Welcome to Desk Notes!

Phil Morton

28 Feb 2025 — 2 min read

Welcome to my new website and the very first issue of Desk Notes!

I’ve been writing on LinkedIn for the past few years, sharing thoughts on research, design, leadership and career development. But LinkedIn has its limitations - posts disappear over time and while brevity is great, sometimes you need more space to go into more detail.

That’s why I created this site and newsletter - to give my writing a more permanent home and to make it easier to revisit useful ideas.

Why Desk Notes?

I had a mentoring catch-up recently and wanted to share some tools and resources, but it was difficult to content that was hidden away deep in a shared drive and find older posts on LinkedIn. Desk Notes is my solution to that.

This newsletter is built around the idea of learning by osmosis - the kind of insights you pick up just by sitting next to someone (me!) at work. I want to share the knowledge and experience I've gained over the last 15 years, to help other people.

Each issue will be a mix of:

Lessons from experience, across research, design and leadership.
Tools, frameworks and mental models that I've found useful.
Book recommendations, useful links and industry trends.

What’s next?

I'm planning to post weekly and to get off to a good start, I've got the first few newsletters lined up already. Beyond that, I'd love to know what kinds of topics would be most useful to you. Hit reply and let me know! 📩

How AI coding is reshaping product teams

Coding is the area in which AI is having the biggest immediate impact. 63% of professional developers use it (and that’s data from May 2024). There are two types of tools emerging: 1. AI coding assistants Tools like GitHub Copilot, Cline and Cursor support developers in their day-to-day work,

An illustration of three ladders. The first has all its rungs, the second has some missing and the third has many missing.

AI won’t make you an expert, but it will make experts better

Imagine you’re working on a project with two colleagues. One is a seasoned expert, the other is just starting out. Both have access to the same AI tools. Who do you think would benefit more? A couple of articles I’ve read recently suggest that it’s the more

An illustration showing the difference between using lorem ipsum and real copy.

Using AI to write more realistic prototype copy

I recently finished a project where I used AI to write 90% of the copy for my mid-fidelity concepts and prototype. In the ‘olden days’ of 2 years ago, you’d have to write all of the copy in your designs yourself, or resort to lorem ipsum. But what if

An illustration showing a couple speaking to a researcher.

You should probably be doing more research with couples

The vast majority of qual UX research is one-to-one. But in reality, many products and services aren’t bought or used by just one person: it’s a couple making the decision. Just consider the data: * 71% of holiday bookings are made by couple or families * Partner influence is the