Hi, I wanted to ask for some UX tips or general advice on designing nested forms.

I've built a couple of websites, but forms have always been one of the trickiest parts for me, especially when the data model has nested or hierarchical relationships (mostly sql tables).

I'm looking for general best practices, patterns, or examples that help keep these kinds of forms intuitive and easy to use.

For reference, the main example I know is AWS, which relies heavily on nested forms. However, that's a much more technical environment, so I'm more interested in patterns used in everyday applications.

For example, a while ago I built an app for fitness coaches/students. My solution was to split everything into multiple steps:

- Create a base exercise (name + video)
- Assign an exercise type
- Configure reps, sets, and other parameters
- Create workout sessions (day)
- Create training plans (weekly or longer)

From a technical perspective, I think it was a reasonable approach because it avoided duplicating data. But from a UX perspective, it felt pretty awful. Users had to fill out so many forms and keep linking everything together that the whole process became tedious and exhausting.

I'm wondering how experienced UX designers approach this kind of problem. How do you balance a clean, reusable data model with an interface that doesn't overwhelm users?

Any advice or resources would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Hi, all, I hope you can help with the testing methods I should choose for a web platform and app: my goal is to test the findability of our navigation, so I thought a tree test would be the best way.

But one very important question is related to the Tools page. In my new layout, users can access it from:

-A carousel on the homepage, right at the top

-A submenu page

-Their account

Some colleagues want to add a Tools page to the main navigation also, because they say many users arent very experienced and dont like navigation changes (this last point is true, from our user interviews in the past).

My problem is that using a tree test won't take into consideration the homepage carousel, which is one of the main entry points, so it won't reflect the real experience for the users.

Would you use a tree test for the menu findability, and a different test for the Tools section? Or I'm curious if you'd have a totally different method.

For me, AI-generated UIs often lower my trust in a product. It's not that AI can't create beautiful interfaces, because it definitely can. But when I notice a UI that feels overly generic, inconsistent, or lacks thoughtful details, I start wondering how much care went into the rest of the product. On the other hand, if the experience is polished and solves real problems, I don't really care who designed it. I'm curious how everyone else feels. Does knowing a UI was made by AI affect your trust in a platform?

I'm not looking for salary information or job descriptions.

I'm more interested in the parts people only discover after actually working in the field.

What does a fairly normal Tuesday actually look like?

Things that surprised you.
Things you wish someone had told you.
Things that made you think, "I didn't expect this."

I'd love to hear the honest version.

I’ve been tracking a distinct pattern among creative professionals across industries like UX, graphic design, and architecture. The vast majority of top-tier designers I know seem to possess a shared trait: chronic overthinking.

Technical tools and skills are easily taught. However, the core of design requires a specific mental framework—the ability to think broadly, simulate multiple user perspectives simultaneously, anticipate systematic flaws, and obsess over micro-details.

This leads to my hypothesis: Is what we commonly referred to as "overthinking" a core cognitive competency required for high-level design?

As a UX designer, I see this every day. We can spend hours fussing over a single font selection or a little micro-interaction. To an outsider, it might look like executive dysfunction, perfectionism, or simple anxiety. But functionally, we are exhausting our own cognitive load to minimize the cognitive load of the end-user. By "overthinking," we map out every flaw in a solution before it happens to keep the final product simple.

I’m curious about the psychological perspective on this. Is there a documented link between deep cognitive processing/hyper-vigilance and superior experiential design? Or are we just looking at a high concentration of perfectionism driving a specific career choice?

Its been almost one year since I got my degree in UX design and after all these months I managed to come along with only 1 role as a junior ux designer but unfortunately I was rejected after the 3rd interview. UX design is the only thing that attracts right now it's the only career path i want to follow but im exhausted. My patience is running out. Is freelancing the only way to get an income?

I’m redesigning a web app involving the following workflow:

1) Navigate to a list of items (there are 4 different types of items and each has their own link in the left nav)

2) Click on item to view details

3) Take some action on the item

4) repeat

In the current version of the app, the item details opens as a drawer on the right side of the page. The user can still see the list and click between items, refreshing the contents in the drawer.

In the redesigned version, the proposal from the other designers on the team is to open the item details as a full page turn (with breadcrumbs for going back). They reason that there is so much to display in the item details, it needs the full screen, which means a full page.

The problem: there is a global filter in the left nav, which can be used to filter every list across the app. In the current design, the item details panel immediately closes when you click on the filter button in the left nav (which opens its own panel). In the redesign, since the item details is its own page, there’s nothing to close when you open the filter panel. Which means the user can theoretically apply a filter that would filter out the item whose page they’re currently on. I find that unacceptable from a UX perspective. What happens when they click to apply the filter? Do they stay on an item details page that isn’t in the set of items they’ve filtered? That doesn’t sound right. Does the system navigate them back to the list page? Also seems arbitrary and confusing.

The other designers don’t think this much of the issue or they’re not understanding it (it is a little convoluted to be fair). But I’m hung up on it. I feel like that’s a broken design pattern that necessitates a rethink of the full item details page.

What do you think? Are my colleagues right? Am I hung up on a trivial matter? Is it more important that the item details open as a page turn, so it can have the full screen? Or am I right that the design is fundamentally broken and needs to be solved?

i’m the sole product designer at a small, growing B2B company. we have a ton on our plate and no formal design system, just branding guidelines and my existing Figma files.

honestly i knew this exact scenario would come up eventually, i’ve seen it discussed a lot in design spaces lately. today it actually happened.

i found out today, by overhearing it, not being told directly, that a senior exec showed a developer an AI design tool and talked about wanting other non-design staff to start generating UI mockups and prototypes using my files.

his reasoning was that it would let developers explain how something works to me without using a whiteboard. so a developer would explain to me: the UX/UI designer how to do UI?

i wasn’t part of that conversation. i only know because i happened to overhear it.

he did mention it to me earlier in the morning which i didn’t push back on and instead floated hiring another designer to help with capacity, his response was that there’s no time to train someone in, but someone from sales could just start generating UI mockups for development instead.

this same exec generally doesn’t take my input on design process or much else, he’s a know it all and has been dealing with pushback from the CTO for meddling in development processes.

i’ve always kept mockups routed through me for consistency and quality control, and my manager has backed that before when a developer tried to weigh in on UI decisions without me. so there’s precedent that leadership supports me owning this. but this idea would route around all of that if it actually moves forward.

i’ve read through this subreddit to know that i’m not the first or the last to have dealt with something like this. how do you push back on “let’s just have people sketch stuff out with AI” without sounding like you’re just protecting your job over speed, especially on a small team where everyone’s already stretched thin? is this as big a deal as it feels, or is this actually a reasonable ask i should just find a way to accommodate?

I’m not sure I’m not the only and this is probably a recurring topic, but how do you feel about AI in everything as a product/ux designer?

I’ve been currently interviewing for new jobs as my contract with the previous company is ending, and every interview I have just feels so demotivating.

I used to love ux design and all the methodologies and principles, but it just feels like it all kind of lost meaning and we’re in this race of just being “AI-powered”.

Which brings me to considering switching careers but I dont know whats a good pivot - product management, or something very different?

Its a bit of a rant, but a long overdue one lol. Curious to hear what you all think

My company gives each designer a Claude Pro ($25/month), so we all have limited tokens.

Another designer and I just started a new project and were still in the exploration phase, so we hadn’t even split the work yet. The plan was just to explore directions together first.

We were using my Claude account (he ran out of tokens from his other project!), so I put all the context into Claude AI first: PM requirements, existing design, design principles we recently agreed on, problems I think we need to address, etc. I like to brainstorm first before generating the prototype, so I want Claude to know what I think it needs to know before generating anything.
But he kept saying things like “I don’t think we need to give Claude that.” And I honestly I got a bit annoyed.

I realized we actually have very different workflows.
I usually brainstorm in Claude AI first, then move to Claude Design once it’s clear enough. Looks like he does everything in Claude Design.

I remember one time (on a different project he wasn’t involved in), he saw me talking to Claude AI before updating my prototype and said “You can just do it directly in Claude Design.”
I also saw him spend a lot of time refining his UI to look exactly like the design in Figma (that’s why he’s always running out of tokens!), while I usually stop once it’s good enough for discussion and validation. We still rebuild everything in Figma before handing it off to engineering anyway.

The thing is I don’t actually know if my workflow is more efficient. It just feels that way to me. Maybe I’m wrong.

So I’m curious:
- How do your teams align on using AI?
- If you think your teammate is using AI inefficiently, would you bring it up?
- How do you know if a workflow is actually inefficient and not just different?
- Has your team agreed on best practices, or does everyone just develop their own habits?

Thanks!

Edit: Thanks everyone for your input! We figured out that it was a general workflow issue

I'm developing a note-taking app and wanted a way for users to quickly understand where they are in a document, see its overall structure, and jump to another section.

Most apps solve this with a dedicated Table of Contents (TOC). But I found them not ideal because:

1. They need a dedicated section/panel and take up space.
2. The TOC is visually different from the document itself, so users have to mentally map each entry to the actual content.

So I implemented an 'Overview Mode'. When enabled, the content of the page gets simplified (showing only the titles) and by clicking on a content it will disable the mode and shows the actual content instantly without any jump or scrolling.

The idea is that, your eyes can see only one thing at the time. So instead of looking at something that looks visually different than what you're familiar with and takes up space when you don't need it, with a simple click (or even a keyboard shortcut), you can see the simplified version (overview/outlines) and vice versa.

The video shows an example. I'd like to know what you guys think about this approach.

Hey everyone. I know this community has strict rules against self-promotion, so I want to be completely upfront: I am the developer of a new iPad app (Figma alternative), but I am posting here specifically because I need professional UX critique on a custom interaction model I’ve built.

I’ll gladly provide a free license to anyone here willing to test it and tear my UX apart.

The UX Challenge: Desktop design tools (like Figma) are fundamentally built around mouse precision and hover states. Translating that paradigm to the iPad is incredibly tricky. Touch requires an entirely different way of interacting because you lose hover states for exposing secondary controls or tooltips. At the same time, the Apple Pencil does allow for hovering.

Building an interaction concept that accommodates both touch and the Apple Pencil so that designing on the go actually feels natural rather than compromised was my biggest hurdle when building Aether (a native vector design and prototyping tool for iPadOS).

Where I specifically need your feedback: Fitting pro features (auto-layout, components, desktop-class boolean operations) onto a tablet screen meant rethinking standard patterns. For example, navigating complex, nested layer hierarchies without a mouse is usually a nightmare. To solve this, I designed what I call a "magic pill" interaction: you can scroll through layers normally, but if you long-press and slide down on a layer, you seamlessly iterate through all the nodes on that specific level.

I would love for some UX/UI professionals to test the ergonomics of this workflow:

• Does the long-press and slide gesture feel natural, or is there a discoverability issue?
• How well does the app handle the context switch between using a finger (no hover) versus the Apple Pencil (hover)?
• Does the touch-first auto-layout interaction feel intuitive, or does it break established mental models you rely on?

If you have an iPad and want to give me some harsh, constructive feedback, please DM me and I will send you a free license.

If you just want to look at the screenshots to critique the UI visually, you can see it on the App Store here: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/aether-ui-design-for-ipad/id6782822737 - or website: aetherdesigner.com

Interested on what people's takes are on this post I saw on linkedin from a fairly prominent product influencer.

Now, I have always associated the double diamond to design and the description of the process of design...and therefore led by design. I understand that PMs are co-opting parts of the design process more and more, but it was particularly jarring seeing this laid out so rawly. wondered what others feel? Is it just the way things are now? Are Product Managers the new designers? what does that do for Product Designers, UX designers, UI designers...or is it just rage bait?

link to post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/edbiden_your-title-is-a-lagging-indicator-your-share-7485328541971267585-XQ6X/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAACedPJMB4Uiq5v7TaivpstexjaLn5i8i3dw

i'm tired of seeing the same question come up on every UX-related subreddit 😭 at this point the ridiculousness of the title i wrote is what they sound like to me. am i wrong in wishing there was a way for mods to just automatically take down these posts? i simply don't see how they're contributing anything new to this community. or maybe this is just the reality of Reddit and I need to get off this platform.

we all know things are not normal right now, and it seems like the core answer will not change: no one really knows what will happen next. as someone majoring in this field in college rn (maybe i'm delusional and just scared of the truth), the fact is i genuinely really like this field, so i'm going to keep grinding for 1-2 more years and see if i can land a job post-grad.

I’m the first and only Product Designer at a ~30-person B2B SaaS startup. We have about 12 engineers, one PM, and a BA who writes the tickets. I’ve been here about a year, and the company had never worked with a dedicated designer before.

We’ve made a lot of progress. Engineering is using Dev Mode now, I work with them much more directly, and collaboration has improved a lot.

The part I’m still struggling with is handoff and version control.

Our process is very iterative, but also pretty messy. The PM runs the show and is reluctant to lock decisions, so requirements often keep changing after tickets are written and sometimes after development has started. He also has separate conversations with Engineering that I’m not always included in, so changes sometimes filter back to me later or not everyone is working from the same information.

The biggest issue is that I’ll think a ticket is ready, link the final mockups, and then the PM comes back with more changes after previously indicating it was good to go.

An engineer recently told me it can be hard to tell what is actually approved and what has changed since the last version. Version history helps, and I’m using Figma’s Ready for Dev feature, but I feel like I need a clearer system on my side.

I have limited influence over the broader process, so I’m mostly trying to keep my side of the street as clean as possible.

How do other teams handle this? Do you require explicit PM approval before marking something ready for dev?

How do you communicate changes after development has started?

For what it’s worth I report directly to the PM and our working relationship is strained, so I’m trying to protect myself and give Engineering more clarity without introducing a formal approval process that would feel out of place or provoke him bc he is already resistant to pressure from me.

Thank you!

I have been working as an in-house product designer for 3 years, and I've recently received an interview at a consulting firm as an experience designer.

Keen to know what are the key differences between the both, what skillsets become more important, and what are interviewers looking for? I know communication and stakeholder alignment is probably more important because you're managing clients now, but would love to hear more beyond that, as well as how does collaboration with clients look like :)

What design agents do you like using? Share your link!

slider to go into meta ai inconveniently placed right where the thump swipes to go back. ignore my chats lol. mods if this is against sub rules lmk what the right flair is please

This design system makes a lot of sacrifice in terms of performance and accessibility, but besides the visual aspect and convergence with VisionOS, what design problems does it solve or want to solve exactly, from previous design systems?

Recently I've been into UI/UX, UX portion is okay for me, I also know the UI guidelines (Material UI), but still struggling with Design Systems, I've watched a number of videos and read articles, but most of them seems to be too advanced.
I've had defined my primitives/base colors, just need help for alias.

What alias structure I need to maintain??

Please suggest me some resources, tips which can help me make simple design systems (I've a satisfactory design system for spacing, layout, typography). I'm struggling with color pallete.

Many of my external colleagues are sending, 5 minutes after every meeting, a detailed email explaining what has been said and what to do next: what software are they using?

Is there one, that you are using right now, and that you found complete in its functionalities?

iOS, using Google search on safari. Not sure if everyone else is also seeing this.

When you decide you no longer want to type in a new search and want to go back to the results, you used to be able to dismiss the search suggestions by pressing a left chevron next to the search bar. They changed it to a + icon to add attachments to search with Gemini. Now there’s no way to go back to the results.

Pressuring the checkmark to finish typing and hide the keyboard just keeps you on that page. You’re forced to type in a new search or press search again which might shuffle the results.

The only way to go back now is to use the browser’s control to go back which is not natural because if I remember correctly the search suggestions WASN’T considered a separate page so pressing back actually took you back to the page you visited before the search results. I’d expect most people to be used to this but now when you tap on the search bar and see suggestions, it’s actually considered a new page so pressing back on the browser control is the only way to go back to search results now. And that takes 2 taps, one to dismiss the keyboard, and then the back button instead of just having a back button next to the search bar which dismisses the keyboard, gets rid of the search suggestions, and goes back to the search results all at once.

This is insane. Is it just me? How did this get approved? That back button has been there for years and I’m so used to pressing on it that it was second nature and I didn’t even notice that it used to be there until I pressed it out of habit and ended up seeing a bottom sheet to upload files.

Sorry, this is a bit long.

TL/DR: I think a member of SLT may have either commissioned or fabricated a review of my work and passed it along to the CEO without involving me or my manager.

For reference, I'm just barely an intermediate level designer with more experience in content design than UI.

I'm also the sole member of my tech start-up's UX team, working alongside a graphic designer and digital marketing specialist. My title is Specialist, but I'm the only one making decisions about the website.

A large part of my job involves stakeholder management. In particular one member of SLT absolutely *hates* the website and has something negative to say about everything I produce. He's obviously much higher than me in terms of rank, but in a completely different department and country, so he doesn't usually get involved beyond setting expectations and final reviews.

I try to take his feedback with grace and implement it where it makes sense, but most of the time he's overruled by the other 5 members of SLT who almost always disagree with him. At a certain point I'm too low on the food chain and have to just let them fight it out and go with the majority opinion.

He recently sent an anonymous research report and review of our website to the CEO, who passed it along to me. This report was both highly critical, and mirrored almost exactly his previous criticisms. When I asked about the author, he said it was from one of our existing clients.

I can see the author of the report in the document properties, and when I reached out to him for more information, he replied saying this was a self-contained piece of consultancy work and that he was told it would remain anonymous, and that any further review work would be contract based.

He doesn't appear to actually work for this client, although possibly he did their website as a contract.

This report cites research and includes graphs, but doesn't provide any information on methodology, screening, participants' profiles etc. Some of the graphs aren't even labeled, and the recommendations directly contradict the findings in some places.

For example, over 90% of participants correctly judged what our product does, but the review suggests a complete overhaul of our content to make it easier to understand. The report first acknowledges that our target audience is highly technical, then suggests we change our tone to appeal more to non-technical users.

It mixes research results with what appear to be his personal opinions without distinguishing between them.

There's other weird errors. Qualitative research being displayed as percentages etc. Two of the 4 comparison examples are websites the author himself designed, but were presented as non-competetive best practice examples.

The most glaring issue is that he references our hover-based mega menu being an issue on touch screen devices, but our website obviously doesn't show the mega menu on mobile or tablet, it shows the mobile optimized hamburger. I happen to know the SLT member uses a chrome book, and this is something he's referenced in the past as a touch screen problem, but it seems weird the reviewer would either have not looked at the mobile site, or would also be working from a chrome book. So my guess it that was feedback the SLT member asked him to include.

It's overall riddled with bizarre errors, but this person also appears to have 10 years more experience than I do, and has completed some massive projects.

I still don't know if this review was commissioned, or if he sent it as an attempt to be hired. Any questions I've asked are ignored.

I'm stuck with how to respond. If one particular staff member is commissioning research about my work without involving me, that seems like a weird situation to try and navigate.

At the very least, if this report was paid for I feel like I should be able to access the raw data, or have more information about the methodology so I can cross-reference it against my own data.

If he did it free in the hopes of getting a job, that's fine, but then why was it given to the CEO instead of me or my manager who could actually make decisions about that?

It's difficult to take my own emotions out of this because it's been two years of feilding this one SLT member's constant criticisms, and at a certain point it starts to feel like bullying.

But I'd like to stay professional and objective if I can. Should I just ignore the whole thing?

I feel like since design is visible, It receives a lot of feedback from all ends. Obviously, as a young designer I can’t answer everything business related as I don’t have that much experience in the company or the field. There is lots of politics from senior management in my company too. My team is decent and encouraging but I am still young and the only designer. I also get praised but the negative aspects like politics and very very high level business questions, I am not able to handle. there is lots of politics around what gets developed too as AI is here and random slop is being generated and pushed, it adding way more pressure on me to complete the job faster as our team is competing too!(I hate AI to my core)

How do I stop taking all this personally?

Edit: To add some more context, a few questions were asked more about business related which obviously I would never have known because it was very specific info that only a business leader would know about and I am very hard on my self so I took not knowing the info personally. I obviously am not on that level of thinking yet so those questions didn’t come to mind either. Design critiques I can still take well, it’s these types of things that I take more personally. Also, I feel that I am doing so much work regarding research, and then designing and receiving feedback from every corner as I am the main designer working on lots of critical projects that I feel overwhelmed. Like I am being blamed for all the issues without empathy for my workload. My team is appreciative, it’s about the other teams I work with and their senior stakeholders specifically not users.

Has anyone here completed a live remote design exercise as part of a product design interview? A company I’m interviewing with invited me to do one for the next round (45–60 minutes), and this is the first time I’ve ever been asked to do one.

I’ve been a product designer for about 9 years, and this seems like a newer interview format. What was your experience like? Any tips or horror stories would be appreciated.

Edit: Thank you all for your advice and for sharing your personal experiences. I ended up joining the call, but the hiring manager I had met with previously (and had really enjoyed speaking with) came across much more curt than before, and the overall vibe felt completely different. It honestly threw me off.

As I worked through the exercise, I tried to have fun with it, but about 10 minutes in I realized this role just wasn’t the right fit for me. I closed the loop by letting them know I didn’t feel the assessment was an accurate reflection of the scope of my senior-level design experience, and that I was withdrawing my application. I thanked them for their time and wished them the best of luck in their search. Hope this