the product, allowing users to customize their own workspaces with themes. Their UX copy is charming, personable. In other words, Slack’s brand from the colors to the fonts to the brand voice is infused from their marketing website all the way into their product. And this attention to design as story has helped drive Slack to over ten million daily active users, and propelled the company’s valuation to $20 billion when they IPO’d.

Design as storytelling is an incredibly powerful tool to build a brand, create a better product, and promote fanaticism. As young startups enter an increasingly crowded marketplace, they need to differentiate through memorable and consistent branding. And they can by incorporating storytelling in their design.

I’m really proud to announce that DesignScene for iPad has shipped today. From idea to release, it’s been about a year in the making. Here’s a little trailer I made in case you missed it:

I’ll be frank and say that this app was really made for me. Like many designers I spend a lot of my time going from website to website looking at stuff and reading up on trends. I eventually started using RSS feeds but even my feeds got unwieldy. I dreaded opening up Google Reader and seeing “1000+” unread items.

When Apple announced the iPad 12 months ago it struck me that this device was the perfect thing to visually browse through all of my design-related feeds. It didn’t take me too long to sketch and comp up something.

Of course I am just a designer and had zero Objective-C skills whatsoever. I can do simple HTML, CSS and even PHP, but real programming languages elude me. I knew I had to find a development partner. Problem is that there are tons of people like me with an idea, while developers are in high demand. I asked my network of friends and contacts, posted on Craigslist and BuildItWithMe but didn’t really find anyone. I had a couple of meetings with friends of friends who were iPhone developers but they had their own objectives. Finally I got in touch with an old friend who was working on his first iPhone app.

I presented my idea to David and he liked it. We decided to go to iPad Dev Camp which took place a week after the iPad shipped and just a couple of weeks after David and I initially talked. We built the prototype for DesignScene at the camp (and received an Honorable Mention). We were off to a great start.

The reality of day jobs and personal lives slowed progress down as we got into the spring and summer of 2010. But in the fall as chatter of curated content emerged we kicked ourselves into high gear. David worked on functionality (there’s a lot of backend processing that actually happens so that the app is as fast as it can be) and I worked on reaching out to sources to get official permission.

Fast-forward to today, and DesignScene is now available for purchase on the App Store. We’ve worked incredibly hard on this, sweated all the details (there’s actually a maintenance upgrade that we released hours after 1.0.0 went on sale), and are really proud of what we’ve accomplished. Of course we could not have done this without the immense and loving support from our families. A million thanks to our wives and kids for putting up with our late night hackathons.

We are going to keep working on to improve DesignScene (we have some neat features we’ve been thinking about) but we’re also going to think about other apps. Stay tuned and wish us luck!

iTunes Link to DesignScene app for iPad

David’s side of the story