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🏎️ Speed is cheap. Trust gaps cost months

January 21, 2026

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.

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.

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):

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.

Contract:
States (default, hover, focus, disabled, loading, error):
Keyboard and accessibility notes:
Layout constraints (long labels, narrow containers):
Analytics event:
Visual regression coverage:

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.
```
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.

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.

Solving Problems the Hard Way

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.

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.

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

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