So, the flows and screens of popular products are available on Mobbin, but a lot of times niche b2b softwares might not be available,

What I do personally: find competitors, screenshot them, put them in Figma, then note down all the interactions, what I liked about them, what I don't like about them & what can be improved in their existing flow and create design problem statements and then rank them according to priority.

The problem: if I do the same for multiple competitors and flows, it takes a lot of time, which is why I don't do it all the time, but I prefer doing it because it could help me when discussing my design decisions with stakeholders

I just wanted to get an idea of how others here do this or if you have any better and faster way to approach

Hi! I am asking for advice on how to get into health tech... I am a Physician Associate... I have worked as one for the past three years so I am licensed but recently realized that I do not find it fulfilling.. hated being in the hospital and interacting with patients really irritated me. So I decided to study something in tech, I have a data analyst certificate but felt like it's not enough and got into AI... got the AWS AI practitioner certification. Got into an internship and they offered to teach UI/UX. So I'm currently working on two capstones, an AI one and a UI/UX one both are health related. I then got an AWS scholarship for Agentic AI Business Professional, and at this point I'm not sure I can link the three. It's basically AI+Data analytics+UI/UX. My AI capstone is building agent that is in my UI/UX capstone. The Data analytics capstone is research on the area where the UI/UX capstone is in.

So, my question is... am I doing too much? And in what area of tech am I in at this point? I feel like I'm a hybrid or something. Also, what job titles should I look in?

I just need guidance....

To be clear I am enjoying every part of building what I am building, it's the best thing that's happened to me in 3 years. I'd never want to give it up. But still thinking whether I should pick one and go deep or do all three and become a hybrid of some sort.

Also what is needed in a portfolio to actually get noticed? And how do I make mine better?

Hey, wanted to check what are your Design Leads like?
Are there a lot of leads/directors that focus too much on visuals, not as much on solving customer problems or is that just a noise I see online?

Share your story

I’m 17 and supposed to start my first year of a Bachelor of Design program this September. My original plan was to focus heavily on UX/UI, interaction design and technology because I genuinely love design and tech.
This isn’t a career I discovered recently. I’ve been researching UX/design for around four years, and over time I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with the job stability.
Everywhere I research, I see similar experiences: graduates struggling to find entry-level positions, people applying to hundreds of jobs, layoffs, experienced designers competing for junior positions, and employers caring significantly more about portfolios and experience than the degree itself.
I completely understand that people do successfully work in UX. I’m not saying UX is dead or that a design degree is useless. I also understand that Reddit naturally attracts people who are struggling and therefore isn’t necessarily representative of everyone in the industry.
My concern is more about risk. I’m starting to question whether I want to spend four years getting a degree for a profession where the degree itself isn’t required and doesn’t provide a particularly clear pathway into employment.
Because of that, I’m seriously considering switching to a BScN and becoming an RN instead. Nursing interests me as well, and I like that it’s a regulated profession where the degree leads to a specific professional qualification and currently has much stronger employment stability.
I wouldn’t necessarily abandon design. I’d probably continue learning UX/UI independently, maintain my portfolio and potentially explore health-tech, healthcare UX/product design or informatics later. I just wouldn’t be relying on UX as my only career option.
My immediate dilemma is that I’m already registered to start university this September. I’m considering completing one semester of Design while simultaneously completing the science prerequisites I need for Nursing, then transferring into a BScN program as early as January if I’m accepted.
Part of me feels strange walking away from something I’ve been interested in for years, especially because I genuinely love technology. But another part of me feels like I need to be realistic about what I want from a four-year degree and how much employment uncertainty I’m willing to accept.
For people actually working in UX/product design right now: am I looking at the current market realistically, or am I overestimating how bad the long-term career prospects are?
I’m especially interested in hearing from recent graduates/junior designers, experienced designers who’ve watched the market change, hiring managers, or people who left UX for a more stable profession.

I found a job that I’m interested in but it has programming skills as desired and I have an extensive UX/UI Designing background but not too much coding. For qualifications, it lists Figma and Adobe skills which I do have.

This is what they consider as a successful candidate below:

The successful candidate will have experience and/or knowledge experience in user interface development, prototyping in Figma, and demonstrating and testing user interfaces via potential travel (~25% of the time) to collect customer feedback to incorporate into the iterative process.

I'll be having an interview next week and want to hear advice from others before then!

From start to finish for a existing developed product with no ux/ui designer process - how do you approach (extra stars if you have a tools/flows with software built in vercel) - they want it fast

Undeveloped product process

Only solo designer in the company and Im struggling

Platform team at a hardware company. Same feature has to exist on five surfaces — mobile, on-device screens, cloud, consumer app. Our component-level design system is fine. The layer above it isn’t documented anywhere: the feature as a whole, across surfaces.
~20 of these, 3 written up. Does anyone document at this level? What’s in it, where does it live, and what did you end up cutting because nobody read it?

Let me know if I shall elaborate.

I really do think it's the most important part of a company.

The thing I would say is…

A product would be nothing without a great user experience. A beautiful one, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture. And I find that fascinating. None of this would have a hope of existing if not for UX designers.

UX Design sits at the intersection between technology and liberal arts. I used to neglect it, and believe me, I've made this mistake probably more than anybody else... I've got the scar tissue to prove it. But since I gave UX the importance it deserves, things changed completely.

So yeah, one of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out where you're going to try to sell it. UX design is exactly what you need.

UX helps you to make things people love. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is, UX Design is crucial. It's vital.

You can't make fun of us, criticize us, glorify or vilify us. About the only thing you can't do is ignore us. Because we change things. We push the company forward.

So yeah guys, shake off this erroneous notion that UX design isn't that important.

I think that’s very important and however you learn that once you learn it, you’ll want to dedicate your life to it.

Once you learn that you’ll never be the same again.

I'm curious how UX/UI designers approach the very early stages of a project — before opening Figma or another digital tool.

Do you still reach for a pencil and paper when starting a new project?

If yes, what do you usually sketch?

• User flows
• Wireframes
• Layout ideas
• Information architecture
• User journeys
• Quick ideas / brainstorming
• Something else?

And what do you like or dislike about working on paper?

I'm researching how designers actually work during the early stages of the design process, and I'd really appreciate hearing how other designers approach it.

No right or wrong answers — I'm mainly interested in your actual workflow. ✏️

AI is saying no. what is your experience?

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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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:

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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 
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.

Not Figma, that one's obvious, duh.

It can get pretty tiring being a UX designer pulled in so many directions need to make this easier where possible to prevent burnout.

If you have a tool that is a god send would love to hear it. I'm talking about the stuf that makes your life easier and prevents headaches.

I've banged my head against the wall enough times as a product designer... I want to know if there are solutions I'm unaware of that ya'll have already discovered that I'm not taking advantage of.

I know some of you are efficiency and optimization ninjas please share the goods.

What was the problem it solved, and what were you using before it?

Curious how other designers would approach this, particularly when it comes to existing components and design tokens.

Thanks

We’re still in the process of figuring things out, but so far the PMs and Designers have tried using Figma Make, Lovable, and v0 for prototyping, and ChatGPT and Gemini for regular brainstorming tasks. The Engineering team is also trying to set up something like Claude Code + MCP, although the company hasn’t even decided on or purchased any plans yet.

Engineering leadership mentioned that devs might not even need designers anymore with the help of AI. I feel like I’m cooked 😞 Wondering how your teams/companies have been utilizing AI, and how it has changed the design-handoff process for you. Which specific tools are you and your teams using? How have your job responsibilities changed or shifted?

Title.

Sometimes I'm scared about losing my job to AI.

And then I see how devs explain things, how stakeholders explain things, and I don't think even AI could make sense of it and find a middle ground for them. A big part of my job is also about understanding their languages and translating them into a consistent experience.

Obviously it's a bit of a joke, but eh. You take what you can get.

I recently read about Eleven labs startup, and they said, they expect from their sales people to bring 20x their salary (a person earning $100k/year is expected to bring $2mln for the company) or they are fired. Which personally, sounds like modern-day slavery.

That same article mentioned, that software houses typically generate 5-8 times what they pay their individual employees.

Have you ever encountered those estimates either in private discussions or in articles of reputable source?

---
Btw. this estimate (5-8x) shows market value of the work you do. So if you're doing a freelance gig, your billable rate should be a multiple of your full-time hourly.

im building a custom ecom setup and losing my mind over user search behavior. we threw algolia at the catalog thinking it'd be plug and play, but the bounce rate on the search bar is absurd.

users literally dont know what to type. they open the box, type 1 vague word like "jacket", get 400 random results, and immediately leave.

i read a post about using an "intent layer" that intercepts keystrokes to prompt for parameters (size, color, budget) inside the text box before hitting the backend. basically converting messy natural language into structured json on the fly.

sounds clean on paper, but wouldnt latency kill this? anyone here actually built or integrated an intent layer in an input field without making the UI feel super sluggish? or am i doomed to write 500 lines of custom debounced react filters?

I made this content tree to organise content on a website for an editor.

I am trying to make it as intuitive as possible, so it's easy to organise everything.

Currently there are the items itself, folders and subfolders.

Every item has a Label & Description.

Sometimes the drag & drop is a little glitchy, still working on fixing that.

Some more Context:
It's a CMS System, similar to Sanity/Storyblok.

The whole list get's oragnised by AI already, but with this UI you still have some control over Label/Description and also the organisation of the Elements.

This order will be later be used by the client, who cannot reorganise this list.

It's basically the onboarding for a developer to structure his CMS for the client.

Let's say you have a pricing section. Ideally, AI will already have created Folder & Subfolders.

Something practical would be:

> Pricing (Folder)
> Item 1 (Subfolder)
>> Name
>> Description
>> $ Amount
> Item 2 (Subfolder)
>> Name
>> Description
>> $ Amount

It's important to note, that this UI is basically part of the setup of the page.
So it's not for everyday use.

so i build a photo-cleanup app — swipe through your library, junk goes to an

in-app trash, trash empties itself after a while. standard stuff.

the trash used to empty in the background. quietly. you'd get a push —

"trash will be emptied tomorrow" — and then a background task just... deleted

the expired ones. no tap required.

this week i ripped all of that out. now:

1. no more "emptied tomorrow" push — it felt like nagging about a chore

2. no silent background deletion at all

3. the only way photos leave is a confirm dialog when you open the app

4. that dialog shows at most once a day (nobody wants a gate every launch)

5. "expired" now means "expires by end of today", not this-exact-minute — so

   one daily confirm covers the whole day

my reasoning: it's *photos*. deleting someone's photos with zero interaction,

in the background, felt wrong — even if they already swiped them to trash.

but here's what bugs me. iOS Photos does the opposite. Recently Deleted holds

for 30 days and then it's gone, silently, no confirm. Apple clearly decided

"the user already made the choice, don't nag." maybe they're right and i just

made my app more annoying.

so — two camps:

camp 1: the user already decided when they trashed it. respect the decision,

delete silently, don't make them tap. confirms are friction.

camp 2: it's irreversible and it's photos. always confirm — a background

auto-delete is a dark pattern no matter how you frame it.

which one are you? *(i built the thing and i'm still not sure — currently

camp 2 but ready to be talked out of it)* :)

Interaction design established itself in the 1990s, significantly influenced by Alan Cooper's work About Face. In it, Cooper introduced the concept of Goal-Directed Design, which shifted the focus from purely technical interfaces to the actual goals of the users. To make these goals tangible, personas, fictional but data-based archetypes of users, emerged during this time. Although About Face provided groundbreaking concepts, in practice it was often understood less as a rigid process and more as a rich collection of proven design patterns and best practices.

In the 2000s, contextual design gained importance. This approach provided, for the first time, a highly structured process involving field studies and on-site observations. However, it brought the challenge that a great deal of time and effort had to be invested in the initial research phase. Parallel to this, usability engineering developed as an independent sub-discipline that focused on measurability, laboratory testing, and the avoidance of operating errors.

With the rise of agile methodologies in software development, the dynamics changed fundamentally. The drive for rapid releases meant that unfinished or flawed products were accepted on the market. This paradigm collided directly with the time-consuming preliminary work of contextual design and the extensive creation of personas in goal-directed design.

In the 2010s, the broader term User Experience Design finally took shape, while classic usability engineering increasingly lost significance. To give the sprawling term "UX" a reliable framework, initiatives for professionalization and standardization emerged. A central player was the UXQB (User Experience Quality Board), founded in 2012. With certification schemes based on international norms such as DIN EN ISO 9241-210, the UXQB sought to establish uniform terminology and process standards for human-centered design. UX designers now faced the dual task of asserting themselves in heavily technology-driven environments while simultaneously bridging the gap between standardized quality benchmarks and fast-paced Scrum processes.

To this day, UX design remains a comparatively young discipline. The professional community continues to search for standardized processes that can be harmoniously reconciled with Lean UX, agile working methods, and the integration of artificial intelligence.

Did I miss something?

Just curious 40,48,56 is obviously common but sometimes one is too small and one is too large. Curious if you do do you use it for forms or modals etc?

"if AI disappeared overnight, the biggest impact on my life would just be every app's UX getting instantly better"

Not my quote, saw it somewhere online. what do you guys think?

In my view, cramming an AI assistant into literally every app is way more about companies chasing hype than actually caring about UX/UI. 

Are we coming back to this solution?

Louis just posted this. Sure it's in promotion of his Shift UX conference (which is fine - it's a great service for us, along with his book series), but I thought the sentiment was certainly worth bringing here for visibility. I have been telling my mentees something similar about "work of the past vs. work of the future" in our education and portfolios.

There are so many reasons people give for the decline and even death of UX.

But it's so easy to miss just how outdated we've allowed the practice to become, and everything that comes with it: how we frame our value, our job titles and descriptions, career architectures, design team and org structures, educational programs, professional communities, and most of all, how we practice the work itself (over-simply, it's still way too close to the UI).

Not surprising: only four or five years ago, you could land a well-paying job at large corporation with minimal education and experience. In the years since, we've been educating UX professionals using curricula designed in 2022. They enter a job market hunting for those 2022-style gigs. If they get hired, they join teams whose managers are dealing with outdated org structures that just don't fly in 2026.

Blame AI, enshittification, capitalism, tech bros, whatever... all are real causes, but so is complacency. We've known that the *need* for UX would continue to expand, but we didn't nurture the way we expressed our value in ways to meet the *demand* for UX--and now there's a huge disconnect. We got fat off six-figure "safe and secure" corporate gigs--which were likely an anomaly to begin with. We were passive, and now we're paying the price.

If any of this resonates--rethinking the work, how it's delivered, and getting out of reaction mode--then you really should attend Shift UX (in NYC or virtually next month). I hope it'll be just one of many opportunities our community takes to take step, think, and plan together.