UCD Coach
The design industry, decoded daily.
Overview
A daily design digest that reads the industry and returns the five things worth your time — sourced, dated, hype-checked.
The problem
Every design newsletter has the same problem: volume without judgement. You get twenty links and no view on which of them matter. A pipeline that summarises more, faster, makes that worse rather than better.
0→1
- 01
Built the editorial constraints into the pipeline rather than the prompt: every item carries a source and a date.
- 02
Every item gets a hype status — Hype, Adoption, or Established — so the reader knows whether something is a press release or a practice.
- 03
Each briefing ends with one action. Five items a day, across seven topics.
- 04
Layered a human-curated "Coach Picks" tier on top so the whole thing isn't machine-judged.
Under the hood
A daily pipeline sources, classifies and summarises, then writes to a dated archive that becomes the permanent URL structure. Every digest is addressable at /archive/YYYY/MM/DD, which is what makes the archive product possible at all.
Features & interaction design
- 01
Hype status as a visible badge
The single most useful piece of metadata in design news, and nobody was surfacing it.
- 02
Receipts on every claim
Source domain and date sit next to the summary. When something couldn't be verified, the digest says so out loud — that honesty is the product.
- 03
One move per briefing
Editorial output that ends in an action beats output that ends in a summary.
- 04
Topics are landing pages
Seven taxonomies, each an indexable page with its own description. Structure serving both the reader and the crawler.
Outcomes
- —A daily digest publishing five sourced, dated, hype-checked items across seven topics, with human-curated picks, RSS, a full dated archive, and an affiliate revenue layer. Live.
- —Daily publishing cadence with source-linked briefings
- —Clear hype vs adoption framing for AI and tooling news
- —Free, no-signup entry point for the UCD product family