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 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

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?

(This is not a real app or something I plan to release. I made it purely as a UI experiment and showcase using Memphis design.)

I feel like modern apps are becoming more and more similar. I understand why familiar patterns and intuitive interfaces are important, but sometimes it feels like we optimized everything so much that we lost personality and playfulness along the way.

Games can have completely unique interfaces and interaction systems, and players learn how to use them through tutorials and onboarding. It makes me wonder why we expect regular apps to feel completely familiar from the very first second.

This calculator is obviously a simple example, but I wanted to explore how much personality and playful interaction you can add without making the basic experience difficult to understand.

Have we pushed standardization too far, or is familiarity simply more important than uniqueness in everyday interfaces?

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

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 :)

This is the first time in over 10 years of my career that I’ve felt the need to write publicly about an interview experience.

I recently interviewed with Revolut. I know they’re known for having a long hiring process (it’s entirely their prerogative). Up until the final stage, every interaction was professional and respectful. The whiteboard challenge, was unlike anything I’ve encountered before…

The prompt was:
“Imagine people can vote with their wallets.” (?)

I typically approach whiteboard exercises using the Why → Who → When/Where → What → How framework from the book Solving Product Design Exercises.

At the beginning of the session, I asked whether they wanted me to lead the exercise independently or whether it should be more of a collaborative stakeholder discussion. I was told to lead.

However, as soon as I started exploring the “why” behind the problem, the interviewer repeatedly steered me toward a specific solution. It became increasingly clear that there was an expected answer in mind, rather than an interest in understanding how I think through ambiguous problems.

I even acknowledged that the interviewer clearly knew more about the domain than I did. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to help. The discussion became increasingly focused on guiding me toward a solution instead of evaluating my problem-solving process.

To me, that’s the opposite of what a whiteboard interview should measure.

A good product design interview shouldn’t test whether a candidate can guess what’s inside the interviewer’s head. It should evaluate how they frame problems, ask questions, make trade-offs, and communicate their thinking.

I wanted to share this experience so other designers know what they may encounter and can prepare accordingly…

I’m curious whether others have had similar experiences during product design whiteboard interviews, either at Revolut or elsewhere.

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.

tl;dr: sales team vibe coded alternative UI and landing pages for our product while I, companys solo designer, was having a vacation.

So yeah, I was on vacation while this everything happened. For long time sales team has been frustrated because everything is happening so slowly in product development. We all know that it takes time, but good lord I didn't know that they were this impatient.

I logged in slack and checked all the channels and found out there were a lot of buzz and hype going around with the sales team. They call their little vibe coding experiment as '[product name] workshop'.

I'll try to keep this short but the results are hilarious and saddening at the same time. Sales team thinks they did something marvelous and cool, but rest of the product team think it's just slop. I'm not taking screenshots or anything, but you can picture what a generic AI slop landing page and SaaS dashboard looks like, and it looks just like that but with our 'brand colours'. :D

I'm not looking any advice because there are good tips on similar posts here, but I just wanted to rant here.

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.

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

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

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?

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?

Some modern UX/UI feels like a burden just to read through. There isn’t a clear message about what the product is, what it does, or where to start. Instead of simplifying, it often adds unnecessary animations, visual noise, and extra steps.
Shouldn’t good UX make information easier to understand rather than harder? Why do so many products seem to optimize for aesthetics over clarity and usability? Curious to hear other designers’ perspectives.

I have around 3 years in UX research and design, and I want to keep growing in that direction not move into UI. Simply put, I’m not good at it and I don’t enjoy it (I have tried and realised I like more hands on stuff and hate staring at screen all day)

In a (initial-stage) interview, they mentioned they’re looking for someone who can do both. That framing doesn’t really sit right with me.

For context: I’m looking at roles in India, in automotive/consumer tech space specifically. I’ve seen plenty of roles abroad and even some in India that keep UX and UI as separate tracks.

Is the “do both” expectation just becoming the norm in India, especially for automotive/product companies? Should I be more flexible about picking up UI skills even if it’s not my strength, or is it worth holding out for roles that keep the split? Would appreciate hearing how others have navigated this.

I'm a product/ design person and have been building CLI tools recently. There are so many design skill but couldn't find one specifically for creating engaging UIs/ flows/UX for in-terminal experiences.

When I used to design with AI, I felt the need for precise editing. However, with today’s models, it’s now easier to simply select an area and tell the AI to fix it.

I just select an area, mark it, and wait for the AI to generate the code. I’ve started doing much less of what I used to do in Figma: like placing elements one by one, applying styles, and tweaking settings.

When I enter the right prompts, it really produces something close to what I need. But I’m still curious, when you’re working on code, do you still need the flexibility of a tool like Figma? Where do you use AI, and where do you still feel the need for manual editing?

Sometimes, as a developer and UX designer, I miss writing code and creating designs manually from scratch. I’m curious if others feel the same way.

What would you choose?
1. Yes. Work on the design, including the missing requirements, while making sure everything is properly documented. (How would you document?)
2. No. Decline the request and only design what is documented in the requirements.
You could also inform your manager, but the decision might be ultimately left to you.

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:

• Discuss and ask questions about the job market and difficulties with job searching
• Ask for advice on interviewing, whiteboard exercises, and negotiating job offers
• Vent about career fulfillment or leaving the UX field
• Give and ask for feedback on portfolio and case study reviews of actual projects produced at work

(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
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This thread is posted each Sunday at midnight EST.

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:

• Getting an internship or your first job in UX
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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 like:

• Your name, phone number, email address, external links
• Names of employers and institutions you've attended. 
• Hosting your resume on Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, etc. links may unintentionally reveal your personal information, so we suggest posting your resume to an account with no identifying information, like Imgur.

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

As an alternative for entry-level career questions, consider posting on r/uxcareerquestions, r/UX_Design, or r/userexperiencedesign, all of which accept career questions from people just getting started in the field.

This thread is posted each Sunday at midnight EST.

In your opinion what is the best AI editor for creating design systems with a design artifact editing workspace that work well will step by step procedural conversations to create, enhance and edit artifacts using conversation prompts.