UX Lift links roundup – the best UX and design links from the last few weeks

Articles

The surprising origins of our obsession with creativity – The idea of ‘creativity’ originating as a reaction to the increasing mechanisation of white-collar work in the 1950s is fascinating.

User interviews 101 – A good introduction to interviews by N/N group.

The tyranny of the marginal user – Why consumer software products get worse, not better over time.

A designer’s guide to weekly, scrappy, rapid iteration and testing – A guide to building regular user testing sessions into your workflow.

Accordion editing and apple picking: early generative-AI user behaviours – How tools like AI chatbots are forming new behaviours.

Centaurs and cyborgs on the jagged frontier – A recent study found that people using AI for work finished 12.2% more tasks on average, completed tasks 25.1% more quickly, and produced 40% higher quality results than those without.

Cool tools

Obsidian – My new favourite notes and writing tool. Simple to get started, but enormously powerful thanks to a huge ecosystem of third-party extensions.

Multi.app – Figma-like collaboration for macOS.

v0.dev – Didn’t think it’d be long before generative AI came for UI. Type in a prompt to get designs and working code.

YouTube 2 Webpage – Script to create a webpage from a Youtube video with a transcript paired with screenshots.

MacWhisper – Free app to generate transcripts from audio or video recordings. Handy for transcribing meetings.

Cool stuff

I’m a fake brand in a fake world – Exploring made-up brands for movies and TV. Also see Fictional Brands Archive.

Stable Audio – Text-to-music generative AI. Surprisingly not bad.

Falling down the Internet hole – Web design as it should be.

Ramen Haus – Like Rotating Sandwiches, but, well you get the idea.

British Seaside Simulator – After visiting Sheerness by mistake once, I can confirm this is 100% accurate.