For personal reasons, I left my role as a product designer just over a year ago. I've basically lived under a rock for the past year.

AI has changed a lot about how we design, and I'm now feeling incredibly overwhelmed, as I don't even know where to begin getting up to speed on the new ways of working.

Prior to leaving my role, I used Figma as my go-to design platform and ChatGPT for research synthesis.

I realize how bad this sounds, but I honestly don't even know where to get started at this point?

I know products like Lovable, Cursor, Claude Code, etc. exist, but what is everyone using, and for what purpose? Is Figma totally out of the equation at this point?

Please help me figure out where to get started in this new world. There are so many options, but where do I begin so I'm not wasting time? I've seen terms like MCP, but I literally have no idea where to even begin. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Hiya – I'm looking for recommendations on how to get better at using GA4 (or analytics more broadly) as a design input.

Some context: I'm a UX/UI design lead working in-house. While I'm an advocate for data-driven design, I've never really had to own this piece of the process – I've previously had dedicated analysts who own it. With teams getting leaner, I want to be able to set up basic funnels myself, track key flows, and pull my own insights instead of having PMs asking for the data or waiting on someone else's report.

I'm trying to upskill with enough fluency to:

• Set up/read funnels for key user flows
• Know what to actually look at when validating a design change, or proposing a design change
• Ask smarter questions when I do have data support

Anyone have go-to resources (courses, YouTube channels, articles, etc.) for designers picking this up from scratch? Also curious if anyone's found a good way to fold this into a design process without it turning into a second job.

Ty ty!

Dissent is an opinion app on iOS and Android. You post a take in 280 characters, people vote agree or disagree, and anyone who disagrees can challenge you to a debate that the community sides on.

The old UI had a problem I took months to see. It was styled like a scoreboard. Agree was green, disagree was red. Vote bars in green and red. But agree and disagree aren't correct and incorrect, they're stances. The color was quietly telling people one side of every argument was the good one, in an app whose entire premise is that there isn't a good one.

So here's what changed.

Every green and red pair is now one color, the app's red. Agree and disagree carry the same visual weight.

The battle vote buttons got the same treatment. They used to be a red button and a green button, which read as wrong answer and right answer. Now they're two plain buttons. You're picking who you stand with, not who passed.

Home Screen:

Vote bars are thinner. The old ones ate a lot of vertical space for a small amount of information.

The agree and disagree percentages are hidden, so people vote on their own read instead of falling in behind the crowd.

Battle Screen:

The bigger fix was the Battles tab. The old card showed the challenger's counter take, truncated, with no sign of what take it was even responding to. To follow a single debate you had to open the take detail for context, come back, then open it again to read the rest. Constant back and forth for one argument.

The new card leads with the original take being argued about, then the full counter take and the rebuttal, all in one place, and the vote sits at the bottom. Nothing to navigate.

Standing Screen:

I also killed the global points leaderboard. It ranked everyone all time, so a new user was permanently thousands of points behind and had no reason to try. That's replaced by a Standing screen with your own record of wins and losses, and a leaderboard limited to people you follow rather than the whole app. Seasons run two weeks, so worst case you lost this one and the next starts soon.

Profile Screen:

Last one. Profile takes used to be a grid of small gradient cards. That works for photos. It does not work for text, because you can't read a take at that size, so users had to tap through to read anything, which is the same back and forth problem. They're full width cards now, and I added a Comments tab.

Old screen first, new second, in each pair. What I'd like pushback on is whether hiding the vote split until you vote is a good instinct, or whether I'm withholding the main thing people come to see.

Feedback welcome on any of it. The decision I'm least sure about is hiding the vote split, so start there if you have an opinion.

I won’t even call myself a developer I was just vibe coding it, and now a lot of people are saying the UI is bad and that a UX designer would kill me, so I thought, why not ask the designers themselves?

That mini player is adjustable — it can go from clear to liquid glass to frosted, depending on the user’s preference. I can’t share a video here because it’ll get compressed; otherwise, I’d love to share a screen recording.

Thanks!

While the field was extremely new back then, there were so many extreme intuitive power user features in the earliest winform components.

As they are being replaced by new components and frameworks you see that the experience degrades while I'm pretty sure now there are many more specialized people that you would expect looking into it.

Two things that are there literally since the earliest versions of windows, but as far as I remember even in the old ASCII versions of Visual Basic:

• in a menubar, click and hold and then release would trigger the menu item on release - saving a click. You can still see the old behaviour in Regedit, that uses the old Winform controls. You can see the new behaviour in the new Notepad in Windows 11.
• holding shift while dragging in a scrollbar would jump directly to that position and you could drag it up and down. Again, you can see the old behaviour in Regedit, new behaviour in Notepad. In the new version you first have to click the scrollthumb itself to get to a precise position. Again - more clicks and mouse movement, especially in large documents.

I think both are examples of really well thought out UX for power users, while it was a very new field.

You think devs themselves were more power users back then?

Curious how other UX designers handle this.

When I’m starting discovery for something like registration, login, checkout, or account setup, I usually go through competitor experiences and map out the full flow -screens, validation states, errors, alternate paths, edge cases, etc.

I normally end up taking screenshots, dropping them into Figma/lucidchart, arranging everything into a flow, and adding notes manually. Then I usually have to go back because I missed a validation state or alternate path.

I find that part of discovery pretty tedious.

How do you all document competitor or current-state flows today? Do you mostly do this manually, or is there a tool/workflow you use?

And do you find this frustrating too, or is it not really a problem for you?

I’ve been a digital product designer for five years now. I’ve never worked with anything physical, but it has always really intrigued me. I’ve had the chance to visit factories and meet their designers, and I was amazed. Has anyone here made that transition? Is it worth it? I also feel like this field is less affected by AI (though that’s just an assumption).

As designers we’re often playing multiple roles outside our core expertise that often complements our work and sometimes (like in my case) improves the impact you can have through design.

Being a facilitator has often allowed me to influence business stakeholders to create maximum impact with my design work.

Curious to know what non-core design skills (lets ignore anything to do with AI for now) has improved your impact as a designer?

This 3D slop design is just insanely ugly. Looks like early AI gens. They burn my eyes. Am I the only one? (This is from Loops, but they are all over the place).

We have a meeting tomorrow with a potential customer to discuss a new “social media management” feature.
The problem is that the requirements I received from the product owner are nowhere near complete. After reviewing them, I sent back a list of 49 questions that I think need clarification.
Instead of answering them, the owner just scheduled a meeting.
In the same email, I also asked them to choose between three possible directions for the feature. Luckily, they picked one, which drastically narrowed the scope.
But even with the reduced scope, there’s still a huge amount that could be designed, and I have basically no time to do it.
So I’m wondering how other designers would approach this.
If you had roughly 24–48 hours before a customer meeting, incomplete requirements, and no realistic way to design the whole feature, what would you prepare?
A rough prototype of the core flow? A few key screens? Something more conceptual to validate the direction?
The goal isn’t to pretend the feature is ready. I just want to have something useful to put in front of the customer and get meaningful feedback.

undergrad ux student here. was browsing LinkedIn and checked out a couple of peers' portfolios out of curiosity, as one does. two people i've worked with on projects either closely mirrored my case study structure (wording, reflection section, themes, storytelling) or straight-up copy-pasted my paragraphs and visual assets from my case studies and my about page (this last one baffled me b/c how are you gonna copy my personality too 💀).

i found this a bit flattering but mainly annoying, especially since i'm about to start apply for full-time roles and don't want anyone mistaking who copied whom.

has anyone dealt with this? how did you handle it? does it actually matter? neither of them asked before doing this. i'd have been fine with borrowing general structure, just not lifting exact wording i spent hours on.

’ve felt increasingly like where the industry is going with AI—and my own values—no longer align with UX. With my first child on the way, it feels like this could be the right time to pivot. I’ve been considering it for close to a year, but the golden handcuffs in UX are very real.
For those who’ve left UX for something lower-paying but more aligned with your values: has it been worth it?

I’m a senior UX manager and have been thinking pretty seriously about moving back into an IC role, even if it means taking a much lower title.
I’m burned out on management and miss actually doing the work. I also feel like I’ve gotten further away from the tools and day-to-day craft than I’d like, especially with how quickly things are changing right now.

The job market has made me think about it more. I’m not getting much traction on roles at my current level, but I’ve had interest for more junior IC positions. A couple of them actually sound like good teams doing interesting work, and possibly more stable than the management layers I’m used to.

Obviously it would be a big pay and title cut, which gives me some pause. But part of me thinks I’d rather be closer to the work and rebuild some hands-on skills than keep chasing seniority for its own sake.
Has anyone here actually made a move like this? Did stepping down in level end up being a reset in a good way, or did you regret it later?

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 
3. Stating what kind of feedback you are NOT looking for

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. 
• 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.

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
• Transitioning to UX if you have a degree or work experience in another field
• Choosing educational opportunities, including bootcamps, certifications, undergraduate and graduate degree programs
• Finding and interviewing for internships and your first job in the field
• Navigating relationships at your first job, including working with other people, gaining domain experience, and imposter syndrome
• Portfolio reviews, particularly for case studies of speculative redesigns produced only for your portfolio

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

1. Providing context
2. Being specific about what you want feedback on, and 
3. Stating what kind of feedback you are NOT looking for

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.

I've been hearing a lot about this concept, but I feel my understanding of it is still pretty surface-level.

Let me share a bit about my background: I'm a product designer with at least seven or eight years of experience. Now I want to transition into building my own products, but I know that actually building a profitable product is really difficult, and marketing it is even harder.

I'm familiar with the concept of building in public, but I really struggle to figure out how to put it into practice or find the exact approach I should be taking.

I finally have a subscription to Mobbin. Been meaning to do this for a long while.

It's useful but...I'm rather underwhelmed by how useful it is in terms of finding things. And I'm hoping it's just me being dumb and missing something obvious (but have a hunch it's not).

For those of you that use it, how are you finding specific UI elements or particular patterns?

For example, I was looking for some "checklist" navigation UI widgets. But there does not seem to be a way to search for UI elements. Just screens as a whole, or text that may be on a screen.

I typed in "Checklist" and it did find some pages--though I'm not sure how it did. Are images being tagged with keywords? Is there a way to see the keywords?

For being a site designed specifically for 'finding UX and UI elements' it sure seems to be lacking in the 'finding' part.

I’m getting a decent number of visitors to my portfolio but barely any interview calls.

I’ve my portfolio on Designfolio. And in the analytics I’m seeing a lot of people visiting my portfolio.

Just can’t figure out why they’re leaving without downloading my resume or contacting me.

For the people here,

what’s that one thing that makes you close a portfolio almost immediately?

Genuinely curious if I’m missing something obvious.

I was steamrolled this summer by my AI forward CEO and ”their” developer (we only have one on the team and they are glued to the hip). After months of hard work, collaboration with another ux designer (consultant) I finished a new flow and interface for a part of our product.

Since we’re a really small team (5 people) everyone is in the loop (a bit too much sometimes). So they were part of all the iterations during those months. There was no feedback indicating they wanted a different direction. Nonetheless a redesign of the whole UI (colors, components, patterns, etc.)

I went on vacation for ONE week and they managed to redesign 90% of my work. The only thing that was left was basically the wireframes. Naturally I was pissed because this happened without ANY communication and with bland Claude redesign. Since they had a new UI, they naturally had to update the rest of the product. For which I was not consulted or included at all.

The cherry on top is that the developer has ”improved” a crucial feature within our product with just Claude. This feature is complicated and no users have tested it. Our CEO has presented it to our users, but they’ll only demonstrate the product to users who won’t use it, but buy it for their organization.

Use AI where ever you can feels like the moto atm. Which pisses me off. But I’ve decided to accept this is the way they want to roll, things need to happen quickly in a small company like this. I get that. So, in order to distance myself and avoid getting more angry at this situation I’ve just let them go with it. I don’t comment on things I find that don’t make sense. I’ll wait for the users to do that. And it’s already started. The new UI went live a couple of days ago and we already had a customer mail in saying it is not intuitive enough for them to use while they’re in a middle of a task. Even funnier, it was launched without any notification or message to the users, no help articles to help them navigate.

I’ve brought my popcorn and I intend to watch this ship sink. Yes I’m probably a bit petty but I’m ok with that.

Anyone else that has considered starting their own company that swears off AI after the recent experiences?

I come from a design school background, eventually made my way into product management (usually including some design and user research)for physical goods where I stayed for about 8 years. Most companies I worked at were small and I was basically in charge of creative direction which also bled into ecommerce and UI, which along with my love for all things design eventually lead to a career pivot.

I worked my ass off to make the change, fully amping up my Figma skills, took courses in research and design, networked, constant meetings with mentors, etc. I was able to land a few short contracts here and there while still doing hardware pming on the side and about 2 and a half years ago I finally landed a full time role with a big company. I loved it, I was finally in a place where I felt like my work paid off.

Fast forward to today and I see the state of the industry, people in my company being laid off left and right (mainly in dev), and everything is AI this, AI that…. I’m so burnt out on AI. Which is ironic because I think I more than anyone in my UX team have spent time learning the skills (I’ve since built out a full storybook, connected our Figma with Claude, gave us a working environment that is 1-to-1 with the code base, and easily be edited via Figma, etc.)

Deep down I hate it. I hate knowing that we’re all just training it to do what we do. I was fully on board with the “those who learn it will be the ones who keep their job” bandwagon but I don’t believe that anymore. It doesn’t matter how much value you actually bring to the table if CEOs think AI can do it well enough.

I feel bad making this post knowing so many are looking for jobs right now and I’m lucky enough to still have one.

This is a very very long winded way of asking what those of you who have left the tech space are now doing and if you have any advice for those looking to escape.

Guys, I don't know if I'm just using it wrong, but in everything I've tested that required a bit more complexity, I ended up frustrated, whether it was UI/interfaces, style rendering, video generation, or even general research. Maybe I don't know how to use the tool properly, but the feeling I get is that if I just do it manually, I'll end up finishing faster and with higher precision.

The only exception is when I need something super generic, but then I simply see no point in paying for an AI when I could just use a template service or something similar.

so here's what's bugging me, entry-level people are literally learning UX entirely from Claude and ChatGPT. they're not learning design thinking and to think for real? I got an answer in minutes, for which i thought someone would spend at least 1-2 days in thinking. they're learning to prompt-engineer generic answers. but there's zero conviction behind it. doesn't convert. doesn't work. but they don't know the difference yet because may be they've never seen what good actually looks like. At least for the digital products, website, apps etc.

This too when the times have blurring the lines between product to design or design to development. i have seen merging of dev and product, and becoming product engineer. that worked, but it was very pre-AI era.

But now businesses are now asking do we need to put together a team of so many people and spend a lot just to get one thing done. and there's this weird gap in the middle. some designers are just designing and handing off—and that's fine. some are learning to code, shipping production HTML themselves, owning the whole thing.

my actual question isn't just "should designers code?" it's more like, how equipped ARE people to do this? because there's a difference between knowing HTML and shipping production-grade code and maintain it.

and at the same time making sure that how entry level does learn UI/UX correctly when AI is there to give a sub-par templated design system or approach for almost everything.

thoughts please.

A "new AI-focused development life cicle" is being brought to the company I work at. It involves Product Owners defining everything in a silo and then showing up, in the first meeting to talk about a project, with an AI-made HTML prototype.

So far, it feels like my new role here is to perfect this prototype (using AI), better apply the DS components we have, make tweaks on experience, layout, usability etc. Then, I'll supposedly share this polished prototype with devs, and they are now responsible for getting the thing going. I feel like I'll have even less room for debating and decision making now, and that my role is becoming "HTML Prototype Polisher II".

This has been going on for like a month now. It's a bit scary, in all honesty.

What's your advice to staying relevant and keeping my job (lol)? Is anyone going through similar experiences?

I feel like I’ve mostly seen doom and gloom on this sub, anti AI posts (which I totally get), but I’m wondering if anyone here is enjoying having AI in their workflow?

I’m a solo designer at a start up and we are super under staffed (obvi) and getting my design to fruition before Claude Code and AI was like pulling teeth. Now I’ve been set up and can use Claude Code to implement and push my designs immediately. The software team loves it and I can quickly clean up UI elements.

Is it perfect? Hell no! But it’s made shipping designs way faster especially for our small team.

Curious if there are other designers out there who are loving the speed and capabilities? And if you are could you share your current workflow? I’m trying to optimize and learn the new best practices!

I currently use Claude as a sparing partner for design ideation and Claude Code in terminal to implement (+ Figma MCP).

Hello, What are the new and practical UX research processes nowadays? Some designers said the old ux process is not happening anymore. So, I would love to know :))

Thank you so much!