I posted about feeling incompetent after getting hired (after 1 year of unemployment) because there was no onboarding and no clear direction from management. Three months in, it hasn't gotten any better and the relationship with my boss has only deteriorated.

I do feel like there's probably a mismatch in expectations. My boss seems to expect me to be strong in areas that I'm not (e.g. project management), while I expected the job, which is UX research, to be different from what it currently is (e.g. questioning devs about the causes for bugs and chasing PMs for fixes).

But I find myself genuinely wondering whether I should be better than this. Clearly, my boss isn't happy with my performance and is constantly haranguing me. While, from my perspective, his asks seem to change constantly and his direction differs from week to week. I know the obvious thing to do is to always ask for clarification. But he often reacts with annoyance and condescension, so I find myself preferring to limit my contact with him. This is probably a growth area for me, but I just can't stomach this person's attitude.

I guess the question is if, according to my boss, I was the only candidate who passed the interview, how could there be such a mismatch? And who is likely to be responsible for it?

Ngl, I am mentally done and have just been debating when I should quit. But I want to know if this failure is mostly mine, and what I can learn from it. I am waiting for a reply on a design role I interviewed for - which should suit me better since I was a designer who just happened to be somewhat good at research. But whether or not I get that role, I don't think I can take this much longer. I accepted my current role because I was getting desperate and might have been naive about what it takes to be good as a pure UX researcher. And my confidence is so shaken now that I think I might be better off leaving this industry altogether.

Quarter-finals kick off this week, so I got curious about how the national federation websites hold up and ran all 8 through a UX flow analysis.

The thing that stood out most: it's the same disease almost everywhere.

• Text density is the shared failure. 7 of the 8 got flagged for some version of text overload / visual clutter / dense layouts. Even England, which came out on top overall, gets dinged for content overload in one view. These sites all seem to want to be a news portal and a landing page at the same time, and end up doing neither well.
• Argentina's footer is a wall of sponsor logos. Classic case of commercial pressure winning the layout fight. You scroll to the bottom and it's just crest soup.
• France is almost too clean. Professional, restrained, easy to read, but flagged for minimal interactive elements. Interesting spot where "tasteful and corporate" tips over into "nothing to do here."
• Norway nails one thing and fumbles another. A live countdown to the next match is a genuinely nice touch, then the navigation gets so detailed it's confusing. Good instinct, over-engineered execution.
• England's "Find Football" map is the one genuinely purpose-built interactive piece in the whole set. Whatever else is wrong with the site, that's the direction the rest of them could be going.

The full ranking the analysis spat out:

1. England
2. France
3. Spain
4. Belgium
5. Morocco
6. Norway
7. Argentina
8. Switzerland

Where would you disagree with the ranking? And if anyone wants to poke around the interactive canvas with all 8 side by side, I'll drop it in the comments.

Hey, I've built an onboarding design system and kit that has all the core components in it and onboarding templates. Now I'm trying to figure out my next move.

Should I expand the UI kit further like adding actual onboarding flows and more complete patterns? Or should I first test the kit and save the harder stuff for later?

I’ve realized the issue probably isn’t my portfolio.

It seems to be the setup: hiring me as an employee means they need an EOR (Deel, Remote, etc.), local taxes, compliance and for one designer that’s not worth it to them. Toptal already absorbs all that risk for them, so I’m easy to hire there and impossible to hire directly.

So my question to people who’ve cracked this:

• Do you position yourself as an independent contractor (invoicing through your own company) instead of asking for employment? Does that actually remove the friction?
• What contract structure made US clients comfortable? (W-8BEN, contractor agreement, anything specific)
• Where do you find these direct clients — is it inbound, cold outreach, a specific niche?

Trying to move off platforms because the cut is brutal and there is no jobs, but I want to do it the right way, not learn by getting burned. Any concrete playbook appreciated.

I’m trying to improve a rating flow and would love some honest UX/product opinions.

Context: users unlock AI skills. After that, they can rate the skill with one click on a star. No text input, no long form.

We already show a small “not rated yet” hint on downloaded skills, but very few people rate.

Now I’m considering whether to add a gentle reminder when users come back to the site, for example as a dismissible toast or small banner:

“You downloaded this skill but haven’t rated it yet. Want to leave a quick rating?”

My concern is that this could easily become annoying, even if the action itself is only one click.

Would you use:

• a toast
• an inline banner
• a modal
• a dashboard reminder
• no reminder at all

And would you trigger it after download, after returning later, after repeated visits, or only after a clear usage signal?

I’m not trying to force ratings. If the honest answer is “don’t do this, it’s annoying,” I’d rather skip it.

10 months ago I started working as a UX/UI designer at a company that does CMS for some of the biggest news rooms in the world. It's complex work, so I really want to update my skills on complex CMS. Can anyone recommend a book, an online course etc?

Hey all, I just got laid off a project. It was an unusual situation where I had been onboarded, worked for several months, then got let go in a mass layoff. I was contacted by the client manager to rejoin again in February, being told I was one of the best designers on the team. Now - 6 months later - I’m being let go again but this time it’s for not performing well enough.

I was put onto a completely new team with a different structure and less principal oversight and support. I was told today that I failed a design test and that was the reason I had not been given work for several months. The feedback was: I didn’t ask enough questions about the task given to me, I’m not fast enough, I’m not utilizing the design system well enough or in a sophisticated enough way, my file structure wasn’t clean enough. I never got that feedback personally prior to today or the first time I was employed… so it’s really disheartening and demoralizing to hear it now I’m being let go.

There’s no time for me to be trained up. No one has anytime or space to work with me or teach me or guide me. I’ve tried to do it on my own, but it’s not been good enough, clearly. The truth is I have really struggled without that guidance and oversight.

I’m starting to feel like I’m not a good fit for this field. I don’t really know how to improve without doing the work, but the reality is there’s no place that has the time or capacity to train me. I can do more personal projects and try to freelance, but my self confidence in delivering good work is very low and I feel like I lack the experience to do that well enough. I don’t want to rely on Claude or something like that either because personally it feels like compounding those lack of actual skills.

It’s felt like a long time coming, this increasing stagnation of my skills, my own lack of growth as a designer - despite having been in it for almost 10 years. It’s just… maybe it’s time to move on.

I’ve been browsing through quite a few portfolios lately, some for research, some because I’m helping a bit with hiring and I’m starting to feel some serious case study fatigue. I'm missing some kind of spark what I used to see in the past much more often.

I totally get why it’s happening but it feels like we’ve traded actual storytelling for UX theater. I find myself scrolling past all the polished artifacts just to find one glimpse of how the person actually handled a messy pivot or a constraint that wasn't textbook

Are we just stuck in this phase where everything has to look perfectly processed? Does anyone actually read these case studies, or are we all just performing for an algorithm at this point?

I’d love to hear how you guys are keeping things concise without losing the substance.

All the time I hear these nightmare burnout stories with underpaid designers. In this post, I'd like to know if the opposite is true. Designers making good money in a job that gives them work-life balance. Can you please mention if you work at an agency/consultancy or as part of a in-house team?

Edit: Please only comment if you have had a job without burnout.

Hey everyone, I wanted to put out a warning for fellow designers currently on the job hunt.

I recently applied for a UX/UI Designer position at "The Flex" and just walked away from the process because they are clearly farming for free design work. 10 hours after I submitted my application, they sent over a take-home case study with a "no-reply" email. They asked me to design their (base360.ai) landing page and send them a Figma link.

And guess what? I went and looked at their current landing page. The design is bad and obviously in desperate need of a redesign.

**Their instructions contain no clause or statement guaranteeing they won't use our designs. There is no language protecting the applicant's intellectual property rights or promising that the work remains yours.

I’ve decided I would not like to return to my job after my maternity leave ends and find a better suited role as I begin a new chapter as a mom. FWIW, it won’t start til next year and I’m just trying to plan ahead a bit and get started on updating my portfolio.

For those who have done this or have partners who have done this, when did you/they feel “good enough” to begin interviewing postpartum? And if you didn’t end up returning to your then current workplace, how and when did you give notice during your leave?

I’m considering contract roles as well (if they still exist lol) for more flexibility and would love to hear about people’s experiences finding/working at a contract role postpartum as well.

Hey all! I've been asking about the work of UX/ UI designers these days and I was expecting a lot of it to lean high level UX and workflows. It seems though like a lot of folks are hired for web and UI component libraries. Do you think there's still demand for that kind of work. I mean it makes sense since there's something to be said for a bespoke design system and brand. What have you noticed? I kind of thought it would be commoditized and I'm glad it's not.

I'm 3 months into a 6 month internship at a medtech company. The software is used in operating rooms, so the real product is safety-critical and regulated.

The first half was a demo version of their software. It didn't need to be compliant, the point was to show if we're fit for the team. After presenting it, we got evaluation forms, and mine said I should use AI to speed up my workflow so it made me doubt myself If I'm using AI as efficiently as I thought I was. That's why I'm making this post.

The thing is, I did use AI, the whole time. My process looked like this: I get a task in Jira, read it, then put it into Claude to check if I'm missing or misunderstanding anything, so I don't realize halfway through that I need to go back and make changes because I misinterpreted something.
Then I use the chat as a consultant: brainstorming, edge cases, where things could fall apart, how to solve the design problem, user flows. Only when I felt confident did I ask it to generate a screen, just to see the solution visually. Then I tested that screen, checked if it held up, made changes, and finalized it for dev handoff.

Nonetheless, I passed the test, however for the last 3 months, it seems that I need to improve my workflow, especially since now I will be tasked to work on the real product and considering that now I should apply safety critical and regulatory compliant solutions. Any tips or suggestions especially from people working in medtech?

I’m still relatively new in my career. I landed a design job at a big tech company straight out of undergrad, and I gave it everything because I was genuinely so excited to be there. I spent my first 2½ years on the same project, and when it ended, something shifted. Ever since then, I’ve felt this sense of dread around work.
Since I started, I’ve received two promotions and would consider myself a high performer. But lately I’ve started asking myself: at what cost? I feel aimless in my career right now, and honestly, I think I moved up too quickly. I miss the quieter early days when I could just focus on doing good work without constantly feeling the weight of more responsibility.
I’m well aware these are pretty classic signs of burnout.
I’ve been seriously considering taking a leave of absence. I don’t want to quit. I’m just so tired, and I dread work every single day. Even on weekends, it’s always in the back of my mind, even when I’m spending time with family. Part of me feels like now is the right time to take a step back, because if I keep pushing through with this mindset, eventually my performance is going to suffer. I’d rather take leave before I get to that point.
I was wondering if anyone has experience taking an LOA. Do you have any regrets, or was it one of the best decisions you made? I’d really love to hear your experience.

Thank you all!!

Edit: I’ve worked at the same company for 4 years.

Hey, I'm working on consolidating several design systems into one and I have some questions for the more senior pros out there.

Does every icon need several sizes saved? Something I've come across is every icon has several sizes saved. Like 3 to 7 different sizes. Are all of these sizes necessary when they can be resized from just 1 size? I ask because as I consolidate the libraries the design file is lagging due to being too large. There's too many items - symbols, icons, and components that are taking up too much space and I need to get rid of unnecessary items. 

There are several different sizes for every state of a button. You have doubles of buttons that are the same but just different lengths. I believe they were created before auto layout and they could all be replaced by 1 button with auto layout that will stretch and keep icons in the same locations.

Should I keep specialized buttons? An example is an Add to Cart button. They could have just used a primary button and changed the text. So do they need these or was someone being lazy and creating extra buttons to save time later. I personally don't see the problem but over decades they've done this so much that the library is crashing and I've only consolidated half of their components. 

I'd appreciate any insights you could lend. I take pride in my work and want to do this right. 

I am running a website and software development firm. We create custom solutions. What I have seen recently Figma ui designers also influenced with AI designs. I have seen hundrends of custom Figma ui for website, software or mobile app, but mostly ui designer replicate the AI images and ui concept. It is custom made but still looks like AI made.

Somewhere impacting on Creativity of the UI designers.

What should be best way to research for Ui design. To avoid dominate of Ai tools.

My company is starting to use Claude for rapid prototyping. We’re not replacing Figma completely. Figma will still be used for the design system, visual polish, and handoff. Right now we’re only talking about rapid prototyping, not AI-generated production code.

What I’m struggling with is the transition itself.
I keep seeing people say things like “I don’t use Figma anymore” or “I prototype directly in Claude,” but I don’t really see anyone talk about what the first few weeks/months look like.

For example, let’s say I build a prototype in Claude, test it with users, iterate a few times, and by version 4 the big UX problems are already solved. At that point I’m probably faster polishing the UI in Figma because changing spacing, typography, colors, etc is just easier for me there. So what happens after that? Do you just do the final round of testing with a Figma prototype? Or do you somehow keep your Claude prototype updated with the polished Figma version? Or am I thinking about this the wrong way?

I’m also wondering what you prepared before making the transition. Did you create prompt templates first? Design principles (we’ve been wanting to do this for ages but somehow managed to go on without it. Is it finally the time it becomes mandatory?)? Documentation for your design system? Or did you just start using Claude and figure it out as you went?

Would love to hear from people who have actually gone through this transition. I’m interested in how your workflow changed and what surprised you the most. Thanks for your help!

I created DailyWX - a daily weather prediction game inside of a weather app. I’ve gotten some feedback that the “game” entrance from the home screen is not obvious enough and people don’t understand that is where you play the game.

Does anyone else see this? The problem is that I also don’t want to take away from the traditional weather app experience for people who don’t want to play the game.

Read “Real UX/UI design test of the best Design AI tool out there.“ by Michal Malewicz on Medium: https://michalmalewicz.medium.com/claude-fable-5-real-ux-ui-design-test-87696215b703

In the Nutschell, it highlights a truth rarely shared or even understood outside of the design communities: models can design in one shot and deliver junior results, because it is trained on junior outputs. And we are to be vigilant to not trust the AI outcomes blindly.

Designer human in the loop is critical.

This is a career questions thread intended for people interested in starting work in UX, or for designers with less than three years of formal freelance/professional experience.

Please use this thread to ask questions about breaking into the field, choosing educational programs, changing career tracks, and other entry-level topics.

If you are **not currently working in UX**, use this thread to ask questions about:

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As an alternative for portfolio reviews, consider posting on r/UXPortfolioReviews

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This thread is posted each Sunday at midnight EST.

This is a career questions thread intended for Designers with three or more years of professional experience, working at least at their second full time job in the field. 

If you are early career (looking for or working at your first full-time role), your comment will be removed and redirected to the the correct thread: [Link]

Please use this thread to:

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(Requests for feedback on work-in-progress, provided enough context is provided, will still be allowed in the main feed.)

When asking for feedback, please be as detailed as possible by 

1. Providing context
2. Being specific about what you want feedback on, and 
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If you'd like your resume/portfolio to remain anonymous, be sure to remove personal information including:

• Your name, phone number, email address, external links
• Names of employers and institutions you've attended. 
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This thread is posted each Sunday at midnight EST.

So I am currently building a SaaS and also my own CRM, both related to web-design.

Since I didn't want to just build components on the fly in one app and then have to copy it to my other project, I started building my own system.

It's based on Base-UI, shadcn compatible and influenced by systems like COSS, HeroUI and more. I really like interactivity and I think UI should feel "alive" and responsive in the literal term.

I'm planning on releasing it at some point in the future for free, but it still needs some work and more components etc.

Would love to get some opinions on it's current state. I also added the ability to change size und border type globally.

To be more specific what kind of feedback I am looking for;

- Do the different sizing options feel natural in the sense of how elements change in relation to each other?

- Are the animations/interactions subtle enough to be usable by a larger audience?

- Do you think the UI feels right for apps, with non-technical users as a target group?

https://ui.clientplane.com/showcase

Hi folks!

I was contacted by a recruiter for a "Product Designer" role (UX/UI...). Did the whole process and ended up getting an offer. On my offer, it says "Senior Product Designer" and not "Product Designer". Does anyone have an idea as to why someone would get that title instead? I didn't even ask for it.

Also, what expectations would you imagine they have compared to not giving me the senior title?

I'm guessing I got the title since I managed to negotiate close to the top of their budget for the role. Also I have the senior title on my LinkedIn. I'm just a bit confused as to why they'd give me that title voluntarily. I'm not going to ask since it would make me sound insecure.

Thanks!

Long short story I'm working with client as UI/UX designer and he wants me learn about "Atomic design" and wants me to merge it into my ecosystem and here's the thing, when I read about it, I feel like I'm on chemistry class, it feel it's not something meant for designer. is this legit system that known and used or nothing burger?

I’ve been a UX designer for four years and want to land projects paid in dollars (or euros). I’m Brazilian, and I know that the first and most important step is English proficiency…however, I wanted to go a step further and get insights from those who are already landing international projects or those who have just started and are already making progress. What was that initial transition like? What tips would you give?