Company acquisition, AI agents as personas, how might things go wrong

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.

“Three years ago, during the hard Covid lockdown in The Netherlands, the news arrived at our company; we were going to be acquired by a competitor. At that point, my reference to company acquisitions was Meta buying Instagram or movies depicting evil corporations pushing local shops into bankruptcy.

I had no idea how common mergers and acquisitions are all around the world, across many industries. Naturally, questions piled up in my mind: Will I still have a job? Will my colleagues still be around? Will I be replaced by their own designers? Will we lose all the hard work we’ve put to get the product where it was?”

How did a company acquisition feel like for a product designer →By Teisanu Tudor

Editor picks

• Designing for “how might things go wrong?” →
  Anticipating and designing for failure.
  By Elvis Hsiao
• How to build a legendary park →
  Applying UX to transform green spaces.
  By Rita Kind-Envy
• Gentrified by design →
  Reflections on the role of algorithms in creative work.
  By Kristina Gushcheva-Keippilä

The UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about their work.

98.css: a library for building UI that looks like Windows 98 →

Make me think

• Care doesn’t scale →
  “We’re pretty limited when it comes to care. In any given moment, you can only really care deeply and individually for one person. There was some pain in that realization.”
• The best prompts start as conversations →
  “But my breakthroughs with the new technology started when I realized I was thinking about it all wrong. I needed to stop treating AI like a search engine and start treating it like a jam session.”
• How did you pick that typeface? →
  “I think the most important and difficult thing about being a designer is making decisions. (…) There are around 500,000 fonts available; designers have to choose 2 or 3 for any given project.”

Little gems this week

Why over 100 million athletes are hooked on Strava →By Mary Borysova

User experience without intentional limitations creates chaos →By Simo Herold

Laid off twice in a year as a product manager →
By Jean Huang

Tools and resources

• Treating AI Agents as personas →
  The Agent Computer Interaction era.
  By Paz Perez
• Can you design it more like Apple? →
  Stakeholders’ favorite question and how to respond.
  By Andrea Grigsby
• Designing errors for workflow automation platforms →
  Pushing for more accessible error resolution.
  By Rucha Abhyankar

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Company acquisition, AI agents as personas, how might things go wrong was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.