Hey 👋
It's been a couple of weeks, but we're back for the last newsletter of 2025.
Before diving in, a quick thank you for all your support over the past months. This year brought some big changes, in particular, the new “Build/Shape/Ship” format and my efforts to break down how every discovery can land you a meaningful win (and not just more reading for the backlog).
The goal stays the same through 2026 - keep it curated, keep it useful, and always keep it human.
If you’ve got thoughts or feedback, just hit reply to any newsletter. I read every reply.
This week’s picks are especially handy if your team is shipping interfaces in the “AI everywhere” era. Explaining algorithmic magic without hand-waving, and getting more out of prototyping (rather than just building for the sake of it).
Enjoy this issue - Adam at Unicorn Club 🦄
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🏗️ Build
Make better interfaces.
Explainable AI in Chat Interfaces
Most AI chat explanations are misleading, overconfident, or encourage misplaced trust.
- Why it matters: If users don’t spot limitations or false citations, your interface can amplify errors and undermine trust.
Prompt to Design Interfaces: Why Vague Prompts Fail and How to Fix Them
AI-prototyping tools promise instant design, but vague prompts end in disorderly, cluttered outputs and Frankenstein layouts.
- Why it matters: Vague or overlong prompts waste engineering time and yield unusable UI. Precision saves hours and raises the bar on both design and code.
- Adopt this week: Refactor one “AI prompt” to use precise visual keywords (e.g., “neobrutalist landing page” over “trendy homepage”) and attach concrete mock data on your next prototype.
🎁 All Wrapped Up
Twenty-two new CSS and HTML features landed: customisable selects, scroll markers, interest invokers, scroll-state queries, and real conditional logic.
🧩 Shape
Shared foundations across teams.
Native CSS mixins are moving closer to reality, promising DRY patterns without a transpiler, but subtle scoping and parameter gotchas lurk.
- Why it matters: Codify shared style logic directly in CSS. Reducing build step loss and aligning “design token” changes with live UI.
UX process, misapplied, often becomes a charade. Validating stakeholder hunches instead of learning what matters or reasoning from goal to interface.
- Why it matters: Treating design as mere validation or “accountability sink” kills actual user-informed iteration and slows delivery even as everyone pretends to move fast.
- Takeaway: If your “validate” or “feedback” work is just rubber-stamping ideas, step back and demand the business goal before you build.
🚀 Ship
Release, measure, iterate.
2025 In Review: What’s New In Web Performance?
Real cross-browser Core Web Vitals, easy audit tools, request throttling, and DevTools LLM support all move performance monitoring from Chrome-only to team-wide practice.
- Why it matters: Teams can now ship, verify, and debug performance improvements in Firefox and Safari, not just Chrome.
Sustainable product growth isn’t a hack it’s the blend of ruthlessly auditing your real problems, locking on product-market fit, and aligning growth bets with both business and UX.
- Why it matters: Growth loops collapse if you scale the wrong thing. This gives you a concrete map for fusing research, delivery, and business accountability.
- Try this: Run your next “growth” initiative through the audit - does it align with strategy × UX and clear product-market fit? If not, stop and rethink.
🎪 High Impact Events
Redesign Onboarding Flows using Causal Chain Thinking
Unpack hidden friction in onboarding and turn passive flows into confidence-builders. (Thu, Dec 18, 2025, Free Event)
Designing For Complex UIs in 2026
Sharpen your handling of mega-menus, dense tables, and high-friction forms with SmashingMag’s Vitaly Friedman. (Tue, Jan 6, 2026, Free Event)
🔭 Spotlight
Share with 3,300+ readers, book a spotlight ad.
Discover the strategies behind iconic brands.
Get our "7 Positioning Sins That Cost B2B Brands Millions" guide when you join. It's free, join 10,000+ B2B executives.
One AI workspace where the whole team is part of the creative process, customer research finally informs product strategy, and concepts come to life at lightning speed.
🎲 Also worth a look
A few extras we've found.
Why feature roadmaps don’t work for early-stage startups
Feature-based roadmaps lock in guesses - outcome-driven plans let you flex when reality hits.
Are you designing for the user’s values — or your own?
Honest exploration of how invisible team biases, rather than research, often lead to hidden ethical trade-offs in UX.
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Thanks for reading ❤️
Adam from Unicorn Club
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