In this format, I share links to articles and posts that caught my attention and got me thinking. Sometimes my thoughts directly connect to the article’s main points, while other times they touch on related ideas. In any case, I recommend reading all of them.

How Many People Do You Need to See Trip on Your Carpet Before Fixing It?
Jim Lewis, PhD and Jeff Sauro, PhD

In general, this article is about how to make decisions about eliminating problems based on research, and it emphasizes that even knowing about a problem—without direct research evidence—is already a reason to fix it. However, it also made me think a bit differently.

From time to time in my work, I come across debates about the effectiveness and reliability of UX research. The main argument is that it’s impossible to interview just five people and then draw reliable mathematical conclusions about existing issues, so why waste time on UX research?

UX researchers bear some responsibility here because they often avoid numbers and forecasts. They even write in their recommendations, “Don’t say how many respondents experienced the problem,” since everything gets complicated by the purity of the experiment, sampling, and so on. You can understand their caution, but it doesn’t always foster trust.

That’s why it’s important to remind ourselves and others, from time to time, that any research result comes with its confidence interval and is mathematically supported.

For example, if a study shows two problem triggers in a sample of just five people, then the confidence interval, according to the Clopper-Pearson method (with 95% confidence), ranges from 5.27% to 85.34%. In other words, if we extend the study to the entire audience for which this sample is relevant, with a 95% probability at least 5.27% of users will encounter the problem.

Have you ever seen a business dismiss issues affecting 5% of its core audience? It’s hard to imagine, yet I’ve seen exactly this kind of attitude toward research in conference rooms. If you ever run into the same thing, send them this article.

Balancing Text In CSS
Ahmad Shadeed

This article covers an important improvement in CSS that allows you to balance lines of text when they wrap.

First of all, I can’t help but say how much I admire the people who put together such in-depth articles, complete with interactive examples and all kinds of different content blocks. On top of that, they do it regularly and with impressive consistency.

As for the article itself, from a designer’s perspective, I’m really looking forward to text-wrap: pretty moving from “Limited availability” to “Baseline” so we can finally use it by default in all projects and basic settings.

I’d only recommend using text-wrap: balance if you have a clear reason to do so because the breaks it introduces often look worse than those slightly odd hyphenations.

The rise of the generalist
Carly Ayres

The main idea of the article is that the rise of AI will increasingly lead to the emergence of generalists across different professions. One of the first signs of this trend is the appearance of so-called “Design Engineers.”

I completely agree with the article’s message. In fact, I notice these same shifts in myself, moving right toward that well-known “design engineering.” And I have three main points on this topic.

First. The product trio will fall. If I’m a product designer with plenty of experience who’s gained developer skills through AI, the purpose of product management also starts to blur for me. I can build the strategy, come up with the design, create working prototypes, present them, groom with the development team, oversee implementation, and evaluate the results—all on my own.

Second. We’ve come full circle back to engineer-inventors. In the past, these were the people who did the entire process: drawing up blueprints, building prototypes of their inventions, and launching them into production. Later, as technology got more complex and economic processes sped up, this profession broke down into specialized parts. The product trio is one such piece. Now AI is bringing it all back together. The future of indie hacking and one-person companies is already here.

Third. Inside modern ultra-capitalist companies that focus on efficiency, I don’t see a bright future for these people. These new engineers will end up doing the work of three, yet still receive the same salary plus maybe a small 10–20% bonus. The problem is that even with AI, our brains have limitations, and switching contexts isn’t easy. I predict a push to learn new skills just to stay “in the market,” which in turn will lead to more burnout, depression, and rough transitions between professions.

Design artifacts
Robin Rendle

I see two main ideas in the article:

1. Create design artifacts only when they help move the design forward and support decision-making.
2. Producing artifacts that nobody cares about—just out of habit or because of some process—is pointless.

I fully agree with the first point. It reflects the classic understanding of any research: the goal is to influence a decision. If we already know that, no matter the result, it won’t have an impact, then the research itself is pointless.

The second point isn’t so straightforward. You can’t always predict what effect these artifacts might have. Every task is unique. Sometimes, the outcome ends up being useful, even if it’s not obvious at first. Moreover, an artifact might be underestimated not because it’s weak, but because the company’s decision-making process is broken.

So here’s how I’d put it: If your artifacts aren’t getting the attention they deserve but you have the resources, the interest, and the belief in their importance, don’t stop creating them. Keep presenting them to colleagues and stakeholders every time. Gradually, you can change how these materials are perceived, show their value, and possibly influence a shift in the decision-making approach.

User Research Myths
Jon Yablonski

The article covers five myths about user research. Overall, I agree with them, but the very first myth: “It takes too much time,” caught my attention.

Of course, we need to clarify what exactly “too much time” implies. But from my point of view, this isn’t a myth.

Qualitative research involving real interactions—like interviews and UX testing—does take a significant amount of time. For instance, if you’re recruiting a suitable sample from a B2B startup’s audience, you probably wouldn’t say it’s quick or cheap to find even five respondents.

With today’s “democratization” of UX, research often gets handed off to designers who might not always have the skills or experience of a professional UX researcher. This slows down an already time-consuming process. In addition, many designers aren’t comfortable doing calls “in the background,” especially given that many of us are introverts.

If by “research” we mean “just chatting with a handful of people,” then sure, that’s quick. But if you don’t follow the proper guidelines for conducting user research, the results will at least be invalid, and at worst they can be harmful, misleading, and even discredit the design team due to mistakes.