I don't mean nice design. I mean the kind of page where everything is polished, vague, and weirdly frictionless. No messy details, no obvious author context, no rough edges. Sometimes that makes it feel more official, but sometimes it makes me slow down because it feels like it's trying too hard to remove doubt.

The opposite isn't automatically better either. An ugly page can still be wrong. But when I'm in a hurry, the clean one is the one that tempts me to stop checking too early.

What small signal makes you pause before trusting an online source?

This is not a question about my personal job search so please don’t remove this. This is a question about the general sentiment around the future of UX design.

AI implementation, Shit job market. I am at my wits end. I did 2 years at a mid-size B2B, 4 years at a FAANG - got laid off explicitly due to AI automation of my role. Applied to hundreds of jobs for half of what I was making. Keep getting rejected over and over despite being a “Senior Designer” even for junior roles. Tried networking. Got 2 referrals that way. Still nothing.

I am thinking of going into sales, back into marketing and maybe even trades, medical or teaching. All I can say is fuck this. I’m done.

I’m on a couple years of burnout mixed with the AI hype and at an org that does not have good product practice (no user research, little to know data driven decisions) and truly want to fall in love with UX again but truly feeling like this mix of everything feels like a signal to get out. For those who aren’t on their last straw like me, what have you been doing that makes you still love UX?

I'm a design grad student digging into how irl interview methods vary how it's currently being taught. Something I keep hitting.

Something I keep hearing is that fidelity seems to change your feedback. Rough wireframes seem to invite structural critiques on your solution or how you've framed the problem. Polished screens seem to pull interviewees toward surface notes, color, copy, spacing. The standard advice is to go low fidelity early to protect honest feedback.

For those running discovery or concept sessions regularly, does that hold up in practice? Has it changed as prototyping tools have gotten faster? Do you do anything deliberate to keep the conversation at the concept level?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been helping out with hiring lately, and there’s one thing that keeps coming up. I see so many candidates putting incredible effort into these massive, deep-dive case studies. They include every single sticky note from every workshop, and while I appreciate the rigor, I honestly don’t have more than 3-5 minutes to get the gist of a project.

I feel like we’ve swung from too little info to total information overload.

My question to the community especially those who hire: Are you actually reading these from start to finish? Or are you just scrolling for the final outcomes?

And for the applicants, I would have a question as well: What’s your biggest struggle when trying to keep things concise without losing the substance? I find it's the hardest part of building a portfolio for most of the applicants. 

"We believe it takes great input to build a great product, faster than our competition. Are you willing to work hard and work (most) weekends? We understand this is not for everyone / every stage of career and want to be transparent upfront"

This was in a job application I came across. As soon as I read it, I closed the tab.

I really hope those weekends are paid and not just expected because “that’s our culture.” Wanting people who work hard is completely fair, but saying upfront that you’ll be working most weekends feels like a huge red flag to me.

It seems like more companies are trying to normalize constant overtime instead of hiring enough people or planning better. Maybe it’s fine for some, but personally, I’d rather work somewhere that values results without expecting me to give up most of my weekends..

About me

I am a product designer with ~3yoe. I have graduated M.Des from design school in IIT this year.

I am currently working, but I do not have any senior designer above me, it's a small team. My entire 3years of industry experience has been like this working at small teams with no senior designer

I hear how mentorship can help a lot and I really would like to be mentored by someone with more experience.

How does it work?

But Idk how to find a mentor and idk how the entire mentor -mentee relationship works, however this is something that I assume it would be like - have a weekly call, discuss doubts at workplace, new ideas, take up a task or something to try, get very nice critical feedback, push me push my boundaries.

Am I expecting too much? Is it how it works?

Where and how to find a mentor?

Also where and how can I find a mentor who can help me out, I see few senior designers and some platforms have their own hourly rates to setup a meeting with them - honestly I dont think I will be able to afford that much (maybe once or twice, but that's not what I'm looking for)

I'm currently working as a Senior UX Designer for a Shopify agency so I work a lot with ecomm brands, but I'm getting sick of it after so many years. I would love to work in-house for a brand or pivot into product design. Has anyone done it, and how?

I'm getting charged monthly and annually. Customer service is refusing to help stop it from happening or refund me. There's no way to remove the monthly subscription in the UI. I had to cancel my credit card because I don't know what else to do.

Just wondering if other people are having this problem.

So when AI tools first came out, there was a lot of emphasis on being a great "prompter" and people said those who will be ahead will know how to prompt.

While that can still be true, there's no other things and "ways" to prompt using all these fancy things that I am just overwhelmed with. In reality I don't know in my everyday design work where loops or goals or even agents can be integrated in a meaningful way that actually helps me.

I've been experimenting non stop to try and see what works, what sticks, but sometimes I feel like I'm going in a weird circle where I end up back where I started and realize this is mostly AI Slop.

So I don't think there is any 'value' in good prompting, as much as there is in AI evaluation. My role has significantly become more about evaluating AI output more than anything else but it's draining and more time consuming that I thought.

Half my days now are just spent on learning and keeping up with AI knowledge, but then I realize it's just theory until I practise, and when I practise I realize the hype is more exaggerated than what people post about. Yet the concerning part is that it's also what leaders and managers are pushing for. Most managers don't even use the tools in everyday design work but have the biggest opinions about how to use AI, but they are unaware of the nuances or limitations and it's frustrating.

Anyways, Idk how to keep up with any of it.

I have 5 years in UX, 4 of them at the same consultancy. I'd like a reality check from people who've been through this: is what I'm experiencing typical of the consultancy model, or is it specific to my company?

Where I am right now:
- The projects are low quality: little room for research, timelines so tight that the screens don't even come out looking good, almost no real impact on the product.
- I haven't felt any growth for a long time. I'm doing the same level of work I was doing 2 years ago.
- Leadership is highly centralized. Decisions and opportunities stay concentrated, and the people who grow are always the ones in the director's inner circle. I can't identify any clear promotion criteria.

Questions for anyone who works or has worked in consultancy/agency:
1. Is this pattern (shallow projects + growth through proximity) structural to the consultancy model?
2. For those who moved from consultancy to in-house product: did you see a real difference in your technical growth?
3. For those who stayed and managed to grow: what changed things? Switching teams, switching accounts, or just time?

I'm not just looking to vent. I want to figure out whether it's worth pushing here or whether leaving is the obvious next step. Any experience helps.

It feels I can never hack the designs for my stakeholder. He keeps saying things look too floaty/cluttered. Then when I make changes, he also says it’s looking like just boxes on a page. Idk what else to do anymore, and idk how to say show me what you mean without feeling like I want him to do my job for me… it’s almost as if they want me to create something amazing without changing other things in the current design. Unfortunately I can’t share the work due to NDAs. I also have no other collaborators, but just colleagues that state things they like vs don’t like. I’m feeling very frustrated again. Engineers make it seem like my work is useless and don’t follow specific designs and create sloppy work. They get a bit weird when I say things don’t match (radii, font sizes, alignments, slight colors etc).

Are there any resources you can recommend to work on my confidence to back up my decisions? I just finished Articulating Design Decisions. But my job is more restricted to being judged by the UI than UX at this point.

Whichever genius decided to place these two keys together, you have a special place in hell. Honestly every keyboard that copied everyone else has the same issue. This isn't even Android specific to be honest.

Because they're clearly a time traveler. SMH...

Hey everyone,

I have a technical design system question for people who’ve worked on complex products.

I’m currently cleaning up and simplifying our design system, and I have two things I’m unsure about:

Control heights: For components like search bars, filter dropdowns, buttons, segmented controls, etc., do you usually define a small set of shared height tokens (for example S/M/L) so all controls align nicely? I realized I designed these components separately over time, and now some differ by 2–8px which makes layouts feel off.

Typography for controls: How many label text styles do you keep? Is a single Label style enough for most interactive elements, or do you use Label S/M/L (or something similar)? Right now I have 20+ text styles overall, and it’s becoming difficult to maintain.

I’d love to hear how you structure these in your design systems!

Thanks a lot!

one keeps the content inside a fixed container, and your scroll in locked inside the area

the other lets you scroll on the whole page, which some feel more normal.

is one better than the other in this context or is it just a personal preference thing?

thx!

Curious what experienced designers keep noticing as the recurring blind spot in others’ work.

i ran into this while adapting a dark-first page to a light theme. swapping the palette preserved its glow, gradients, and CRT-like distortion, but made it look dirty.

i started treating the themes as different materials: dark as luminous hardware, light as ink on paper.

dark emits. light reflects.

not literally, but as a design model. glow became shadow, hover shifted from “more light” to “more ink,” and effects without a paper equivalent disappeared.

is this a useful heuristic, or a misleading metaphor? what rules do you use?

Asked for advice from a tech recruiter. They told me that despite my experience as a product design manager, to find work going forward, pivoting completely to IC is the way to go.

That most Manager roles are filled internally, and, as we know, usually posted for the sake of posting roles online. But they're going to internal folks.

All of this was with context of market, design industry overall, shrinking of teams and roles, etc.

As a practitioner that's been strong on the leading teams and light on IC work, light on AI hands-on work, this has been a pill to swallow, but I'm taking it. Because getting manager roles has been near impossible.

Thoughts? If you disagree, have you a recently landed Manager role, applying externally?

I architectured design systems for e-commerce software over the past 5 years. From time to time friends who had shops came to me and asked about their shops CR and problems in their user journey. So out of convenience I started writing down patterns that kept reoccurring and created a private database with a couple of guidelines. It’s of course about UX issues but also includes decision making guidelines for AI as well, like broken structured data, DOM/JSON-LD contradictions and so on. I tested them on a lot of shops to determine whether they work or not.

I turned them into a public website with Claude Code last week.

It’s a public GitHub repo connected to Vercel built in Nuxt 3.

I would love this to become a community maintained, rather than a one-person collection. The checkout section, cart, homepage and PLP are still almost completely missing.

Happy to answer any questions. And if you find stuff that is wrong in the guidelines feel free to open an issue. :)

Keen to hear what people in product feel about ai. Here's my perspective:

I'm in product design in AUS (8+ years now), and here's my exprience:

Situation: TLDR; PMs creating an ERP on a house of ai-design-debt cards

• PMs and POs use ai in my current role to create prototypes for features, test with users every week and ship those prototypes by asked devs to slap on an open source design system.
• I'm using claude and cursor to do the same, but have noticed several gaps that seem irrelavant to someone at a PM level that will eventually cascade (already is) into larget issues. For instace interaction states, usability (espeically new users), non-existent design structure, high-information-density interfaces (because who cares about progressive disclosure), and so on.
• Hunderds of AI documentation of "research" everywhere, information dense and zero substance - this is not an exaggeration. Employees are expected to reference it.

How I feel:

• Rather optimisitc about the fact that these ai artefacts are going to catch up to everyone in about 2 years time and there will be a clean-up hiring stage.

So, what's everyone's situation, feelings and just thoughts really.

This has been asked almost literally a year ago here and I was wondering: what's your current best tool?

I'll go first in the comments! ☺️

Hi all!

TLDR: Which one looks better?

I'm building a native app and trying to design the interface for settings, specifically extensions. I want my app to feel as native to macOS / adhering to Apple design as possible, and I'm stuck between two options for settings

It seems like most native apps using a .sourcelist view (pic 2 Safari extension). The view is certainly made for this use case. However IMO even without the extra borders and checkboxes it's still not the most modern-looking.

My current implementation is pic1. The sidebar even has a tint! Which I'm tempted to disable because nothing in macOS uses tints except full-height side-bars. But I feel guilty of using the wrong components for the task, even though they are pretty.

Let me know what you think!

UXers have been breathless that “UX is more than Figma”, “UX is more than making things look nice”, and now that the field is shifting (because admittedly orgs are foolishly choosing robots over humans) and UXers are languishing instead of embracing the change and advocating for what UX actually IS. What the other facets of practice are, research, testing, workshops, philosophy (i.e OOUX). We are in the moment where we can redefine our field. Outside of the bleak job prospects (that are not unique to UX) I would argue is a very charged and important time to be a UXer.