Figma Make Time Savings, LLM Bias Affects Designers, Target's AI/UX Bid, EasyCircuit

Nik and Dan open the fall semester with a look at how their own courses have been rebuilt around AI this year. Nik's third run of AI Augmented Designer now leans hard into professional software development practice. Dan is teaching Designing for AI Products and Services, an Advanced Interaction Design Studio reworked around AI-ready design systems, and a new independent study with Brad Myers on "AI widgets" — what happens when scroll bars, cut-and-paste, and other decades-old microinteractions get smarter.

This week’s news: Figma's randomized controlled trial on Figma Make found roughly 20% time savings, but Nik pushes on whether a 52-minute task dropping to 45 minutes actually feels different, or whether the real gain is more iteration cycles. Maud Benaddi's article on bias in LLMs prompts a discussion of how training-data skew shows up in generated personas, AI-assisted copy, and flattened qualitative research summaries; Nik connects it to Liz Gerber's exercise having students generate personas of themselves and watch the class recoil. Target's appointment of its first chief AI officer, Chandhu Nair, alongside Purvi Shah as SVP of UX, gets read as a welcome sign of AI and UX paired around real operational value rather than an AI strategy for its own sake. We close on EasyCircuit, a new app for vibe-coding hardware prototypes — fun, promising, and, as Nik found when a wiring render would have let the blue smoke out, a reminder that basic usability QA still matters.

LINKS

Measuring Time Savings From Figma Make

https://www.figma.com/blog/measuring-time-savings-from-figma-make/

Bias in LLMs, or how to design for everyone with tools built for someone — Maud Benaddi

https://medium.com/@maudbenaddi/bias-in-llms-or-how-to-design-for-everyone-with-tools-built-for-someone-01b8e38bd17b

Target Strengthens AI and UX Capabilities to Power Its Next Chapter of Growth

https://corporate.target.com/news-features/article/2026/08/chandhu-nair-purvi-shah

EasyCircuit

https://easycircuit.app/

Dr. Liz Gerber’s LinkedIn post
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/elizgerber_ai-builds-cardboard-cutouts-of-people-not-share-7440452615232024576-aS5k/