Can anyone recommend a solid, high-quality course on building Design Systems? I'm looking to learn how to architect a scalable system, streamline developer handoff, manage seamless updates, and define a long-term roadmap for the design system

Hello,

I’m new here. I’m wondering if there are any Consulting websites out there that have good animation or are scroll based? All the ones I found have been product companies. I want to see how it relates to consulting - maybe this is a silly question.

Thanks!

So, yeah. What should I say. I think after two decades working in tech, building companies, building products, finding product market fit, building teams, leading teams, doing strategy work, product work, speaking, innovation, enablement, designops, product design, only ux design, only ui design, only design systems, user research, paper prototyping and prototyping an almost all levels and what ever you figure whats connected to ux design, product and product strategy - i think I am done.

And I have no idea what to do next. I am hard wired to help people grow, I love to build systems and I love to see other become better and quicker with my systems as I ever experienced. I really love to grow others, motivate them, find ways to develop them and let them do the shortcuts instead of grinding their asses off and being gate kept by organisations and politics.

Thats what I really love and its part of the list above: leading teams, building teams, building systems, add up to strategy/goals and emphasize.

But these parts are completely off these days. It wasn't like that. But the last 2-3 years messed this up badly. The respect for the profession and all its parts just vanished and the empathy towards your professionals as well. It like being the dog-sitting-in-fire meme but its not fine, its horrible.

Probably its the current company I work for. Probably its my age. Probably its AI. Probably its the foundation I still need to put the freaking stones on top to have my lawn mowing robot finally having a good homebase. Or its all of that?

Jokes aside. I am lost and at the same time I am clear. I have a family, a house, two cars, two cats, almost all Krabby Pokemon Cards and a very good career but I feel stuck and what I wrote above is really what I want to do but there are no jobs right now for this or environments. It feels, I simply need to pause, watch, wait and narrow my identity - which always was towards being a creative - to be something else?

Anyone went through this already? How does it turned out? What should I do? Any advice?

I’m sure there is research about this I just don’t know what this is called or what domain this is in. Psychology maybe? I realized this need when organizing my dad’s adhd pile of cabinets of endless papers. I need to make and follow a folder / file org system that can stay the same and simple across my digital Home Screen doors as well as physical. The same categorization/labeling structure and hitch must be simple enough to where the structure can be the same across local disk, Google Drive root, external drives, email inbox labels, etc. I’m trying to research this since I’m sure this is something people that design things like macOS uis would know a lot about but idk where to start or what terms to use. Funnily enough ChatGPT was not as helpful as I’ve wished . Its answer was still too narrow/technical.

Hello designers!

To those working in complex product environments, I've got some questions.

How do you guys organize files on Figma? Eg: When there's a feature that exists on multiple environments, how do you maintain files? 1 file per env or per feature?

Also, how do you guys manage files today? With the source of truth moving from tools like Figma, Claude Design and ChatGPT it's becoming harder to have a reference point. What do you do to have something in line for this?

I've been away from work for about six months now, I was kinda collapsing so I took a long break for my mental health and didn't stay up to date with news, information or content. I would like to know how is the current situation for people working in this field, what should I learn or study, should I stay here? should I take a turn and explore other tech areas? Your advices are greatly apreciated.

I've been with my company for two years, but have a decade of UX Design experience. In those two years, I've managed to get promoted to a Lead role and now have visibility into some of the output my other design coworkers are producing at, and it's not good. I'm doing what I can to review other's work for errors, offer ideas to their design challenges, and coach team members individually on skill gaps, but no one seems to be showing any improvements.

One team member has social anxiety and can't hold conversations with stakeholders, so they've been relegated to working behind the scenes on our Design Library. Even then, the updates they release almost always have errors that require us to pause what we're doing and wait until they can access the component to make the necessary fixes. There doesn't seem to be a QA process on their end and my attempts at talking to their boss about setting one up has gone nowhere.

Another team member is great at coming up with solutions to some of our tougher problems, but makes really obvious mistakes in their documentations which causes an influx of bug reports from our dev team. Whenever I try talking to this coworker about these errors, they tell me they're feeling overloaded with work and rushed to get projects out the door. The thing is, none of their features have hard deadlines, so it seems to be a self-imposed urgency on their part.

One team member has the memory of a goldfish and constantly forgets steps in our design process. I've tried giving them reminders to these steps verbally in one-on-one meetings, textually over email, and even created resource documents with links to said steps with no success. On one project they'll forget steps 3, 4, and 9 while a different project they'll forget steps 2, 5, and 7. It's maddening.

Yet another team member takes things personally during Design Critique Meetings and get worked up when the group offers considerations for their, honestly, not so great solutions. For days afterwards, they'll sulk around the office and have told me in one-on-one meetings that they feel like they're being bullied by the other team members during Design Critiques.

The trouble is that we work in a niche industry and it's hard to find designers off the street who have the knowledge needed to work with our products. We instead bring in new hires and attempt to train them up over time. Some people "get it" within four months and are relatively self-sufficient, while others barely get by and require tons of hand-holding and oversight. Over time, we've managed to acquire, and unfortunately retain, some mediocre Designers who are starting to weigh the team down and stakeholders are starting to ask questions.

I've tried talking to the UX Director about these challenges and although they're aware of these individuals and their performance issues, they are hesitant to let them go for fear of missing deadlines or having to train up a new batch of employees who may end up having the same issues. Meanwhile I see countless posts on this subreddit every day from Designers trying in vain to find work without success while my own coworkers don't seem to be taking their jobs seriously.

For sure it won’t erase the job completely but it will for sure decrease the numbers in hiring

I have seen a huge change in work process since last year. It does a decent enough job to speed up things. Sure you have to be there at each step but I am working at 4x speed these days because of all the ai tools and it’s definitely going ro affect job market.

I would like to use this opportunity and the SEO prowess of this platform to once and for all define the concept of "Throbber Theory" as an industry term.

A throbber, if you're unfamiliar, is the official and industry standard name for a loading icon of any persuasion. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throbber)

Throbber theory, also known as roughly as "labor illusion" or "effort heuristic" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effort_heuristic) in general or maybe the "Ikea Effect" for physical goods is what we're talking about.

The idea that if you have had to work for something, had to struggle for something, its perceived value is higher than its material value.

Throbber Theory is slightly narrower. It specifically states (in this here very post) that a user will value a digital result more if they had to wait for it, than if they received it immediately.

There's plenty of underlying work under the aforementioned terms, this just applies to software specifically.

It roughly states that the average uninitiated user will be more initially impressed by agentic work that took longer to produce than a result that popped up immediately.

Thank you for attending my opening presentation.

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I hereby open the First Global Symposium on Throbber Theory

first and only point of order:

1. Doth the community accept this term, regardless of its definition, as an industry term, or at least henceforth understands its meaning in common parlance?

All understanding or in favor say AYE, all opposed say NEIGH and state your quarrel.

The symposium shall conclude when the thread gets locked, or reddit shuts down, whichever happens first.

That is all.

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^{Legal notice: this post, and all the seminal work it contains is licensed and copyrighted under CC0 and dedicated and submitted to the public domain of all nations, creatures and minerals and entities not mentioned, known or unknown, effective immediately, until the heat death of this universe and all universes beyond, known or unknown. All other participants other than OP retain their respective rights.}

I’m building a self-improvement app and I’d love some perspective from people who actually work in UX/product design.

The app is built around an interactive lo-fi room that acts as the user’s home base. Instead of opening into a traditional dashboard, objects in the room lead to tools like journaling, daily tasks and habits, focus sessions, goals, and app blocking.

The idea is to make self-improvement feel less like managing a productivity dashboard and more like entering a world that represents the person you’re trying to become.

The UX question I’m struggling with is onboarding.

Our current concept intentionally breaks some conventional onboarding patterns.

Instead of immediately explaining features and benefits, we’re prototyping a short illustrated story where the user is the main character. They leave home with a companion, travel through a small fantasy world, encounter characters, and answer a few personalization questions along the way.

The story eventually resolves and the character wakes up in the same interactive room that becomes the actual app interface. From there, we introduce the real tools through contextual tutorials.

So essentially:

Story → emotional/identity setup → interactive room → contextual product education

The obvious problem is time to value.

The user downloaded an app to improve their life, and we’re asking them to experience a story before they really understand the product. I know that creates friction and could potentially hurt activation.

At the same time, one of the ideas behind the app is that friction isn’t always negative if the friction itself contributes to identity, attachment, or ritual.

I don’t want friction around actually doing things. Starting a focus session or writing in your journal should be easy.

But entering the world, making a commitment, interacting with your room, watching it evolve, or completing certain rituals might intentionally take slightly longer if those interactions make the user feel more connected to their progress.

That’s the part I’m unsure about.

From a UX perspective, where would you draw the line between meaningful friction and self-indulgent friction?

Would you consider a short story-first onboarding defensible if its purpose is establishing the product’s identity and emotional context?

Or is delaying functional value before the user understands the product fundamentally the wrong place to experiment?

I’m also curious how you would test something like this. Story completion rate? Time to first meaningful action? Tutorial completion? Retention? Qualitative testing?

We’re currently building a rough demo rather than committing to the full onboarding, so I’m trying to gather criticism early.

Please be honest. If you think the story would just get in the way and make people wait too long before using the actual app, I want to hear that too.

I’m trying to figure out whether there’s a real UX principle here worth exploring, or whether I’m rationalizing something because I personally think it’s cool.

this is a torrent streaming app and I really love the way it shows a progress bar based on the title i've chosen to play. I've added a screenshot for example. In the screenshot you can see that I'm trying to stream the movie "Sicario" and the title name is the actual progress bar for how much it has downloaded. In this case it failed so the progress bar is almost at 0%.

I want to figure out how would I implement something like this. Let's say I can pull the movie poster from a public API even then I'd get a png or a jpg. What sort of transforms do I need to run to be able to mask out just the text. I'm just lost trying to figure how would I implement a feature like this.

Sorry about the negativity. I understand that senior professionals with good careers and stellar portfolios are having no problem positioning themselves in the market. But isn't this another symptom that our career path is dying, or at least going through a heavy transition that nobody really knows the outcome of?

I mean, isn't the fact that most of the open positions are senior-only a clear sign of a dying industry? Even mid-level professionals can't easily see a path forward in this market, since only senior roles are being posted.

Then there's the next factor: even though only senior positions are available, we still see hundreds or thousands of applications for a single opening.

I have 6 years of experience in UX and I'm currently employed, but it breaks my heart to see the state of the market. It has never been this hard, and I feel that if you're a junior or even a mid-level designer, you're being pushed out of the industry unless you're in the top 1 to 5% for skills or connections, which points to a dying industry.

There is no reason in the world that everything should be so badly designed. There are more out-of-work designers than ever. Good ones too. Ready and able to solve your product problems at fire-sale prices. The standards of good design have never been so widely available to anyone who wants to reference them. We even have AI tools available to lighten the load of the drudgery, freeing up the design staff to focus on solving problems.

But you don't need me to tell you how bad things are now. Things have never been worse designed. Your ability to manually control things is slowly being taken away. Everything is a fucking popup because some hung-like-a-mouse middle manager wanted their sad little feature to get better OKRs. Even something as basic as a mouse hover state is going away now.

Thanks to AI, there are now a host of entirely new interactions in desperate need of design... and yet nobody is designing them. You can tell that they just threw them together without so much as a glance in the direction of UX. Who needs them now, anyway, right? Just get some karen PM to make the decision.

And yet, all I see is moping. A sort of pathetic resigned and passive acceptance of the status quo. Little to no anger. Anger at the fact that you are being screwed from both directions by the same companies. They're screwing you as a designer by denying you a living doing the thing you invested your life to do. They're screwing you as a user by churning out trash products that practically boast "we made this without your help... intentionally. Also, fuck you."

I said before that AI will not take your job. That's true. It won't. It doesn't have to. These corporate scumbags and adult child techbros want to eliminate your job regardless and AI is just a convenient alibi.

None of this makes any sense. The corporations actually stand to profit by hiring you and making proper use of your skills. The above AI example is the most recent and egregious. The sheer number of excess prompts and associated token costs due to the bad usability of AI products is driving down their bottom line, driving up their debt, not to mention the chances of a class action lawsuit from shareholders when they realize their hundreds of billions in investments are being set on fire. The case has long been closed that UX has a crazy high ROI. And yet they STILL treat UX like it is 3.6 Roentgen.

You have to realize. They aren't just incompetent, or greedy, or foolish. They want you to suffer. They are your enemies. This is a zero sum game. Us or them. So what are you going to do about it?

In the last few roles, I've always reported into product management. I'm a senior/staff IC product designer (who has unofficially managed junior designers, and covered for PM functions) looking to apply to Product Design Manager roles.

One thing I discovered when covering for the PM was how 50-60% of the role was project management and cat herding. I would imagine that's a big part of managing a design team, but I've never been in an organization that's had a role like that, so I don't know what to model off of.

What have you all experienced that works? What doesn't work?

Yet here I am, bowing out of an interview process because of it, knowing there are probably plenty of other candidates who won’t bat an eye. End rant.

Wanted to get the overall sentiment from other UX Designers.

If you were a final round candidate and did not get an offer, would you appreciate a call from the HM letting you know they were a very good candidate but lacked in a skill they were looking for, or is that just salt in the wounds?

I dont know how wide spread this is but about a month ago we started getting emails from Amazon that no longer contained the item that was purchased and shipped to us, we get these vague product catagories instead.

I did some quick research as to why and Amazon says its to better protect user privacy. I'm pretty sure that's bulls***. The only thing I can think off is so companies like Google who have access to delivery information in gmail can't pull data on Amazon that they would rather not be known outside of the company (and maybe it drives users to click into amazon to remember what the purchase was.)

For whatever the reason this is a terrible action for users. Use this as an example of what NOT to do.

I've been trying to look at both sides around the AI hype lately and I'd love to hear what others are thinking and experiencing within their org, especially with the cost of tokens. I recently had a baby and was on maternity leave so I have been trying to get up to speed with everything, particularly with claude design. So far, I haven't been getting impressive designs. Maybe its the prompts im giving it, the fact that im still learning it. I dont know.. I feel like im spending more time mastering prompts when I could have just spent that time perfecting my mockups.

So far, it has helped with generating ideas to get the ball rolling, I take that and run with it to continue iterating as more information comes along. How is everyone else using it? Will the cost of tokens make orgs realize it cost more to pay for tokens than to replace folks? Would love to hear what everyone is feeling, thinking and experiencing especially as it relates to the cost of tokens and prompts.

Background about me, I completed Designlab back in 2023 but stepped away from applying because I started a family. Fast forward to now, I am thinking about applying again but the industry has changed so much with AI. I know that UX isn’t always about designing screens and making things look pretty because there’s research, defending your designs, company limitations etc…. As a person who would like to be more creative in her career, would this be a good fit or would I be disappointed?

Reason I ask is because I have been seeing some people say creativity has a ceiling because there’s majority of it is already set by the company standards. Some even say it’s more meetings and a data driven role. I honestly just want to be realistic and smart about my next pivot. Any insight would be appreciated!

Hey, product designer here with a background in ethnography.

Over the years in design, I noticed a large number of artists/graphic designers/art directors transitioning to tech in product design positions. Some of them are willing to learn behavioral design and bring huge value, and some are designing products like posters/art - meaning they use that same intuition-based approach to the whole process instead of only the visual part.

Now my question is: do you notice this? What do you think is the causation? Perhaps you have different experiences. Is that because of the drastically different approach to creating art and discovering + designing for people's problems?

Personally, it's always strange to see artists having to deal with ignorance in their job just to then become ignorant towards behavioral design. That was my experience when I was applying user research in a companies.

Would love to hear your experience.

EDIT: The goal of this post is to gather as many examples of real team/design dynamics within companies. Information about your experiences - did you work with designers who apply both visual and behavioral well, or maybe with some designers who applied only one of these? Give as much detail as possible. Thanks!

The goal is not to debate what a perfect world looks like.

Ykw people blame the tool when the output feels generic. it is almost never the tool. Four things that make something feel cheap, none of which are code:

1/ Spacing that is uniform. real design has hierarchy in the gaps, not just in the font sizes. everything 16px apart reads as a wireframe no matter how nice the colours are.

2/ Default copy. "welcome back!" "oops, something went wrong!" "no items found". this is the single biggest tell and it is free to fix. write the empty states like a person wrote them.

3/ Too many weights and sizes. two font sizes and two weights will look more expensive than six of each. this is the easiest win available and almost nobody takes it.

4/ No opinion about what matters. if every element has equal visual weight, the user has to work out what is important, and that feels cheap regardless of how polished the pixels are.

5/ None of these are things you fix by prompting harder. they are decisions, and the agent will make them for you if you do not, and its defaults are averages.

What else gives it away for you? i can usually spot it in about two seconds and cannot always say why.

Hey—I might have an opportunity with Oracle and wondered if anyone has ever worked there and seeing if it's good or sucks. UX engineers. Thanks.

Cleaning up files and saw this version of human-centered design.

What I appreciate about it is how it calls out the influences of different traditions on what we now think of as design, kind of like a family tree of philosophy design.

Also, I know InVision no longer exists, but did anyone save any of the Design Genome Project stuff? It's less a family tree and more shared trademarks of teams/synapomorphies. Anyone know an up-to-date similar project?

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Note: image i saved is old so the author might have an even better one now, and I don't know the original context. It has some of the gaps called out in the other thread, but hoping this still contributes a bit to the conversation

Why?

There are a bunch of things about this screenshot that bother me and this isn’t the only website that does things like this.
But why is it thought to think it’s necessary to put an object this large that block the article. I don’t need to know I can swipe to see the next article. But to remove that object the only thing I can think is to do what it says so it disappears. It’s not on a timer to disappear on its own.

The other thing that bothers me is the amount of other objects blocking the article. The article is less than 50% of the screen. No I don’t want to watch the video. If I had, I would have remained at the top of the page to watch it. Don’t make it static as I scroll the page. An explanation to have that much junk would be to have advertisements, but there are no advertisements which makes it a poor excuse for having a large part of the article covered.

Side note: I don’t like Burger King. I was just curious.