Issue 128

WELCOME

Being Designerly 128 has curated content at the intersection of Design, Tech and Human-AI to help you sharpen the human skills AI can’t fake. This issue contains the WIRE+FRAME prompt framework by yours truly, visualizations of how people use ChatGPT and a visual timeline of AI, career dreamer, functional personas - AI edition

FEATURE

Prompting Is A Design Act: How To Brief, Guide And Iterate With AI

Prompting is more than giving AI some instructions. You could think of it as a design act, part creative brief and part conversation design. This second article on AI augmenting design work introduces a designerly approach to prompting: one that blends creative briefing, interaction design, and structural clarity.

TRANSPARENCY

Amazon's FTC Prime trial calls 'customer obsession' leadership principle into question

Transparency and Advocacy principles resulted in a $2.5B settlement. The case, first filed by the FTC in 2023 under then-chair Lina Khan, outlined a half dozen ways that Amazon utilized misleading web design tactics, known as “dark patterns,” to get online shoppers to enroll in the Prime program when making a purchase, or make it frustratingly difficult to cancel.

VISUAL COMMUNICATION

Visualization: How People Actually Use ChatGPT

A report from OpenAI sheds light on user behavior by analyzing a sample of 1.1 million messages from active ChatGPT users between May 2024 to July 2025.

The findings, summarized in a helpful visualization by Made Visual Daily, show that ChatGPT’s core appeal is utility: helping users solve real-world problems, write better, and find information fast.

Did anything surprise you?

Eight Years of Consumer AI Deployment in One Giant Timeline

When eight years of LLM evolution are collapsed into one view, what’s revealed in this visualization is not merely the pace of releases, it’s how competition, curiosity, and capital have fused into a self-sustaining cycle. Each launch seems to fuel the next with even greater velocity, pushing breakthroughs into deployment at unprecedented speed and scale. It’s a vivid testament to how far the field has come - and how high the stakes now are.

EXPERIMENT

Career Dreamer

A playful AI based tool by Google to help you draft a Career Identity Statement that showcases the unique skills and experiences you bring to the workforce, discover careers that might align with your background and go deeper into those that interest you.

What surprised you about the results?

UX

Functional Personas With AI: A Lean, Practical Workflow

Paul Boag shows how to breathe new life into this stale UX asset and demonstrates that it’s possible to create truly useful functional personas in a lightweight way. He argues that using AI to help us create personas based on existing assets is preferable to having no focus on user attention at all.

Just don't let AI hallucinate - ground it in real data, and know your data enough to observe and notice issues...

UNTIL NEXT TIME

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I love your thoughts, suggestions and feedback, positive or negative—just reply or email me at lycerejo (at) gmail.com - thank you!