Nad Chishtie

Are design tools helping your team… or slowing it down? 🧠 • Too many platforms • Unclear workflows • No shared standards Tooling should enable creativity, not complicate it. This piece breaks down how to manage workflow shifts in design teams. If you're part of a design function, take a look 🔎

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We’re going into week 2 of our closed beta at Linqlo and between our small test group we’re about to break 1000 links! 🔗🥳 Last month came with some awesome improvements and fixes including: 🚀 Bulk link importing 🗂️ Table view toggle (multi-view layouts) 📥 Drag-and-drop link adding 🎬 Demo template feature  ⌨️ Expanded keyboard shortcuts 🔌 6 content types added (Figma, SoundCloud, Vimeo, Sheets, PDFs, YouTube) & more! With the biggest win being the completion of our new Chrome extension which allows you to add content to your project without opening LINQLO. Read the full log👇 https://lnkd.in/dBXriKxz

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Let's talk design specs. What makes them useful for dev? I used to get sooo annoyed when I put every detail dev needed to know in the spec just to get question after question after question from them. The spec wasn't the problem, it was how I was working with the dev team that was. Read an article I recently wrote for Nielsen Norman Group about writing useful design specs and working with dev: https://lnkd.in/eRG_Rume #ux #design #designer #developer #software

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As your business matures its experimentation program, it's important to align on: 👉 what metrics matter most, 👉 how they're defined, and 👉 who owns which ones. Check out the article Jonas Alves (Co-Founder at ABsmartly) shared to learn more about Metric Governance!

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Working at the bleeding edge means you're the one who bleeds first. This week, I read something that made me realise we'd been bleeding in a very specific spot without knowing it. A framework, formalising something many of us have been fumbling toward: AX: Agentic Experience Design. Three layers: what agents can do, how humans stay in control, and how agents talk to each other. The one that hit me was the Trust layer. Intent Preview. Autonomy Dial. Action Audit. That's not a new theory. That's the design debt most enterprise AI products are quietly accumulating right now. The products I've seen actually get adopted aren't the ones with the most features. They're the ones where the AI's reasoning is legible. Where users get a dial, not a switch. Where transparency is designed in, not a black box inside another black box and not bolted on as a disclaimer. If users can't understand what your AI is doing or why, you don't have an AI problem. You have a design problem. We've been building toward this at CohesionX. Turns out we had a name for it before we had a name for it. If adoption matters to you, AX is worth your time. Worth a read: https://lnkd.in/d4XpX2xQ Thanks Lloyd Pilapil for this!

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Unsurprisingly the feeds have been ablaze with talk of Figma's MCP server, and yesterday Akbar Mirza joined Liam Hampton to discuss some good practices to ensure a more accurate output in the code generation inside of VSCode. One of the key takeaways was the importance of documentation in your co-pilot instructions.md file, suggesting fixes based on some of the recurrent issues. It gives me huge confidence that the labour intensive process of Design System and Developer documentation is truly starting paying off. You can check out the full session here ⤵️ https://lnkd.in/gavm-T_8

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5 Things Designers Can Do Right Now to Improve Their Work: 1. Have a point of view 2. Have a point of view 3. Have a point of view 4. Have a point of view 5. Have a point of view You don’t need more tools. You need to decide what you actually believe.

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Take your design career to the next level with our Toolkit. This isn't another course. It's every method, framework, tool, and strategy CDO School founder Ryan Rumsey developed to help designers turn their decisions into business outcomes that matter to people writing the checks. No recurring subscriptions. No forced community. No artificial progression. Just the complete collection of tools you'll reference throughout your career.

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If you’re working with AI image tools and wondering how they fit into a professional design workflow, this review shares how we approach it in practice, including limitations, tips, and where we see things heading in 2026. What stood out after a few months of testing NanoBanan Pro wasn’t just image quality, but the level of control and consistency. Used well, AI can support early decision-making rather than replace it. In practice, tools like this can help designers: – Explore atmosphere, lighting, and materials earlier in the process – Maintain visual continuity across multiple views – Iterate faster without rebuilding scenes – Communicate feeling and narrative before technical lock-in 🔗 Read our full review: https://lnkd.in/dB3TkssY #InteriorDesign #AIDesign #Futureworkflow #DesignWorkflow #NanoBananaPro #AIDesignTools

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Pitfalls when putting together your first product specification for hardware development A product specification is an essential tool to communicate what you intend to build - and to justify the features and performance criteria by linking them to the needs of your end users. As a designer, I’ve received countless spec documents over the years - some great, some terrible, and many somewhere in between. I wanted to share a few common pitfalls I often see, and why they can lead to issues further down the line. First up: the over-constrained specification What does this look like? An enormous document full of features and technical requirements, most of which are based on assumptions rather than validated needs. Why is this a problem? When you over-specify too early, you risk constraining your design team unnecessarily - closing off potentially better solutions before they’ve even been explored. How to avoid it? Start with user requirements, not product features. Define what your user needs to achieve - in a solution-agnostic way - and then translate that into specific product requirements. That translation step is critical, and it’s often where assumptions creep in. Start small, focusing on the most critical requirements first. Add detail only when it’s necessary and justified. Treat your spec as a live document. It should evolve with the product - and with your understanding of your users. Example: Let’s say you’re designing a portable piece of consumer electronics. Your spec says: “Product should be <100x100x300mm in size.” But where did that come from? The underlying user requirement might be: “User should be able to carry the product with one hand for up to an hour.” The dimension constraint assumed the product is hand-held - but a shoulder strap, a handle, or even a wheeled base might be better solutions. Without stepping back to understand the user need, you might accidentally rule out a simpler or more effective design. It’s tempting to jump straight to defining the product, but early in the development process, it’s essential to stay open to multiple ways of meeting the need. I’m keen to hear from other hardware innovators - especially if you’re currently writing your first spec, or have done this before: What challenges did you run into? What worked? What didn’t? (If you missed the previous post on what a spec is and why it matters, theres a link in the comments)

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Entitlements are the building blocks of monetisation infrastructure. Getting them right matters. At MonetizationOS we've been thinking hard about the mental models behind entitlements and how to make them work for everyone, not just engineers. I wrote about how we solved it. Link in the comments. ⚙️

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I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve gone way too deep into a topic and thought hmm… maybe I should start a podcast? Well, this time I actually did. 🎙️ A short story about interface design From the first human touch on tech — all the way to Apple’s Liquid Glass. It’s a journey through the history, friction, beauty, and evolution of interface design. Highly recommend giving it a listen, especially if you’re a designer, 110% you don’t know all of this stuff 😜 Or if you’re just curious! 👀 Link in the comment.

We hosted the Nile x Anthropic x WTW Neuron panel last week (read as: Sam Irving, Adriaan and I sat on a couch for an hour and chatted about AI) We focused on AI in regulated businesses - what's actually working, what's harder than expected, where it's heading. Against the backdrop of Gemini 3 and Opus 4.5 being released, it was a good time to compare notes! Some bits I'm still thinking about: The junior role question is one we need to take seriously. Traditionally, entry-level work has often been grunt work - the stuff that teaches you the ropes through repetition. If AI takes that away, what does a first role actually look like? How do we develop people deliberately rather than through osmosis? The tech is moving faster than most organisations can absorb. The bottleneck is rarely the AI itself - it's culture, structure, permission to experiment. If the technology stopped improving tomorrow, we'd still see massive gains year on year just from companies learning how to use what already exists. And if you're designing around today's AI limitations - hallucination, context, memory - without thinking about how fast those are being solved, you're probably aiming too low. Thanks to Lucy Barrett for keeping us on track, and to Hampden Bank for hosting us! Some of the sharpest points came from audience engagement on the day - so opening it up here too. Anything to add or challenge?

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As the time cost of creating software has reduced, it’s become even more important that we focus on ‘building the right thing’. It’s so easy to spin up a feature that we need to make sure that it meets a valid user need. I’ve always been pretty vocal about scope discipline to tightly focus on meeting user needs, but I fell into this trap myself last week and said something along the lines of ‘but it’s so easy to implement, why wouldn’t we include it?’ Luckily Greg Fletcher, PhD called me out and we refocused. As writing code is no longer the bottleneck, scope discussions are becoming less ‘can we build this in time’ and need to be even more focused on ‘is this the right thing to build?’

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Choosing the right wireframe tool can make or break your design process. Our latest guide for 2025 compares industry leaders like Figma, TemplateToaster, UXPin, and others to help designers, devs, and product teams pick the perfect fit. #ProductDesign #UXTools #Wireframing #TemplateToaster https://lnkd.in/gvMZiNAD

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🎨 Great design isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s about accessibility, consistency, and scale. This article breaks down how the Skyscanner Product Design team identified and fixed a broken colour palette, turning a visual challenge into a solid, system driven solution. If you’re into design systems, accessibility, and real world product design decisions, this is a must read 👇 🔗 https://lnkd.in/ekdYfZNf ✍️ Credits: Skyscanner #UXDesign #UIDesign #DesignSystems #ProductDesign #Accessibility #InclusiveDesign #VisualDesign #ColorSystems #Skyscanner #MediumArticle

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