ctward

i've been struggling a lot with my team to standardize our presentation systems. as soon as we got claude people just started making adhoc, non-standard, slides. This is good because they're 10x better than the bullshit one offs PMs used to make. But as a result we've got 80 different ways of conveying the same type of information to our leadership. And its pissing those leaders off.

Getting people aligned on a single template is our biggest headache for the ops side of the house. Will definitely need to research this further. Thanks for the post.

Valid point. Should I stand up my own blog or should I use a different platform? What recommendations do you have?

I agree that certain icons that are common parlance can increase cognition ( vs. x). However I think expanding a users icon lexicon and forcing memorization can actually harm cognitive experience.

Our users are context switching across dozens if not hundreds of digital experiences a day. Forcing memory recall is a tax. The question is always "whats the ROI?"

IMO color and words go just as far as an icon without relying on net new visual language.

As per your comment on horizontal scrolling, I couldn't agree more. Horizontal scrolling is booty. However, depending on the job to be done you can avoid overly wide tables with customizable columns, expandable rows, hover states, and strategic truncation.

I certainly would prefer those strategies over relying on a unique icon language that isn't part of the dozen or so immediately recognizable icon schemas already familiar to users.

Hey, author here, I'll attempt to clarify.

In a data grid or table the relative cognitive load of the page is already very high. Adding iconography to the table body content is often unnecessary and increases visual noise, processing requirements, and generally reduces readability/scanability.

I've always felt that icons in this context are a risk or liability instead of a strength. I decided to info dump my findings to my team then published it as an article.

I probably could use a good editor to help me next time!

I think in the future product designers will shift into two factions. Live code generation and design system development. Design systems will be the backbone of any quality AI interface generation system. How we build those design systems will be the interesting part. Will most people unify around material/carbon or will they invest in house teams to ensure their UX doesn't fall behind the competition?

my push back on this is that unless you have a pretty robust visual design system the outputs are going to be incredibly unoriginal. Yes it will make solving UX problems faster but at the cost of visual differentiation. There is always going to be a place for high fidelity exploration for styling innovation and brand identity.