Test your idea or product with AI participants and make decisions faster.

Synthetic Users: user research without the headaches

I'm continuing my work on the landing page sections, focusing on an area that showcases clickable industry cards.

We all wear masks on a daily basis throughout our lives.

It would be great if Halloween were that one day of the year when people didn’t wear masks but actually showed their true selves and their real faces.

Now, that would be an interesting Halloween.

When I started in this business, my seniors always said, “Underpromise and overdeliver,” and I thought that was strange. Today, I see these huge corporations overpromising and underdelivering, and I find that strange.

All these posts on LinkedIn feel like messages written on the walls of a public toilet. They embody emptiness, desperately seeking attention while pretending to offer profound insights.

Prediction: Google will become irrelevant and disappear into obscurity in 2 to 5 years.

What happened to that Nigerian prince who was sending emails to everyone, hoping to find someone who would accept his billions?

It’s interesting how, when you ask for feedback on a design and mention your concerns about the content because English is your second language, everyone focuses on the writing. But if you don’t bring it up, no one comments on it—some even praise it. Focus groups are nonsense.

I just wish these writers would stop with this multiverse shit in every damn show or movie.

I’ve been noticing on LinkedIn a flood of laid-off engineers and designers sharing their impressive contributions to the companies they worked for before being let go. It makes me wonder: How is it possible that people with such significant accomplishments are being laid off?

Now that smart glasses are somehow trendy, I’m really hoping they replace phones. That way, I can sit with people, pretend to listen, and make eye contact while browsing the internet.

Are you passionate about Design Systems? No, they’re homogenized, all looking the same. Frankly, it’s boring. Do you excel in Figma? A tool doesn’t make a great designer. Do you think in symbols and assets? No, I think about the user.

These questions are fluff and nonsense.

Now that the hype surrounding AI has calmed down a bit, let’s sit back, relax, breathe in, breathe out, and ask ourselves and everyone else: has it actually created anything of value?

Nope.

Has it solved a real world problem?

Nope.

It’s worth remembering that Pokémon Go has been linked to 256 deaths and 150,000 traffic accidents. I often wonder if the creators see this as an acceptable risk/necessary churn or categorize it as a bad user experience?

Have you noticed? Google is shit, Apple iOS 18 is shit, the phones are lackluster shit, and most movies are just plain shit. Social networks are filled with shit, and Tesla’s robot will likely be another piece of shit. Are we spoiled, or have we lost our sense of quality?

The creators of Arcane are working on this. Arcane was phenomenal, so I’m looking forward to Penelope of Sparta.

I’m so old, I remember when Dribbble was the place to be. Back when getting an invite felt like winning the lottery.

I sincerely can't believe there's so much buzz around a wallpaper app. As a society, somewhere, somehow, slowly but surely, the human race is collectively reversing evolution.

Website development progress update. Designed in Figma, implementation in Webflow.

It's worrying how many people believe an AI tool can create their next billion-dollar idea. Let me be clear: the tool isn’t what matters—the idea is. Don’t depend on tools like Cursor or Claude to build your ideas; focus on yourself and your vision.

These YouTube creators are turning ad transitions into an art form. I’m fully invested in the story, and then, out of nowhere, a sudden slap in the face.

I think—and correct me if I’m wrong—that the designers at WhatsApp were high when they did this.

I’m wondering how GPT wrappers could be valued at millions of dollars. 🤔

Something just feels off.

“Dune” by Frank Herbert, the world’s best-selling science fiction novel, was rejected over 20 times before being accepted by a publisher of car manuals.

The most pointless pages on every website are “About Us” and “Meet the Team.” Meaningless.

I couldn’t sleep and rewatched it after many years. What a fucking achievement. It’s absolutely mindblowing that Akira came out in 1988.

I'm paying for YouTube to avoid ads, yet these YouTube creators are now inserting several of them throughout their videos.

Oh, so now there aren't just generalists, but deep generalists? WTF is a deep generalist?

There has never been a better time to be a maker. 

You have to make what people want to buy. This is commerce.

Don’t ever compromise on quality. But sell the dream.

Be narrow. It’s much better to mean a great deal to few people than next to nothing to a huge amount.

Everything is so fake and repetitive. It’s like all these social networks are dead and lifeless, and with the rise of AI, I have a feeling it will only get worse.

We live in a world where the line between satire and reality blurs into obscurity. Our civilization, with its arbitrary divisions and misplaced priorities, is a masterclass in unintentional comedy.

We havent solved basic human communication and we think we’ll solve machine communication.

The more I read about AI, the more I believe that our minds are not like computers. Most of us are hilariously bad at mathematics, reasoning, and even basic logic; let’s not even touch the subject of communication and feelings.

My theory is that OpenAI has become part of the United States military-industrial complex.

YouTube is hilarious. Big Tech doesn’t want you anymore. It’s getting worse every day, and now here’s a brief message from my sponsor, Brilliant.

I do wonder, did the OpenAI leadership polish their resignation letters through ChatGPT?

I really love Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books, and I love Jackson's movie trilogy, but frankly, I was never afraid of Sauron. To me, a being so powerful putting all his power into a ring and then losing it makes Sauron seem not that smart.

Most of the content on YouTube is like food at McDonald's: plenty of choices, but nothing truly nourishing.

Ancient Romans really enjoyed spending a lot of time in public baths and toilets, where they would socialize, exercise, and conduct business. This leads me to theorize that many of our current web social constructs are subconsciously inspired by public toilets.

If a designer needs to know how to code, then a PM should also know how to design and code. To make it even more fair, now the designer should also know how to PM. So let’s unify these job postings into one role that covers everything.

We live in a world where people are more focused on engagement than on value. They want reactions, but not real conversations. It's about clickbait, not quality.

The American secret service tried to spike Hitler's carrots with female hormones to change him into a woman.

iOS 18 is shit. I have an iPhone 15 Pro, and it’s behaving awfully. Apple has so much talent, but it seems like it’s being wasted.

You ask an LLM for ideas, but it only gives you basic suggestions. Even when you push for something wildly creative, it hits you with a quantum computing app that lets you live an alternative life. Now you’re sitting there, wondering why billions are being invested in this.

I am so tired of seeing Cursor everywhere and people who don’t know how to navigate GitHub claiming it’s the second coming. In reality, they took VS Code, an open-source library, added some AI features, and packaged it with a price tag.

It’s interesting that Figma, a leader in design with probably a ton of design talent at their disposal, somehow created a worse UI. Is this an overreliance on data rather than common sense? Is the design team to blame, or the management? Why the fuck is the toolbar at the bottom?

Strange that with all these capabilities of LLMs, no one has started an AI band yet. 😐

Posts