Hey 👋
Speed is cheap now you can ship a decent-looking interface quickly. Problem is you then spend months paying for confusion, trust gaps, and rework.
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This week’s email edition includes the copy/paste templates (missing from this public post) plus the “weekly lanes doc” idea and why it works.
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This week pick the right interface surface for each AI intent, run a lightweight audit that produces fixable observations, and tighten your release loop with risk-based QA.
Enjoy this week 🦄 - Adam at Unicorn Club.
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🏗️ Build
Make better interfaces.
Beyond chat: 8 core user intents driving AI interaction
Stop defaulting to a AI chat box in design review. Map each AI feature to a user intent and a UI surface like a review queue, canvas, or digest. It helps you design transparency, control, and failure states before you start building.
- Why it matters: Treating every AI feature as chat is the trap, this framework forces intent and a metric you can actually validate.
- Try this: Write an intent card for one AI feature (30 mins), then paste it into the design doc and the pull request description before review.
Copy/paste template available in the email edition: Try this: intent card.
A fill-in card to map an AI feature to intent, surface, success metric, guardrails, and failure states.
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Everything I know about running UX Audits
This bites when support tickets climb and a redesign gets proposed by instinct in design review, because it lays out a UX audit that turns evidence into prioritised fixes. Use it on one flow like checkout to capture problems, evidence, and a recommendation an engineer can ship.
- Why it matters: Without scope and objective, audits become a grab-bag of nitpicks. This process keeps you anchored to key performance indicators, complaints, and testable recommendations.
- Adopt this week: Audit one critical flow (60 mins) and attach a one-page “problem → evidence → recommendation” summary.
🧩 Shape
Shared foundations across teams.
Design Systems for Software Engineers
The thing that changes in your system is you treat shared components as contracts: states, keyboard focus, loading, and analytics events are part of the definition, not follow-up work. It’s a grounded tour of design system engineering from design files to a code library, including how to catch visual drift early.
- Why it matters: Most teams standardise visuals but ignore interaction states, which causes drift and slow fixes across the product, and this guide shows how to encode behaviour, tests, and ownership.
- Adopt this week: Add a component contract section to one shared component (45 mins) and commit it to your documentation.
Copy/paste template available in the email edition: Adopt this week: component contract section.
A quick contract checklist so shared components include states, accessibility, analytics, and regression coverage.
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Your problem framing is sabotaging your strategy
Steal this for planning workshops where everyone jumps to a feature, and force a shared problem statement that describes the behaviour change, not the technology, before anyone draws the UI. It keeps work tickets from reading like button-click instructions and producing exactly that experience.
- Why it matters: If you only ship solutions, you optimise for clicks and busywork and the interface turns into a checklist, and this pushes teams to define the real customer problem together first.
- Try this: Replace one solution-first ticket with a problem-design brief (30 mins) and paste it into the ticket description before your next design review.
Copy/paste template available in the email edition: Try this: problem-design brief.
A short brief that forces behaviour change, signals, and scope before anyone starts designing a solution.
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🚀 Ship
Release, measure, iterate.
Workshopping ideas for our future in Quality Engineering
Quality engineering is less about more test cases, and more about whole-team habits that show up in QA: shared language, hard questions, and fast feedback loops.
- Why it matters: What catches teams out is assuming quality is a final gate, which pushes bugs into late QA and incidents, and these ideas pull risk and learning earlier into everyday delivery.
- Try this: Run a risk brainstorm on one release-critical screen and capture the top five risks.
Full email edition includes: the “weekly lanes doc” idea and why it works.
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Thanks for reading
Adam from Unicorn Club
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