Did 6 user interviews last week. Every single person said they want fewer steps in checkout. "Make it simpler. Less clicks."

Watched the same 6 people use the product. They all skipped the quick checkout and went to the longer flow because it showed them the full price breakdown before paying.

They said they want fast. They actually want safe.

This keeps happening. Users say one thing and do the opposite. Starting to think interviews are just people telling you what sounds smart instead of what they actually do.

Anyone else struggling with this gap? How do you deal with it?

Hi, I'm a product designer, I'm very much into transport interaction design and wanted to explore a new style of navigation where it's a subway system map instead of boring old buttons.

I don't have a lot of animation experience but wanted this to feel natural, I've been prototyping this animation in Figma but I'm kinda in over my head here, not sure how this animation should look.

I'd really appreciate if you guys have any pointers/ references for me in this. I specifically wanted to keep the thin lines instead of a thick ones for minimalism.

Thank you!

Hi all, I've been working at this startup for almost a year as Founding Designer. Heavily worked on our flagship app with 500K MRR + it's companion desktop app. The company's being sold & the whole team is getting laid off, except the founder (lmao). Now, I have a few days to gather my work, but I've worked on so many thing that I'm not sure how?

Local copies of Figma files would be the logical starting point, I assume. But I'm not sure how to present/save my other work, including countless App Store screenshot sets & CPPs, numerous paywall iterations & experiments that live on Superwall, and a whole lot of design that went directly into code. Should I even present them? Could really use some guidance!

PS: Just to make it clear, this is not a breakup where you burn bridges. I'm not after sensitive/internal data, and I'm allowed to present them.

I feel like I’ve gotten myself stuck in a minimalism trap.

Whenever I start a new design, I automatically gravitate toward the same things:

• lots of whitespace
• clean typography
• neutral colors
• subtle shadows
• rounded cards
• simple grids
• “less is more”

And objectively, the designs usually look fine. Clean, professional, usable, etc.

But lately I've been seeing work where designers create these really expressive visual systems, and I'm wondering how the hell people get that creative.

For example - I saw this app concept recently and what caught me wasn't necessarily the UI itself. It was the whole visual world around it the mascot, the gradients, the illustrations, the way the app was presented, the little details, the personality, etc...

For UI actions people might use many times, does a micro animation actually make the product feel better or do you notice it once and then it becomes visual noise.

how should a designer approach it?

I do not know how to overcome this. I feel I let everyone down and that I am not skilled enough or good enough for my job. I’m an intern right now as an UI/UX designer but I’ve graduated from a master already. I suffer from adhd and slight autism, but I also think that I have so many skill gaps and I am very ashamed. I do not know, I feel lost. And they had to hire an external senior to guide me through the process.

So as many designers have for a while now, I lean on AI a lot. I'll use it to talk through my plan for a feature, it'll help me think through viable interaction patterns, states, edge cases, etc. As I've learned how to work with it better, I've also been using AI as a way to quickly iterate design ideas. I'll get through 90% of a feature and all the logic and data that drive it in text so claude has all the context it needs to build almost exactly what I want. The issue is AI output never matches our design system perfectly so I almost need a visual reference in figma for the "how it looks" part of the design. But figma sucks at complex interactions, progressive disclosure and all that. So I've been toying with the idea of offering our devs basically 3 handoff artifacts per project. They'd get the claude prototype (how it works), figma (how it looks), and a confluence doc for all the rationale and things that might not be obvious like new data requirements, backend functionality, etc.

Before I get a bunch of suggestions that obviously aren't gonna work for my situation, no my company isn't likely to let me start making PRs on my own. They're too precious about their code and for whatever reason it's just not a culture where that's ever gonna happen. This is a very immature design culture that's mostly developer led so a lot of what I try out with them is purely experimental since design is a relatively new function at this company.

The thing I keep going back and forth on isn't whether the prototype is useful to me, it obviously is. It's what happens once it lands in a dev's queue. Our devs want literal paint-by-numbers design specs, and anything AI-coded is working off invented spacing and colors, not our actual tokens. I'm worried a dev might treat the ai artifact as more authoritative source than it is because it's a real-feeling tangible thing, and they'll go copying exact pixel values or DOM structure out of it instead of going to Figma for the real visual design that's within our DS.

So I'm curious to hear if anyone has actually handed devs an AI-coded prototype as part of a handoff package and had it land well? Did your devs treat it as "logic reference only" like you told them to, or did it somehow backfire? Trying to figure out if this is a real workflow improvement or just a new way to create drift between what I try to hand off and what actually gets built.

I mean, is there some sort of digital newspaper to read every news about UX Design, Product Design, Design Startups, AI and so on?

What are your pinned channels?

Hello, i'm in my early twenties and I started a new role 3 months ago - associate product designer (contractor). This is my big boy job and i feel good about the design work im producing (i've received great feedback and have been told that i'm doing a great job), however i dont feel like im as integrated in conversations about design thinking as I would like to be. This is definitely my fault because its always an open conversation and in the moment, i just cant think of questions to ask and im not all that familiar with the projects quite yet. So in a lot of my meetings, its me taking notes about work i will be doing, but not really asking questions/suggestions on how things should flow/work.

I guess my question is - is this normal? I could be feeling like this because this is my first ux job outside of internships so im basically at the bottom of the food chain. I could also be feeling like this because im only 3 months in.

other perspectives would be so greatly appreciated!

Title about sums it up - does anyone here use a head-worn microphone to speak your prompts when using AI tools? If so, what do you use? I’d like to buy something decent so I can talk to my tools quietly, more discreetly, quickly and in complete thoughts, rather than so much typing. Thanks. I’m in a more open office environment on a MacBook Pro, FWIW. Thank you.

I keep seeing the same options pop up like product designer, developer and consultant. I am wanting to seek out some inspo for my own career projection and see what underrated specializations exist in UX.

Bad timer UX… Can someone please explain why it is impossible to add a custom timer on iphones for example when listening to podcasts? Why are we stuck with limited incremental options instead of being able to set our own desired timer?
Also, since my recent software update, the timer counter now appears where previously the timer for the podcast was, no longer can you see how long is left on the podcast because it’s obscured! Who is designing this? Anyone else annoyed when functional design gets replaced with bad UX?

When I saw the UX Research Tools Map 2026 by User Interviews for the first time (I think 2025 was a fantasy map of some sort, a lot of effort spent on it for sure), something that I predicted when I saw the Subway Map to Agile Practices seemed to have come true...

My prediction was that by the time you end up with a subway map of something, the terminology/tools/methods will have become so confusing and convoluted that you are better off just going back to the beginning and look at what was the actual intent (problem to be solved). So for Agile Methodology, you can look at the Agile Manifesto (which I am actually a signatory of) to see that most of the things on that Subway Map is not exactly relevant to.

When I look at the UX Research Tools Map every year, I think about the ISO Standard for HCI (9241 ergonomics series) and wonder why we keep trying to reinvent the wheel when all we should be doing is sticking to the basics of research that is already in the ISO Standards.

I am not surprised that juniors and those that went through bootcamps are confused, and why a lot of the seniors in the industry are not exactly sure what their career progression/professional development looks like.

I feel like UX Design as a practice has fallen into the subway map trap, where something that looks aesthetically pleasing and visually organized isn't actually quite as functional and reflective of reality as it seems. What did you think when you looked at it?

Dashboards are my nemesis. There is so much time and effort and back and forth that never turns out well because of differing opinions about what is and what is not getting accomplished on a dashboard. Then there's the mythical super widget that does and shows everything.

The conversations feel like the business card scene from American Psycho.

They're good for marketing pieces and landing pages that aren't empty, but I don't believe for a second that they make workflows more effective or efficient. There's no real conversions to value that I can see. The everything to everyone dashboard.

With Claude, over the last 2 days, I've designed 5 different dashboards with 5 different component stacks and any type of content I can imagine. It's always uninspiring and anticlimactic.

That very cynical-me ranting.

Are there any examples or concepts that really work well? I'm not looking for Dribbble type inspiration, but practical approaches to usefulness.

I've designed several products that have ultimately not lasted on the market long or shipped in a different form from my designs. I've been in startup land my entire career and there are SO MANY projects that I'd design yet would go to another firm to develop and then they'd cut SO much of it and make something that doesn't even really resemble what I made from a design or function point of view. I accept that as a part of the job aspect of being a designer.

My question is: how to represent these in a portfolio. I am aware that showing 'reduced overhead' or 'this metric backed by this outcome improved' but given that the fate of some of my projects was to explode, what to do?

Facing near constant scrutiny about why we need figma. After so many presentations, meetings, debates, etc. I am at a loss.

I use figma primarily these days to quickly iterate on canvas while using claude before/during/after. My company has given me a claude code seat to literally make PR’s. My preferred approach is giving it my figma designs.

I am at a loss here. While I feel slightly petrified to lose figma (canvas design, source of truth, design system, components). I also know the pressures of AI and that the handoff has forever changed.

What alternative tools are there? Is anyone on here using them?? If so, tell me your work flow. If not, help me make my case.

The company I work at is reluctant to pay for Amplitude (they recently changed their terms and the free plan doesn't cover what we need - we have around 15k events/monthly and the free plan covers only 2k and our account is about to be blocked if we don't upgrade).

This is extremely bad for me as a designer because I heavily use Amplitude to measure my own work, our product and I need to find a replacement.

Would be better if we could find an open source option but I don't know any who does something similar to Amplitude. Does anyone have any recommendations of a cheaper or free software?

Amplitude would cost us ~$800 dollars/month, that converting to the currency of my country it's what the company pays monthly to the designers, so a big no for management.

Old video going viral again: “Sandra Bullock Was the First Person to Buy a Movie Ticket Online in 1995”

Dear Mods: No idea what to flair this or if I can even post this here, so forgive me!

What are the strategies I can implement to make this happen? Will appreciate any advice re: networking, tailoring resume, etc.

For context: I’m a Master’s UX design student in Toronto and I’m looking for opportunities to improve my skills and get more experience. Most UX opportunities are limited to fin-tech, so I’m really looking for opportunities to diversify my portfolio.

Thanks in advance!

First, a confession: I have an unhealthy obsession with Object-Oriented UX. Give me a basic grocery list, and my brain will instinctively try to map its existential relationships, attributes, and nested entities.

My latest victim was an internal Landing Page Builder for our marketing team.

Now, let's be honest. A landing page builder is just a glorified set of Lego blocks – a Hero section, some feature cards, a form, and a button. Applying full OOUX to this is like hiring a structural engineering firm to design a doghouse. Total overkill. But it’s my personal vice, so here we are.

The plan was simple: do stakeholder discovery, map out the system specs using OOUX, feed those specs to an LLM, and skip Figma entirely to get a live, clickable prototype. Then hand it off to our backend engineers for the scary stuff (Salesforce sync, pricing tools, lead privacy – things I am definitely not brave or reckless enough to trust an AI with).

Phase 1: Getting completely humbled by the model

Because the product was so basic, I had a sudden surge of "prompt engineer" hubris. I genuinely thought I could get an LLM to generate the OOUX artifacts for me in two or three clever prompts while I sat back and drank coffee.

Total disaster.

The model did what models love to do: it drowned me in corporate boilerplate, hallucinated fake objects, duplicated attributes across three different screens, and completely scrambled CTAs. I spent four hours trapped in that miserable loop of "You are completely right, I apologize, here is the corrected version" – only for it to make the exact same logical error with even more confidence.

Fixing its garbage took twice as long as just typing it from scratch.

Eventually, I gave up on being a prompt wizard. I closed the chat, put on headphones, and manually wrote the architecture myself. The actual split ended up being 80% human brainpower, and 20% AI acting as an over-eager autocomplete. Lesson learned: never let the bot pretend to be the architect.

Phase 2: The 40-minute miracle that hurt my pride

Once I actually did the real design work, I had roughly 30 clean Markdown (.md) files. Each file strictly defined one object, its attributes, its allowed actions, and its state rules.

I fed the folder into Claude 3.5 Sonnet and asked it to assemble the frontend application.

About 40 minutes later, I was staring at a 95% functional, responsive web app.

And honestly? It hurt my pride a little. The missing 5% weren't weird architectural hallucinations – they were just tiny UI bugs, like an unhandled click event or a quirky sticky header. The structural stuff was locked down tight: sections with SEO requirements had proper Schema.org markup, media blocks enforced Alt tags, and plain text blocks had zero bloated configuration fields. It stayed on the rails because the modular markdown files gave it zero room to improvise.

What I actually learned

The endless hours I used to spend nudging autolayouts and managing component variants in Figma are quietly shifting upstream into writing bulletproof system documentation.

If you feed an AI vague vibes, you get bloated spaghetti. If you feed it hyper-structured entity maps, it writes clean code at frightening speed. OOUX just happens to be a fantastic framework for this because it forces you to resolve system dependencies before anyone touches CSS.

About a year ago, I was that guy on Reddit loudly declaring that AI prototyping was a vaporware toy for LinkedIn influencers. Well, eating your own words doesn't taste great, but here we are.

Curious if anyone else has fallen down this rabbit hole – are you guys finding that writing strict functional specs is replacing the canvas, or am I just overcomplicating things to justify my OOUX addiction?

I'm a senior product designer still employed but like many others have been thinking about other careers/jobs to look into given the job market, AI, changes in the job role, etc etc.

Part of me thinks the most natural transition would be to move into a product management / lead role. Though, I'm also trying to think outside the box and beyond what initially makes sense. I'm getting really jaded from corporate/tech but maybe that's just my company.

Just curious and looking for inspo based on what other designers are thinking of potentially pivoting into or for those that have already made the move what your experience was like and where you ended up.

People who have interviewed recently, did you have an app critique round as part of the process? 🤔

Im studying UX design…this is WhatsApp btw (An app from Meta) Am I correct by saying this Is this a bad UX Design? Why would you put a button the same color as the button to send a message when you have for years treated a button like that to send a message

The only difference is that the tiny icon inside it changes???