November 10, 2026 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #584
This newsletter issue was sent out to 172,785 subscribers on Tuesday, November 10, 2026.
Editorial
How do product teams work these days? Where do teams fail, and where do they succeed — especially when they try to integrate AI meaningfully in their work?
Meet 🔮 AI Conf 2027, a friendly, practical, pragmatic half-day conference — on AI-ready design systems, AI workflows, design patterns for AI and the state of AI for 2027. With Brad Frost, Christine Vallaure, TJ Pitre and yours truly. Dec 1. Jump to the details.
Until then, we’ve organized a good number of smashing online workshops for you in the following weeks to come:
- Design Patterns For AI Interfaces + self-paced course UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Nov 16–24 - AI-Ready Design Systems For Designers UX
with Christine Vallaure. Nov 30–Dec 4 - Designing Websites That Convert UX
with Paul Boag. Dec 7 - Designing For Complex UI Masterclass UX
with Vitaly Friedman. December 2–16 - UX Strategy Masterclass UX
with Vitaly Friedman. December 11–15 - Jump to all workshops →
In this newsletter, we also look at AI design and engineering in 2027 and design workflow teams put in practice when integrating AI into their existing workflows. Let’s dive right in!
— Vitaly
1. AI UX Playground
How to design for models that stream, act autonomously, or handle tools? AI UX Playground features more than 150 AI interface patterns, demos, product teardowns, and guides to help you master the challenge. The collection also includes handpicked copy-paste prompts and agent skills you can use right away.
2. Agent Experience Optimization
AI agents are changing the game: Instead of solely optimizing our sites and digital services for human visitors, we need to optimize for agents, too, to ensure they can discover and reference our content. Agent Experiences has got your back as you’re getting started with Agent Experience Optimization, with guides and resources and an Agent Analyzer to check how usable your site is for agents.
3. Stageshow
Even good AI models still have difficulties producing a polished faux UI. To change that, Benji Taylor created Stageshow, a skill that gives your agent a workflowit can follow to achieve better results. The agent reads the skill, starts from the closest example, builds the demo, then films it and fixes what it finds. The result is an ordinary React component you can use and change like the rest of your code.
4. The Problem With The Sparkle Button
The sparkle button seems to be almost everywhere these days — in spreadsheets, design tools, mail clients, team chats, video calls, and even banking apps. John Sabutis explores the problem with the omnipresent sparkle button, what the sparkle is trying to hide, and how we can do better.
5. AI-Ready Design System
Developers can fill in the gaps when turning a Figma file into code. AI can’t do this reliably — it improvises when the instructions are unclear, and the result is often a component that looks finished on the surface but is partly invented. Christine Vallaure wrote a practical guide on how to start your design system in code instead and generate the Figma library from it with MCP to circumvent the problem.
6. Measuring AI-Readiness
How AI-ready is our design system? To help design system teams answer the question, Christoph Hellmuth created open-design-system-bench. The benchmark runs real coding agents against your real components and gives you an AI-readiness score, built from seven static checks, each with concrete findings and fixes.
7. AI Design Engineering Skills
Craft is a growing collection of design engineering concepts, with skills for AI agents — from typography and color to layout, motion, sound, and data. Quite opinionated, with many references, resources, and examples to explore. Kindly put together by Gustavo Fior.
8. Accessible UX Research, Now Shipping 📚
We’ve got exciting news! Our newest Smashing book, Accessible UX Research by Michele A. Williams, is finally shipping worldwide! Get the book right away or order the eBook for instant download.
Accessible UX Research is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Download a free sample (PDF, 2.3MB) or get the book right away.
9. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Designing Websites That Convert UX
with Paul Boag. Dec 7 - Designing For Complex UI Masterclass UX
with Vitaly Friedman. December 2–16 - UX Strategy Masterclass UX
with Vitaly Friedman. December 11–15 - How To Measure UX and Design Impact UX + self-paced course
with Vitaly Friedman. Mar 2–16 - Jump to all workshops →
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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