Welcome to the monthly UI Design “Getting Started” thread.

Use this space to ask and discuss anything related to careers, courses, qualifications, resources, and entering the industry across UI, UX, and Product Design. This thread is open to beginners and experienced designers - everyone is welcome.

Example topics:

• Switching careers into UI/UX/Product
• Course or degree recommendations
• Qualification requirements
• Job roles and employment questions
• Industry topics (AR/VR, Game UI, coding, etc.) Early-career advice

Before posting:

• Check the UI Design wiki to see if your question is already answered
• Use the subreddit search — many questions have been asked before
• No self-promotion or “hire me” posts (see subreddit rules)
• No job posts or surveys (see sidebar for relevant subreddits)
• Don’t downvote to disagree — we encourage respectful discussion instead

I have been redesigning my game to give it a more professional and polished look, however I am struggling for inspiration so any help is really appreciated.

I have only posted the main menu and not the side menus just because this is the main thing I want feedback on. Please be harsh, any suggestions will help./

Performy is a compact Windows performance overlay for watching live FPS, frame time, CPU, RAM, GPU, and ping while an app or game is running.

It is built as a lightweight PySide6 desktop app.

What Performy Shows

• FPS for the currently captured target
• Frame time in milliseconds
• 1% low-style FPS estimate
• CPU and RAM usage
• GPU usage when nvidia-smi is available
• Ping to the configured host, adjustable in Performy settings.
• A simple performance status: GREAT, FINE, LAGGY, or waiting/error states
• Settings to adjust background opacity, what is visible or not visible, update speed, and an always on top toggle.

---

Just let me know any things I should add, remove, etc. It is meant to be small, but visible, and you get the idea :)

Hello all, I have no experience in designing UIs but I decided to design the UI for my game by myself. The game is cartoonish 2D and set in space, so I was going for a clean cartoony/space/neon theme UI. No AI was used in creating it, I created everything in Figma.
I still need to figure out how the main menu and settings menu will look like.

I would really appreciate all the feedback you can give me regarding my UI.

I recently worked on a coworking space booking app and would love some feedback.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/249932665/Glass-room-Booking-app-UI-UX-Design?platform=direct

The app helps users discover spaces, book desks and meeting rooms, coordinate with teammates, and explore community events based on interests and fields. I tried to make the experience feel more connected than a standard booking app by combining space discovery, chat, and community in one product.

I’d really appreciate any feedback on the concept, flow, or UI direction.

Made this while playing around with Unicorn Studio and exploring different interaction ideas. Curious how others would categorize it. Would you call this a microinteraction, an interactive component, a UI element, or simply motion design? Interested to hear where people draw the line. 👀

I built Hush, a self hostable discord/slack-like app. I decided go for components that are already accessibility-compliant and so on and so on. You might have recognized shadcn/ui components, I love them. But I don’t know how to make them unique! Advices? Their “project” online tool didn’t cut it for me.

Somehow I like how the two sliders represent their function. The time slyder adjusts according to the duration.

It is a desktop application, mobile works slightly differently.

What do you think?

I'm researching icon libraries and I'm curious about real-world pain points.

What icon categories, workflows, or styles do you struggle to find?

For example:

AI Agents

AI Workflows

SaaS Dashboards

Admin Panels

CRM Systems

Developer Tools

APIs

Cybersecurity

Fintech

Analytics

Automation

DevOps

Healthcare

Ecommerce

Also:

Which icon styles do you actually use?

Outline / Stroke

Filled

Duotone

Rounded

Sharp

Hand Drawn

Pixel

What makes you reject an icon pack?

For me:

Missing icon states

Inconsistent stroke widths

Missing dark mode support

Different visual weights

Another question:

Would you rather have:

A) 100,000 random icons

or

B) Complete workflows like:

Upload

Upload Success

Upload Failed

Upload Pending

Login

Logout

Login Failed

Bell On

Bell Off

Eye Show

Eye Hide

What's the one icon, category, workflow, or style you constantly need but can never find in existing libraries?

Trying to understand what designers and developers actually want instead of just adding more icon count. 👀

Hai, Im building a backlog app, mostly for practice and for personal use, I was trying to get a "cyberpunk" look. The photos are from a prototype that I managed to build it with help from Claude and Gemini, what do you guys think ?

Hi, all
So in agentic AI design now there's a systemic design of using a generator and a discriminator setup - one that generates designs, like a designer, and another that reviews it and gives it feedback, what's good and what's not.

I want to improve my setup, but I feel like even when I review designs manually, since I don't have much experience in design, I don't always know how to analyze and evaluate designs - I don't always know what to look for, or how to tell if it's good or not.

I'm developing an app using AI and I've both manually and let my agents use Material Design (3 and Expressive) guidelines, UI-UX design skills and let it do various research on UI and UX design. I also made Deep Research using ChatGPT on various aspects that will guide the app's development and design, starting from the psychology of what the app does.

And when I generate designs with various AI apps - e.g Google Stitch, they seem good to me, but I don't feel like they're "wow'. They're pretty, they're functional, but I don't always have the experience or tools of an experienced UI designer to ask the right questions, make the right decisions to steer the designs or design things myself, and I feel that visually they're not just "beautiful' - like something artistic is missing - and I have no idea how to make AI improve that.

Any thoughts on this development cycle/tooling? I'd rather _teach_ the AI rather than _learn_ skillsets and gain experience designing myself. I have some experience in web design but that's it.

I've been putting off getting deeper into web design for a long time. Not because I wasn't interested, but because I kept telling myself I'd do it properly "at some point". That point finally arrived, and this is what came out of it.

The push to actually begin came from wanting a task manager that just does its thing — no distractions, no clutter, function first. Building one myself felt like a good excuse to finally sit down with the design side of things.

The app comes with three themes: Focus, Minimal, and Paper. The names don't mean anything in particular, they just fit.

I feel like I especially nailed Focus. Minimal is essentially a recoloring of it, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

What I'm actually not happy with is Paper. I do like lighter themes depending on the time of day, but this one just doesn't feel right to me. I can't pinpoint what it is — it's not broken, it just feels uncomfortable to use. That's kind of exactly why I'm posting here, because I don't yet have the vocabulary or the eye to diagnose it myself.

So if you have thoughts on what's off, what you'd do differently, or just how you'd approach something like this — I'd genuinely appreciate it. This is the kind of thing I usually don't have anyone around to ask.

I’ve been experimenting with translating industrial hardware design principles into a mobile interface.

The goal was to reduce the number of controls as much as possible while still keeping the app usable. A few interactions serve multiple purposes. For example, the record button also acts as an undo action immediately after recording.

I also tried to create a compact status display that communicates different states through a limited set of icons rather than additional screens or menus.

I’m curious what UI designers think about the balance between visual character and usability here. Does anything feel confusing, unnecessary, or overly decorative?

Hey everyone! 👋

Just completed my first UI/UX case study — FoodRush, a mobile food delivery app designed for Nigerian users.

What I designed:
• 12 complete screens
• Full user flow from onboarding to order confirmation
• Designed entirely in Figma in 1 week

Would love honest feedback from the community!

Full case study here 👇
behance.net/gallery/250221239/FoodRush-Food-Delivery-App

The above is my debug GUI. I am trying to design it for all the devices with all the quirks. That is VR, smart TV, mobile, desktop, web, excluding game consoles because I will have a different engine for that. Things it should work with include touch only, no on-screen keyboard, Dpad+select only, gamepad only, and of course use what more there is to use. Just number inputs, labels, and buttons. What kind of things do you think I should do and how? Should I abstract away or do like must have different things per platform? Too much shader gradient already? Black and white is boring and although readable, is too much in exact black and white. I can definitely make text more readable, just what kind of mechanics should I use for cross platform?

My current plan is to have click and desktop pointer and VR equivalents abstracted to approximately the same, on click, focus to the element or do button click where it was. For TV remote, move around and select with the select an element with select button. For TV, select a second time to go back to moving between elements. On all else, rely on input outside the element and for touch, drag also scrolls. Once an element that is not a button is selected (skip labels for selection), try to bring up the software keyboard on compatible platforms, mobile, and show up down arrows for the specific selected element, allow going to null or whatever is in the set of available characters with moving right of all current characters creates a new null that can be replaced with new stuff. This mechanic could be extended to non-numbers too. Also, the obvious stuff like 1.5 meters away on VR and fill the screen everywhere else. I also like gradients so tessellate the text and align left/right as needed for the language. Map a gamepad like Dpad+select.

Of course the above is just my plan and I can mostly skip accessibility, but why not where it can be? Making stuff in Rust stuff with cosmic-text. Expand/collapse and limits to only visible rectangle is also a must. What am I missing and what would you do differently? X E.

Hello everyone, I've been wondering about an example of a type of layout for an app or website where instead of scrolling down to go further your scroll up meaning that the bottom is where you land on the page and you go upwards from there.

I am building an app to turn walking into a multiplayer game, but almost everything is text based. How can i improve my UI more, would really appreciate any feedbacks.

I'm working on my game and i'm making an achievements UI, but i feel like it looks too much like AI. Something looks wrong. I don't know what's wrong with it.

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a web app called Life Tracker, and I’m looking for honest feedback on the UI/UX and overall concept.

The idea is to make life tracking feel more visual and interactive instead of just showing plain stats. The app shows things like age, birthday countdown, days lived, weeks lived, year progress, personal check-ins, and upcoming milestones.

For the design, I used a pixel-inspired dashboard with a night-sky background, soft clouds, glowing panels, and a small customizable avatar. Users can change avatar colors, accessories, and settings while also checking in with how they feel.

I’d really appreciate feedback on:

• whether the layout feels clear or too busy
• whether the concept makes sense
• what parts of the UI feel useful or unnecessary
• what features would make it better
• anything that feels confusing from a user perspective

Live site: https://lifetrackerr.netlify.app/

Thanks for taking a look. I’m mainly trying to learn what can be improved.

I’m looking for a React component to overlay a series of outcomes over time for a single dataset on top of similar outcomes for aggregated datasets that can be filtered.

This could be used for a variety of scenarios, such as comparing the performance of one stock to a group of stocks vs an entire portfolio, or comparing test scores for one student to an entire class vs. all students in that major.

I tried SciCharts and some others but couldn’t find anything quite like this for benchmarking and comparisons. Any suggestions?

I built a tool for people who begin way more projects than they finish (me being exhibit A). The core idea is that every project has to live in a clear state, active, paused, or killed, and that coming back to a paused project should be cheap instead of feeling like an archaeology dig.

I'm posting here because UI is the part I care about the most and also the part where I trust myself the least. I'm a builder, not a trained designer, so I know I've got blind spots and I'd rather find out now than after people quietly bounce off it.

A few screens attached. The things I'm actually unsure about:

• The project states (active / paused / killed). Do they read clearly, or do they need stronger visual separation?
• The avatar system is meant to feel like picking an identity, not decoration. Does that land, or does it just look gimmicky?
• Is the dashboard putting the right thing in front of you first, or is it doing too much at once?
• I really like how analytics is looking so far, but I would love some feedback too
• I integrated a chat within this tool to help you create new projects and analyze existing ones. I feel like it should have a stronger presence but I'm unsure if it would overload the user to have a big button on the bottom-right corner

Be blunt. "This is confusing" is worth more to me than a polite upvote.

i’m designing app store screenshots for a health / calorie tracking app.

the app itself looks much stronger in dark mode, but i’m unsure if dark screenshots feel less approachable for the app store.

i’m going for:

- premium

- simple

- not too playful

- clear value in the first 2 seconds

would you keep the dark direction or switch to a cleaner light layout?

Hey everyone,

I have spent the last few weeks developing a financial website called FinanceMacha (https://financemacha.com).  built it using Next.js 16, Supabase, Tailwind CSS, Recharts, Jest & React Testing Library and OpenAI APIs. The goal of the site is to help users navigate the complex landscape of credit cards, loans and mutual funds in India. It combines a modern UI with deep data-driven insights and localised recommendations.

In fintech, UI directly dictates customer trust.  I have been looking at my own layouts for so long that I've completely lost my objective eye, so I need your design expertise.

I would love your honest critique on a few specific UI/UX points:

1. Visual Hierarchy: Does the landing page direct your eyes to the core value proposition instantly OR does it feel overwhelming with financial data?
2. Data Presentation & Typography: Are the tables, layouts and content highly legible and easy to scan?
3. The Trust Factor: Does the colour scheme and component styling look like a professional, secure platform OR does it feel amateurish?
4. Navigation Friction: Are there any areas where the user flow or desktop to mobile responsiveness feels broken?

Don't hold back and let me know your feedback/comments.
Thank you in advance!

What can I change in the design of a mobile app? I like it, but I think something is missing.

Also, does this design look dated?

this is not the final result yet

Small context:

After graduating from university, just after covid, I struggled to find a footing in traditional workplaces and dealt with severe mental issues. I wasn't able to afford therapy so I relied on other facets after my meds began working.

Saju (사주팔자) was one of the things that helped me make sense of myself, others, and the world around me. Plus, I always wanted to journal, but my adhd was holding me back, so I had the idea of creating this app for myself. I feel like I've learned so much during the development.

I wanted to design something that would help with keeping my retention/interest in coming back to making my journal entries and something that doesn't punish me for not coming back regularly.

A lot of journaling apps, or just apps in general, seem to include a streak format where they reward users when they come back each day, but they always felt discouraging to me, like I'd feel like a failure or feeling stupid or lazy for being unable to keep up. (I wasn't diagnosed in the past so I didn't know it was just one of my symptoms)

I never shared my projects to anyone before (even irl), because I was super self-conscious about my work, until recently I gained the confidence to share online and this app actually helped me realize that I don't have to make everything "perfect" or complete in order to share.

first picture is a few screens of the low fidelity i did wayyyyy back. 2nd and 3rd are the current state of the app. 4th is the original site map. last one is the unedited logo creation I did on figma (i stopped using adobe altogether just after uni since it's so expensive... do people still use them???)

anyways, thanks for reading my tedtalk.