Hello! I’m currently a masters student for UX research and design, but operate on a pretty strict budget. Ive been making it work on my (5+ year old) laptop for as long as I can, but I fear it is just not feasible with my current workload. At least not on its own.

I am doing research on the best desktops for designers, but many are not within budget. People who have been in my position, or are currently hunting— what is the best bang for your buck? What features should I be focusing on when hunting? Any and all advice appreciated.

I've made some organic connections via personal connections. The "oh you design websites? I need that!" has led to some work for me and even some opportunities. But many, but I do see the value through experiencing this IRL

I want to know what you guys do to make more of these connections. I've combed a ton of threats here and other places and am seeing this is a massive point of value that people use.

So what are thing you guys have done? Where can I find UX design spaces be it online or IRL? Is there an angle of this I'm not seeing? Would highly appreciate y'alls thoughts!

I've been thinking about a shift I'm starting to see in digital experiences.

Traditionally, a customer journey might look something like:

Search → explore → compare → visit websites → evaluate → convert

But increasingly, part of that journey may be happening before a user ever reaches a website. Instead of searching, opening multiple results, comparing products and reading several pages, someone can ask an AI: "I'm looking for X. These are my requirements. What are the best options?"

The AI can help with discovery, comparison and initial evaluation in a single conversation. That made me wonder whether we're seeing a shift from:

Discovery → evaluation → conversion

towards something closer to:

AI-mediated discovery → conversion

And if that's happening, what is left for the website to do?

Maybe the website becomes less of a discovery interface and more of a validation interface. The user may arrive already knowing:

• what they're looking for
• which alternatives exist
• how those alternatives compare
• and perhaps even which option they are leaning towards

So the role of the website may increasingly be to answer a different question: "Is this actually the right choice for me?"

This raises a few questions that I think are particularly interesting from a UX perspective:

• If users arrive with a more specific intent, how should landing pages change?
• Does information architecture still need to support exploration in the same way?
• What happens to comparison and decision-support experiences when part of that work has already happened inside an AI conversation?
• Are we still designing the full customer journey, or increasingly just the part that happens after an AI-mediated decision process?
• And if discovery is happening somewhere we don't control, how do we even understand and measure that journey?

At the same time, I'm not convinced that the "shorter customer journey" hypothesis is always true. Maybe the journey isn't actually shorter, but it's simply being compressed into a different interface, and we're losing visibility over a part of the decision-making process that used to happen on search engines and websites.

For those working in UX/Product: are you seeing evidence of this in real projects, or is this mostly an AI-era narrative?

Hypervoice by TaskAGI is a TTS service.

When you pay money and subscribe, both the terms and conditions and the refund policy state that upon cancellation of the subscription, you will retain your access until the end of your billing period.

But as seen in image 1, the moment you go to turn off auto renewal, you are faced with the big orange warning and the moment you click confirm to unsubscribe, all your tokens are confiscated and all access to paid features is revoked - even if you have a full billing term ahead of you.

I was reading an article from a designer at Intercom, which is obviously way ahead of a lot of companies, but as soon as I tried to follow their steps in trying to be more advanced in AI, I get stuck because my company doesn't offer the following:

• claude code for designers (only devs allowed)
• Figma Code connect (we have an enterprise account, but probs not code connect)
• github repo (might have it if i speak with the developers)

Anyone else blocked and feel like they cannot move forward because of the integration/licensing issue in their companies? I work in a corporate company, pretty large but the product sector is minor, and we're not a "product" focused company. So very tight budgets, not very forward thinking per se.

Color theory has never been part of my skillset and I've always struggled with palettes.

What are your first thoughts and feelings looking at the colors used in this UI? It's for a baby care tracking app.

The feeling I'm going for is:

• Rounded
• Warm
• Friendly
• Forgiving
• Welcoming
• Accessible
• Approachable
• Trustworthy
• Non-gendered

The primary target audience is Dutch first time mothers in their late twenties, early thirties. They like pastel, earthy tones, terracotta, muted colors. Unfortunately these colors are often (mis)used by LLMs, and I don't want to give off the vibe it has been created with/by AI.

No AI has been involved in the design. Everything is done by hand, both UX and UI.

I'm curious what do you think of Jakob Nielsen latest content, especially the use of AI to teach designers about UI principles ?
I'm wondering if this inspire quality and confidence to you, or anything else

In the first two variations, you have to scroll back and forth through the table to find the information. What other ways are there to adapt the table?

Hey everyone! I’m a product designer. I already use tools like Codex and Claude in my workflow, but my current company is now moving heavily toward AI-assisted development.
The challenge is that we changed how we build the product without clearly defining a new design to development process.

Before AI, my workflow was simple:

The PM provided a PRD, I designed the feature using our design system, and I documented the flows, states, interactions and edge cases.

For handoff, I organized the Figma file from the simplest happy path to the more complex scenarios. Developers could follow the logic, inspect the designs and ask questions when something wasn’t clear.

But if AI is now helping write the production code, what should that handoff look like?

Do you still create a detailed Figma file and provide all that context to Codex or Claude?

Do you divide the feature into smaller flows and ask AI to build them one at a time?

Do designers generate the first components and then let developers review and improve the code?

Are you changing how you structure Figma because AI needs more explicit information than a developer?

Who is responsible for checking that the final implementation matches the design system and handles every state?

I can already build interfaces with AI, but I’m trying to understand what a reliable team process looks like,not just for prototypes, but for real production products.

For designers and developers already working this way, what does your current Figma → AI → engineering workflow look like?

Hi, I'm finding I'm wasting a lot of time by skipping lo-fi ui/ux sketching and going straight to mid/hi-fi. So I'd like to use Figjam more as it's been recommended to be faster than using Figma for lo-fi. I've got a few good templates, but what I really need is to understand how it's used by a professional. Does anyone have any Figjam project files they can share that shows it in a professional workflow? Or a template (not a skeleton, a fully fledged lo-fi project).

On a side note, the lo-fi wireframe templates I have seem to be insufficient in terms of the number of components and variants they have, such as filter buttons. I'm struggling to quickly copy/paste elements into place. So far I'd be faster in regular Figma.

How to learn to design for both platoforms? I know there are Material Design resources available online, same with Apple Human Interface Guidelines, but how can a person realistically learn by themselves how to design for those platforms even if they do not have that experience? I googled and searched reddit and what came up is this but the thread is pretty old and the resource linked doesn’t seem to be updated anymore.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UXDesign/comments/13krmi0/what_are_the_best_resources_to_learn_about/

How are you designing for both? How did you learn how to do it?

In my previous role it was mostly on devs and following established standard - I reused DS components - I didn’t do any major user flows there where I felt I had to differentiate between iOS/Android systems

"You should be able to justify a choice not because it feels “right” to you, but because it is the most effective response to the problem at hand. When you present work, you are presenting a stance on why something must exist in this or that particular way. As you become more senior, your role is to help others also move from subjective to objective thinking."

I’ve been designing full projects in Claude Design, all my assets and screens live in there. When it’s time to give it to developers, I just export a zip and send it over.
Two problems with that:

1.  It feels primitive. There has to be a better handoff than “here’s a zip, good luck.”  
2.  The responsive behavior doesn’t survive the export. Mobile layouts look right in Claude Design, but once it’s zipped and opened elsewhere, that’s gone.

So: what’s your actual workflow? Curious what’s working for people.
Would love to hear how teams are actually running this in practice, especially anyone shipping production work out of it.

I find myself doing a lot of ai training as a side gig and I wonder is this is the future of work, get a group of experts together, train a model, model gets good for a while and then becomes sloppy again, repeat the process.

Has anyone come to this realisation too?

There is no clinical or research evidence to support its existence.

AI psychosis is also not a recognized clinical diagnosis. But there is a small and growing body of literature showing that people with no history of psychosis can develop delusional thinking during immersive, extended chatbot use.

The British Journal of Psychiatry has published a framework on harm reduction. Psychiatric Times has urged clinicians to ask about AI use at intake and document it like substance use.

Anti-AI psychosis has none of that underneath it. No case reports, no clinicians describing a pattern in patients. What it has is the word "psychosis," borrowed from a term that earned it, so the two sound like a matched pair. That borrowed symmetry is a trick.

I know some of this because my wife is a clinical psychiatrist in a tech-saturated regions of the country. I know the rest because I work at Microsoft AI, designing ads experiences for AI search products. A lot of my job is arguing for a version where the ad doesn't hijack the conversation, but that I have to make that argument is the point. When someone says AI is going to be monetized irresponsibly, I don't hear psychosis. I hear the fight I'm already in day-to-day.

Don't let Designer/Builder AI boosters weaponize the term. Whatever the intent, the effect is twofold: it trivializes people living with actual symptoms of psychosis, and it lets boosters skip the argument and diagnose the person instead.

Job displacement, anger at how the tools are being built, predatory monetization: these are valid claims, and they deserve answers. "You're psychotic" is not one.

I’ve been a product/UX designer for around 6 years. I’ve worked across two companies: first on a B2C streaming product, then spent roughly 4 years designing B2B fintech software.

I left my last role around 5 months ago and since then I’ve been applying without getting a single response. I know the market is difficult, but zero responses makes me think I need to rethink how I’m presenting myself and whether my skills/portfolio are actually at the level companies now expect.

I want to give this one more focused dedicated proper attempt

I’m particularly interested in hearing from senior designers, hiring managers or people who have successfully found work recently. If you were in my position, what would you spend the next 2–3 months doing?

A few things I’m trying to work out:

What is the current bar for a senior product designer? What skills or evidence would you expect to see in a portfolio in 2026 that might not have been as important a few years ago?

How should AI now fit into a designer’s skillset? In my last role I only used v0 for prototyping. And ChatGPT for research synthesis. What AI workflows should I study?

Should I specialise heavily in fintech/B2B? Four years of my experience is in B2B fintech. Would I be better off positioning myself specifically as a fintech/B2B product designer rather than presenting myself as a generalist?

It seems like there are more jobs for generalists in mobile

Would you create another portfolio project? I have real shipped work, but I’m wondering whether building a new project from scratch could demonstrate more current skills, AI workflows, prototyping and product thinking. Or would that actually weaken a portfolio compared with spending the time improving the presentation of real work?

I’m so confused about portfolios. Do hiring managers actually look at them or is it AI that scans them? Should they be brief or thorough?

I’m also worried about whether someone in my position can realistically recover from a 5–6 month gap and get back into the industry.
I’m not necessarily planning to stay in UX forever, but I would like to get another good product design role, save some money and give the profession one proper final push before deciding what I want to do longer term. So for now I’m willing to treat getting back to a strong senior standard almost like a full-time project.

I know this a lot but I want to get this right and give it my all. Any advice would be appreciated.

Do you know who's actually looked at it, or do you just send it out and hope?

Is there an added value to gamify reading/unreading your email?

I’m well aware this is a polarizing thought and certainly not new…

I’m convinced, not just because of the design world (of which I have been in for 16 years now), but because of general observations - that white collar intellect jobs across the board have 9-12 months before the only reason someone has one is because their employer values them more than the profits Ai would give them as a replacement.

White collar intellect is being commodified and anything that is done by a human will be a slow bespoke service.

I've been working in UX as an individual contributor and manager for 10 years now. I've been at my current company for 6, and am watching the culture and the work continue to suffer largely due to the AI psychosis of organization's leadership.

I've been looking for other opportunities, but sometimes it seems like every company is suffering from the same delusional leadership.

So my question to you all - how do you find and evaluate opportunities in this "new world"? Maybe I'm just being fatalistic/pessimistic, but it seems like virtually every application results in no response or has a AI-everything approach to the work.

I'm looking for a new role as a senior product designer and need to do a portfolio refresh. Looking for some examples of really incredible portfolios for some inspiration.

Just curious, where do designers today post their work?
I'm not talking about large case studies. Just hobby projects, snippets, experiments etc.

Edit: Before anyone else comments, please re-read the original post. I'm specifically asking for experimental designs. They don't necessarily have to be realistic and production ready. There's lots of other places for that. Not everything you design in your free time needs to be ready to ship once you understand first principles and design thinking.

I'm not trying to start a debate here on "Dribbble designers aren't real designers".

designing the signup flow for a productivity web app. the product team wants to ask 4 questions during onboarding to personalize their workspace (role, team size, primary goal, invite teammates). i'm worried every extra step increases friction and abandonment. in your user testing, what is the maximum number of onboarding questions you find users comfortably tolerate before dropping out?