Howdy, picnickers!

We’re going to start with a topic that might not seem like it applies to design - but not only is it relevant, it is fundamental. That topic is writing.

Reading Material

Just like design, writing is both a verb and a noun - there is the act of writing, and (if you’re lucky) a piece of writing produced at the end. And just like design, writing is being swept up by LLM mania, driven by a belief that the content that comes out at the end is the point. Having to actually write in order to get writing is framed as a hassle.

This is the world into which John Warner’s More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI is released. Rather than talk about the book, however, I want to highlight Phil Christman's excellent review of it which articulates - from a teacher’s perspective - the value of that process, which AI tools destroy. “Writing is what happens when you simultaneously express and explore an idea,” writes Christman, “discovering, as you go along, what you actually do and don’t think.”

The product of writing-as-a-verb is not the text - it’s a mental model of what the text should say. The sentiment was echoed by historian Kevin Kruse a few months ago: “You write the first draft to explain it to yourself and then a second to explain it to others.”

This is also how design works: the designer iterates between trying and seeing, documenting one design decision after another until they have come together into a coherent whole. Research works in a similar way: researchers inhabit the data as they process it. What comes out the other side is not just an artifact; the artifact is merely a tangible representation of a point of view that the designer developed as they built it.

Using an LLM to skip the process - of writing, synthesizing, designing, coding - produces an artifact with no point of view. Not only will you not understand it but you won’t know how to fix any of the mistakes that it makes, even if you do find them.

Even that basic designerly sense - good taste - is undermined. Rob Horning goes into detail about algorithmic deskilling in the practices of aesthetic investment in the context of music, but it is equally applicable to developing an intuition for good design.

In short: life cannot be delegated.

The Timeline

And in an attempt to replace it, AI developers will break quite a few eggs. For example, NN/g CEO Kara Pernice describes an attempt by a startup to scrape the entire back catalog of the decades of advice and techniques that the company has produced.

I feel sorry for junior designers hoodwinked into believing that this chatbot is a substitute for reading the articles yourself. Courtney Milan describes the benefit of doing your own reading as the card catalog effect; Surekha Davies calls it a basement adventure; the closest digital equivalent might be a wiki walk. Whatever you call it, this process of learning more than what you asked for is the solution to the “unknown unknowns” problem (or the articulation barrier).

The AI decides what is relevant to the answer, not you. You will simply never know what’s being left out - which degrades your ability to ask better questions in the future.

Companies are coming to that conclusion, too. “In a world of AI, nothing will be as valuable as humans” writes Klarna, the company that once claimed its chatbot could eliminate humans in customer support roles.

Diagram of the week

This week’s diagram is not one of mine - it comes from Jesse James Garrett’s incredible The Elements of User Experience. I’m reproducing it here because it’s simply the best way to make my original point: writing is not only important to design as a metaphor, but also quite literally. I’ve seen versions of this diagram chop off the labels or change “hypertext system” to something more modern, but that defeats the entire purpose of the graphic.

The Web is labels and forms; everything else is a wrapper around those core elements. If you lose track of the reason users come to your website, you will not be able to save it with a really good UI. Reaching back into the archives, A List Apart devised a way to avoid that by starting your design with content first.

One thing that JJG’s diagram is missing is more nuance around UX writing, which was not really a thing back in 2002. But today there are many resources for making sure that the text on your UI is just as refined as the visual layer; recently I’ve come across Nick DiLallo’s post and the Monzo writing system as two sources of useful principles.

Remember: when you think about how to phrase the content, you are thinking about your user. When you slap Lorem Ipsum or LLM outputs into your layout, you aren’t.

-Pavel at the Product Picnic

P.S. I am writing this while away from base, and forgot to make sure I had access to the usual thumbnail image that you’ll see when browsing on the website. The photograph used is "Four Boys on a Picnic" by Blue Mountains Library, Local Studies found with openverse.org.