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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.
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.
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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.
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Why it matters: Treating every AI feature as chat is the trap, this framework forces intent and a metric you can actually validate.
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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.
Intent (Learn/Create/Delegate/Oversee/Monitor/Find/Play/Connect):
UI surface (chat, canvas, queue, digest, list):
Success metric:
Guardrails (what must never happen):
Failure state (what the user sees next):
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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.
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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.
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Adopt this week: Audit one critical flow (60 mins) and attach a one-page “problem → evidence → recommendation” summary.
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🧩 Shape
Shared foundations across teams.
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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.
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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.
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Adopt this week: Add a component contract section to one shared component (45 mins) and commit it to your documentation.
Contract:
States (default, hover, focus, disabled, loading, error):
Keyboard and accessibility notes:
Layout constraints (long labels, narrow containers):
Analytics event:
Visual regression coverage:
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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.
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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.
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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.
Problem (in plain language):
Who is affected:
Behaviour change we want:
How we’ll know (signal or metric):
Not doing (yet):
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🚀 Ship
Release, measure, iterate.
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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.
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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.
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Try this: Run a risk brainstorm on one release-critical screen and capture the top five risks.
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A weekly lanes doc stops the mid-quarter wobble you see in planning meetings, by copying forward a small set of owned workstreams and forcing honest discussion about what moved and what stalled. Tie each lane to a screen and an indicator, and you get decisions instead of status theatre.
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Why it matters: Drift happens because teams reset to a blank page each week, which turns updates into performance and hides stuck work, and this copy-forward habit makes trade-offs explicit early.
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Adopt this week: Add a five-line scan to your weekly lanes doc (20 mins) and copy it forward each week at the top.
Shipped:
Learned:
Risk / regression watch:
Indicator (metric/signal):
Decision ask: (not for scoring) Yes/No on ___ or None this week
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Thanks for reading
Adam from Unicorn Club
Follow me on X or BlueSky
Connect on LinkedIn
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