Menlo Venturesmenlovc.com · 16 September 2026

Key Findings Consumer AI adoption hardly grew even as spending tripled. The share of U.S. adults using AI rose just three points, from 61% to 64%, while global consumer spend reached an estimated $40 billion in 2026, more than 3x last year. The real growth came from existing users going deeper and paying more: 55% of AI users now pay for at least one AI product, and 46% of payers spend more than they did a year ago, versus 12% who spend less. Power users are driving consumer AI market growth: 55% of AI users now pay for AI, but spending is highly concentrated; the top 14% of payers account for 60% of spending. Payers are also nearly twice as likely to use AI daily (50% vs. 26%) and 5x as likely to use AI agents (65% vs. 13%). AI is becoming a source of income: Nearly half (48%) of AI users have earned money with AI, equivalent to roughly 30% of Americans. Consumers are handing AI more control: 41% of AI users have tried an AI agent, 24% use one regularly, and 32% have let AI act on their behalf without final approval. Among agent users, 92% pay for AI, and 63% use it daily. AI-generated conte

design.lightspark.comdesign.lightspark.com · 9 September 2026

Make every single detail perfect, and limit the number of details. The first half gets your attention. The second half is what makes it possible. Fewer details allow you to care more deeply about each one. By details, I don’t just mean the small visual decisions. Every feature, control, mode, state, exception, and bit of behavior becomes something a team has to design and someone has to understand. There’s only so much attention to go around. Same for time, taste, and patience. A button seems harmless enough, but someone has to decide where it goes, what it says, what it looks like, what happens when you press it, what happens when you can’t, and what happens after you do. Add another and now you don’t just have two buttons. You have the relationship between them. Nothing terrible happens when you add a third or a fourth. That’s kind of the problem. Keep going and eventually you’re not really designing the details anymore. You’re managing them. Complexity is a tax on craft. Less, but better Dieter Rams famously described good design as “less, but better.” We’ve spent a lot of time talking about the less. The better is more interesting. Two of Rams’ princ

Interconnectsinterconnects.ai · 9 September 2026

Housekeeping: Paid subscribers to Interconnects now get a permanent 40% discount on my book when purchasing at Manning.com. Access the code at the Interconnects perks page.Many AI optimists tend to compare what is happening in this AI boom to the industrial revolution, or to other periods of rapid technological advancement and diffusion into society. These comparisons fit on the scale of technological change, but miss a crucial factor in how most people are exposed to that change. The problem facing AI is that most people have no super tangible new goods thanks to it and society has more inertia resisting change than in previous eras.ShareI’m writing this coming back online from a few weeks off for my wedding in New England. In this time it would have been very easy to not think about AI at all. The touch-points that average people have to AI products today are fringe, marginally beneficial, or even just very confusing to them (e.g. many people have heard about and brought up the OpenAI-HuggingFace incident, but don’t know what to make of it). People on the positive side think of AI as a way to make fun images, enhanced Google Search, etc.

Dan Maccaroneuxdesign.cc · 26 August 2026

Technological efficiency meets high-end service: a luxury hotel lobby where AI-driven recommendations are seamlessly integrated into the check-in process, offering convenience while raising questions about the role of the human touch. Everyone’s spending a fortune making AI smarter. Hospitality and retail solved the part that actually matters, decades ago. The biggest tech companies on earth will spend close to seven hundred billion dollars this year building artificial intelligence. Microsoft alone is in for about a hundred and ninety billion in infrastructure. Even after spending that, it’s hedging on the intelligence itself. Its own product, Copilot, quietly swaps between ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Microsoft’s homegrown AI, picking whichever one fits the moment. Microsoft then told its customers not to get attached to any of them. That means the company pouring the most money into the intelligence itself is betting you won’t care which one answers you. It’s a good bet since you probably can’t tell which one wrote the email you read this morning. So, if the intelligence itself is going to be a commodity, there needs to be a better di

Jason Hanmedium.com · 3 August 2026

17 min readJul 23, 2026--We assume good design brings joy. Duolingo proved that engineering anxiety is a far more effective retention strategy.The notification arrived at exactly eight forty two in the evening. I was sitting on my couch, entirely absorbed in a television show, when my phone screen lit up. The message was simple. The owl looked slightly disappointed. The text read that I was neglecting my Spanish lessons.I did not feel delighted. I did not feel motivated. I felt a sharp, distinct pang of guilt.I closed the television. I opened the application. I completed a three minute lesson I did not actually need to finish, just to make the notification stop. Just to make the owl look happy again.After I locked my phone, I sat in the silence of my living room and realized something profound. I had just been manipulated by a piece of software. But more importantly, I had just experienced the exact mechanism that makes this company a billion dollar powerhouse.For the past decade, the product design industry has been obsessed with a single, elusive concept. We call it delight. We design fri

Darren Yeouxdesign.cc · 30 July 2026

Why the best UX often disappears. And when it shouldn’t When every interaction is frictionless, nothing sticks. Why the future of good UX depends on knowing when to slow users down. (image source: ABC Radio National) The paradox of “forgettable” design “Make the experience forgettable,” a senior business leader once told me. That might sound like a joke to a designer who prides himself on creating memorable moments. But as the head of airport operations, he was dead serious. Singapore Airlines handles thousands of travellers every day. For these passengers, joy comes from the in-flight experience and on-time departures. The last thing the operations team wants is for a customer to get stuck in a long queue or hit a snag like a failed boarding pass, only to face their wrath and complaints. At the airport, smooth is invisible. One reason Changi Airport remains among the best in the world is its relentless investment in removing friction. State-of-the-art passport-less immigration clearance was once thought impossible. Today, Singapore residents and eligible travellers simply walk through automated gantries without whipping out their passports. Withi

Patrick Neemanuxdesign.cc · 27 July 2026

The four-step hook — trigger, action, variable reward, investment — drawn as one machine that keeps restarting itself. AI assisted.The habit loop that built social media is now wired into every chatbot — here are ways to use it without becoming the dealer.16 min read6 days ago--Nir Eyal published Hooked in 2014, and product teams have been running its playbook ever since. It was a topic I taught in General Assembly, and have been fascinated with ever since because it’s at the base of many interactions, digital or not.Press enter or click to view image in full sizeB.J. Fogg of Tiny Habits and Nir Eral of Hooked.’s Hook Model builds directly on ’s work at the Stanford Behavior Design Lab, where Eyal studied. Fogg’s Behavior Model (B=MAP) holds that behavior happens when motivation, ability, and a prompt converge at the same moment.Eyal absorbed this foundation — particularly Fogg’s emphasis on triggers and making actions as frictionless as possible — and extended it into a four-phase loop, adding variable rewards and investment to explain how products build habits over repeated cycles.Press enter or click to view image in full

Kristen Bermankristenberman.substack.com · 13 July 2026

Everyone is shipping AI features right now, and very few of them are getting used.So how do you get people to actually use the thing you built? In these popular teardowns, I break down what real products got right or wrong about getting users to try and stick with their AI features.These teardowns are for you if: you’re planning to ship or relaunch an AI feature in the next six months, or you work in product and you’re focused on adoption and engagement.Curious about working with Irrational Labs on AI adoption? Reach out: kristen@irrationallabs.com.Descript Underlord: Why you should make your AI features “wild”👉 When AI is the new normal, normal isn’t good enoughHow do you get someone to try your new features? Conventional logic would tell you: make the features better than other things on the market. But that can be a slow game. You have to convince people your feature is better. Descript took a completely different approach. Descript Underlord earned attention when it did something genuinely surprising (turning your voice into a cartoon character’s), the kind of “holy moly, wow” capability that makes people want

Michael Buckleyuxdesign.cc · 3 July 2026

Why making it easier to apply may have made it harder to get hired. Image source: Adobe Stock Ten years ago, roughly 15% of job applications resulted in an interview. In practical terms, that meant submitting six or seven applications often led to one interview. Today, that figure has fallen to roughly 2–3%, meaning many applicants now submit 30 to 50 applications just to receive a single interview. Meanwhile, recruiters report receiving more than 300 applications for the average open position, roughly three times the volume seen just a few years ago. What changed? Not long ago, applying for a job required a meaningful investment of time. You carefully read the job description, researched the company, and decided whether the position was worth pursuing. You tailored your resume, wrote a cover letter, completed lengthy application forms, and often answered employer-specific questions. That effort created a natural form of friction. It didn’t eliminate unqualified applicants, but it did discourage people from applying indiscriminately. Today, much of that friction has disappeared. LinkedIn’s Easy Apply, Indeed’s one-click applications, resume autofil

Arun Bakirathanuxdesign.cc · 26 June 2026

Why bad UX is often a business decision, not a design failure. There’s a screen most people have seen at least once. You’re trying to cancel a subscription. You’ve made up your mind. You click the button that looks like it starts the process. And then something strange happens. The page that loads isn’t a cancellation form. It’s a full-screen gallery of everything you’re about to lose. Videos. Deals. Music. Free delivery. Presented in bright tiles, warm colours, friendly icons. A highlighted countdown showing how many days you have left. And somewhere at the bottom, small, grey, easy to miss, the option to continue cancelling. You almost didn’t see it. That was the point. Someone designed that screen. Someone decided where to put the button. Someone chose that colour. Someone wrote that copy. Someone reviewed the design, ran the numbers, and approved it. And the number they were looking at wasn’t your satisfaction score. The half of UX nobody puts in a portfolio Every portfolio you’ve ever read has some version of this: “I improved onboarding and increased conversion by 34%.” “I redesigned checkout and reduced drop-off by 22%.” Look at what every single one of

Sarah Thompsonnngroup.com · 5 June 2026

Summary: Use behavioral-economics frameworks to uncover hidden friction in your experience and design UX solutions that better support user action. People often intend to take action — join a gym, open a savings account, register for a class, or book tickets to a show — but never follow through. Most of us know this frustrating gap between what we intend to do and what we actually do. Behavioral economics helps UX practitioners investigate why intention fails to become action. It enables them to look beyond whether users can complete a task and uncover what shapes their motivation, attention, confidence, and decisions along the way. The Promise of Behavioral Economics How to Apply Behavioral Economics to Your Work Case Study: Applying the 3B Framework to a UX Problem The Promise of Behavioral Economics Behavioral economics combines economics and psychology to understand how people behave in real contexts. Emotions, habits, uncertainty, social cues, perceived risk, effort, and the way information is presented all influence what people do. In UX, behavioral economics is especially useful because experiences often depend on users making deci