Welcome back, picnickers. 

The top reason I have fun writing this newsletter (aside from getting to be silly on the internet) is that it helps me think through how all the different headlines and discourses come together into one big thing we call “the design industry.” 

And no company has more mindshare in that industry than Apple. So it’s no surprise that WWDC has taken over the headlines in the UX world. While Apple struggles to jam AI into everything like everyone else is doing (which is admittedly not an Apple problem but an LLM problem), they came up with something else to show off. Everyone is talking about it...and what they’re saying is not great. 

The Timeline

The main thing designers are talking about is Apple’s new design language, Liquid Glass. While Google’s Material 3 release from last month amounted to “make the padding bigger” Apple has actually leaned in to a “maximalist” look that some designers are comparing to Windows Vista’s “Aero” design language (and the rest are rightfully pointing out that it is an accessibility disaster). 

We talked about accessibility recently when Figma’s site generator dropped the ball on it. We also covered elevating “taste” as a differentiator for Design, without designers asking why a particular aesthetic expression is “better” than another. With Liquid Glass, Apple has put its finger firmly on the scale in support of these trends. 

While the original Macintosh human interface guidelines were rich with human factors-derived insights, the Liquid Glass design pattern eschews accessibility for maximum luxury branding. Unlike Material 3, which at least bothered to claim that it was Google’s “most researched” Material update ever, Liquid Glass simply asserts that it is delightful, vibrant, and expressive. Did we want that from interfaces, over for example usable and accessible? I don’t get the sense that Apple asked.  

Some speculated that there was a compelling reason for this new design language – just not one we can respect. Vitomir Jevremovic points out that Liquid Glass is going to be GPU-hungry; much like Material 3’s extra padding will eat up the real estate on your gargantuan unwieldy phone, Liquid Glass will make your old phone feel janky and obsolete as it chugs through the new “expressive” visual effects.  

Another theory floated by both designers and journalists is that Glass is that way solely because of VR. Cannibalizing Apple’s most successful product to boost its least successful one feels odd, but that’s what aesthetics will do to you. 

Now, you might say: Apple is going to fix it! People hated iOS 7 and they fixed that!  

The old “building it in public” canard always gets floated out whenever a beloved company does something stupid. But you don’t need to build a bad version of something to find out that it’s bad! And yet our systems reward us for doing just that, in an effect known as the preventable problem paradox. Companies have reversed the double diamond and are now pushing out solutions to nothing in particular in order to “gather feedback” and ship a working version somewhere down the line. This is quite simply waste ideology. 

Reading Material

But this is not just an Apple issue (in either sense of the word). Our good friends at Shopify are not content to stay out of the headlines for long. After making waves by instituting an AI mandate for all functions, they have concluded that “AI enables anyone to make things usable” (lol) and therefore all design titles should be merged into “Designer” to focus on being "artists.” I won’t go into the arguments around why AI won’t replace UX (Natalia Lenoci does a great job of gathering the trends and stats) but I do want to talk about the “creative” thing. 

First of all: simpler is not better. Clearer is better. “Designer” to most people means “graphic designer” – which I suppose works just fine for companies like Apple and Shopify who now see the role of design as branding. The old titles don’t make sense in that paradigm. The legacy of human factors engineering, HCI, and plain old web design is being swept away as companies are no longer interested in making evidence-based decisions, nor willing to pay for such minor concerns as “can people use the thing.” 

The emphasis on “creativity” serves to conceal another shift: design is no longer creative, it is commoditized. It is optimized for atomic outputs over systems. And since our outputs are screens, that’s what we have optimized for. But we optimized for the wrong thing to do real impactful work.

The role of design isn’t to make screens. The screens are just the interface that the rest of the company has into our work. The actual work is systems. And when we attend towards aesthetics, we attend away from systems. 

This is the path of least resistance. Organizations erect systemic barriers to systems design. Trying to change big things can make us come across as disagreeable troublemakers. Success requires not only good design judgment but good soft skills, because we must work with other functions in their mandates, where we cannot be the hero. Even usability – once the domain of web designers who knew the material they worked with – now requires close collaboration software engineers.  

If you don’t always win, it’s easy to feel like it’s not worth trying. Easy to go back to Figma, and cede contested territory to someone else. 

The choice to attend away from making things work has never been more validated by the industry. You can get further than ever by swapping out HCD for XGH+AI, and use LLMs to pretend like you did something. 

But if you choose not to, accessibility is the perfect place to start caring. Even thinking about accessibility and the consequences of not having it is a good first step. Pulling accessibility up from the end of the design process to the beginning is a great way to attend away from your perspective and towards the system that mediates how a human uses your product. And once you’re ready to design with the materials of the Web, Heydon’s guide has got you covered. 

Follow Friday

Forgive the irony of linking to a LinkedIn post that discusses Bluesky, but the comments have built up a solid list of endorsements for why – despite taking fire from legacy media – the new blue microblogging app is a worth successor to the old blue microblogging app. But it’s not just a Twitter clone, it has a few tricks up its sleeve. 

One of the things I frequently see LinkedIn people complain about is that the social feed is terrible. And it’s true! Fortunately, Bluesky fixes that. If you click this button you will get a custom starter pack of people to follow and UX-centered feeds to subscribe to, and jump straight in to the conversation about relevant topics and not people bragging about what the latest tragedy taught them about B2B sales. 

Diagram of the Week

One of my diagrams recently got featured in Dorian Taylor’s talk on organizational cartography (remember that thing I said about systems? I’m not just talking about software systems).

When you don’t have a reality-based business model (i.e. your product is a scam) then you don’t need design. You just need marketing and branding for whatever features come out the orange end of the feature factory. So it makes sense that companies embrace the Double Square, they aim for their designers to attend to that side of the process, and away from the problem framing. 

But if UXers can’t squeeze ourselves into this process, we’ll have to get ahead of it. If you’re going to be at FITC next week – I’m doing a panel that will talk about the blue side of this process. 

—Pavel at the Product Picnic