Case Study Club

The weekly read for designers who shape products.

The Dispatch

●

Source of truth

The Figma file used to be where the truth lived. Designers owned it. Engineers worked from it. The whole team organized around keeping that one artifact accurate.

That's quietly stopped being true.

Last week I caught myself working without it. I'd closed Figma mid-project, opened it twice for reference, and run every iteration through Claude Code.

I spent years keeping Figma 1:1 with the code. On tight deadlines they diverged so much that the upkeep stopped being worth it. In calmer periods I'd try to catch up. (That time should have gone into improving the product. Not backtracking old work.)

Big teams are pulling in the same direction. Notion ships from voice specs through Boxy. Sendbird's Automators lets non-engineers ship products. They're all collapsing the gap between the design artifact and what's being shipped.

Figma is still useful. It's where ideas are captured. The thing you ship is now the truth. Not code. Not Figma. The Product. Like it always should have been.

Field Notes

●

— Volvo commissioned a typeface designed to improve driver safety on in-car displays. UX Collective

— Pew finds 26% of web pages from 2013-2023 have vanished without deprecation. Chris Coyier

— NN/g's survey of 150 designers finds alignment outranks craft as the biggest reported struggle. NN/g

— NASA's Landsat tool renders your name across satellite imagery of Earth. NASA

The Portfolio

●

mchiu.co.uk Portfolio, 2026

A portfolio where process and outcome sit side by side

Alex Chiu's portfolio presents each project as a bento-box layout: process, references, decisions, and outcome on a single screen. The grid is doing more than aesthetic work. It surfaces the relationship between input and output without making the reader scroll through a thousand words to find the conclusion. A great technique to make it easy on the visitor or potential recruiters.

The Tool

●

nudges.fyi Nudges, 2026

A field guide to biases in AI products

Nudges.fyi is a set of 43 interactive field cards covering cognitive biases, decision-making heuristics, and the patterns that emerge when those same forces apply to AI systems. Sudha Broslawsky, former Design executive at Google, built it as a working reference rather than a manifesto.

The cards map behavioral psychology and machine-learning behavior side by side. The link is direct: the heuristics that explain how people make decisions under uncertainty also explain how users respond to AI suggestions and how AI systems exploit those defaults. For anyone designing in or around AI products, this is a great reference.

Written and edited by Jan Haaland. Published weekly from Norway.

Forwarding this to one person is the best way to support Case Study Club. If someone comes to mind, please send it their way.

Issue No. 003

Unsubscribe · View in browser