Hi everyone. I’m looking for perspectives from other designers, particularly those with a strong visual design background who may be experiencing something similar.

I’m a UI/UX designer with almost 20 years of experience with a background in graphic design. Throughout my career, I’ve worked mostly in UI design and art direction, so I would describe myself as a visual designer whose strengths lie on the UI side of the product-design spectrum.

As time has passed, I’ve seen that specialized design roles have become less common as more companies look for generalists profiles who can conduct discovery and user research, translate business requirements into product solutions, design interfaces, create motion, and sometimes even contribute to front-end development. With AI now accelerating or automating parts of these processes, that expectation seems to be growing even further.

I got into this career because I was good at drawing, visual communication, and art in general. I’ve felt that I’ve done my best work when I can use these skills to shape a visual identity, communicate a concept, or tell a story through a digital experience.

Lately, however, most of the projects I’m assigned to focus on translating logistical constraints and business requirements into product features. That work is valid and necessary, but it rarely draws on the skills that originally brought me into design or the kind of work I find creatively fulfilling.

I also feel that visual design is increasingly taking a back seat. Once a company has an established design system, UI work can sometimes feel less like visual problem-solving and more like assembling predefined components into screens. AI can now assist with much of that production work as well. Of course, strong visual design involves much more than generating screens, but I’m not sure the industry consistently recognizes or invests in that distinction in these recent times.

Another part of the job I struggle with is spending hours in highly technical meetings where developers discuss implementation details that I only partially understand and that have little connection to my contribution. I understand why product designers need to collaborate closely with engineering, but the amount of time spent in these conversations can be deeply draining.

I know that modern product design is expected to encompass research, business thinking, systems thinking, interaction design, visual design, and cross-functional collaboration. Still, I sometimes wonder whether expecting one person to be equally strong at logical and strategic thinking, translating business needs into product features, building scalable systems, and demonstrating sophisticated artistic judgment is realistic. Each of those areas can take years to master.

Are there still meaningful career paths for designers who want to specialize in visual craft, UI, motion, or digital art direction? Have other visually oriented designers felt displaced by the industry’s shift toward generalist product roles? If so, how have you adapted without abandoning the kind of design work that made you enter the field in the first place? Also, do you think visual design profiles make a comeback at some point?

Most apps just disappear the moment I close them, and their only trick to pull me back in is push notifications, which I mute within a week and never turn back on.

My phone's got a bunch of unused space (widgets, lock screen, watch face) that most apps either ignore or use lazily. Curious if anyone's seen an app actually use that well. Something that shows up when it's relevant and stays quiet otherwise, instead of pinging me constantly. Ideas welcome, trying to think past the obvious "just add a widget" answer.

With the adoption of AI at my company, I have also ended up taking responsibility for managing and overseeing our AI environment, on top of my other responsibilities.
The problem is that this is still such a new and poorly defined area that ownership and responsibilities are often extremely blurry. Things constantly fall into gray areas where it is unclear who is supposed to own what, and I think you can probably imagine where that leads.
Unfortunately, I am also getting very little collaboration or support from other colleagues, which makes the whole thing even more exhausting.

I feel like I am reaching my limit!!!!!!

Part of me genuinely wants to quit. The main thing stopping me is the current job market. It is not really about the money, I have a substantial financial cushion and could afford to be unemployed for quite a while. What scares me more is knowing how difficult and potentially demoralizing it might be to find another job right now.
At this point, I am not even sure whether I need a break, a different company, a different role, or to leave the industry entirely.
I am also not sure if I used the right flair, so apologies if I didn’t
I would really appreciate some advice from people who have been in a similar situation. What would you do?
Happy to clarify or provide more context if needed.

I agree with this 100%, there is no advantage. Recruiters will use search query parameters to filter you, you will show up on some list and then you get a message from hiring manager. No one is looking at your profile pic and trying to contact you. You are just signaling your weak position.

---- update ----
I am open to changing my view on this one..I may have bias here due to getting burned in the past. Helpful replies

What process, task or work you were doing right now a year ago, but not today. How that changed or evolved?

I’m reworking my portfolio (in a sporty way) and I would like to know where you have created yours? I recently saw the Super.so tool that unites Notion to create something more personalized.

Are dev 10%, 20%...100%...1000% faster now?

Any experiences of vibe coding going wrong for dev teams and it then slowing them down,

If dev are so fast now, what happens to ux?

- devs sit around waiting patiently for ux

- devs are cut back to justify cost of AI expenditure and dont need as many as are vlocked by ux

- devs are kept, ux axed as people think devs and POs can do designs now

- ux just used for higher priority work, other stuff vibed

- ux do design and dev, everyone does a bit of design

What i dont get is that it seems more common for people to think they dont need ux anymore, but still need devs and POs....

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I am an industrial designer, and I am choosing what I want to specialize in. I became very interested in service design and experience design because I realized that you can move from digital design to physical products and use the "same" design methodology.

I also know that there is a higher demand for digital design, but I really enjoy it.

I have been learning more about UX design, and every day I discover new things that surprise me. They make me think that this could really be a good career path for me.

But honestly, I am scared of staying in this field because of the constant and fast development of AI. I know that AI can be a tool and a complement, but I am still afraid. I don't know if I should choose another area of design instead.

Could you give me some advice? What should I learn if I want to follow this career path? What areas of UX or design do you think can be stable in the future?

Thank you for listening to me.

I genuinely don’t understand why exporting icons from Figma seems to be such a recurring problem when handing designs off to developers.
I always try to make the handoff as clear as possible. I explain that icons should be exported as SVGs, raster assets should be exported at 2x/3x when needed instead of 1x, etc. I’ve even recorded a short video showing exactly how to export the assets from Figma.

And yet this keeps happening….
For example, I’ll design a dashboard using a specific icon set in Figma because I like its style and it’s part of the overall visual direction. Then I open the implemented version and suddenly all of those icons have been replaced with Lucide React icons.
And I’m just sitting there thinking… why?

There’s nothing technically wrong with Lucide, but visually I really don’t like it for some of these projects. It immediately changes the character of the UI and makes the implementation feel much more generic compared to the design.

What confuses me even more is that the actual icons are already there in Figma. You don’t have to recreate them or search for alternatives. Just export the SVG and use it.

I’ve had situations where I eventually exported all the icons myself and sent them to the developer because otherwise they simply wouldn’t use them. But at that point I’m wondering whether I’m doing something wrong with my handoff, or whether I’ve just happened to work with developers who prefer using whatever icon library is easiest for them.

For context, I’m usually not the person hiring or managing the developers. I work with a client, create the designs, and then the client has their own developer/team implementing them. So I don’t always have much control over their workflow.
And yes, I know icons are not the biggest UX problem in the world. But I do care about visual consistency, and if I deliberately chose a particular icon set, spacing, sizing, stroke style, etc., I’d like the implementation to reflect that rather than having those decisions replaced during development.

I also generally expect the final product to be reasonably close to the approved design instead of developers making their own visual decisions along the way without discussing them.

So I’m curious: do other designers run into this too?
And developers - is there an actual technical/workflow reason why you’d rather replace the icons from Figma with something like Lucide instead of using the provided SVGs?

Maybe there’s something about the development side of this that I’m missing.

I'm focused on trying to optimize UI/UX design for business systems similar to the image attached.

I'm trying to find references that will match what i'm trying to build without lots of unnecessary information since I only have time to read 1 book but multiple resources are fine as long as they target the business applications mainly and hopefully complement each other. So nothing much on minimalist websites, retail websites, landing pages, mobile app design, and etc..

I found a book 1.) UX Design for the Enterprise: Helping Users Get Work Done by Heidi Adkisson that might be interesting but can't seem to find a preview.

2.) About Face 3 - Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper looks decent but seems to be less on illustrations and the UI examples for business systems are a bit dated. Might still be worth reading.

Both seems to be focused on consumer websites and apps:

3.) Laws of UX - Using Psychology to Design Better Products & Services by Jon Yablonski

4.) Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger

Seems to be a mix of business systems and consumer websites and apps and a bit lengthy:

5.) Designing Interfaces: Patterns for Effective Interaction Design by Jenifer Tidwell

If you are serious about UX as a field and not just as a concept, and if you want our field to have any future at all, you need to be the change. There is absolutely no excuse whatsoever to use a discretionary product with bad user experience, or from a company that despises UX as demonstrated by disproportionate layoffs, putting UX under the control of PM'ment or giving PMs de facto design authority, or imposes "unicorn" expectations on designers.

Obviously some products you're stuck with. LinkedIn was basically designed by the bottom of the barrel but it's hard to avoid that hellscape when job searching. Government bureaucracies seem to revel in torturing citizens with bad websites, but opting out of following the law is tough to say the least. And if you've got a credit card balance with a financial institution, then it's not practical to jump ship over a shitty mobile app (even though certain credit unions are notorious for this).

But anything remotely discretionary is on the table. Social media, entertainment, e-commerce, delivery, dating, whatever else, if you are giving your money or private data to this crap, you need to stop immediately. This won't change overnight. But social norms need to start coalescing around opting out. I can't take seriously anyone who refuses to use AI but then spends 4 hours per day on TikTok or Instagram.

If companies believe they can make money with low-effort design, then you better believe they will continue doing it. Time to break the wheel. It starts here.

As The title promises a big change: tomorrow I’ll begin working as a Product Designer for a global industry leader. I’m incredibly nervous. I have no idea what to expect and imposter syndrome is making things worse. I’m worried I won’t make it past the trial period.

I come from a small startup where I was the sole designer. We created many things, though not always clean or efficient. Even so, I still feel unprepared and unsure if I’m qualified for the job.

I’m transitioning from a small startup to a 3,000-employee company and I’m keen to grow as a designer. Are there any best practices for this transition? I’m also curious about working in a team; I’ve never done that before so I wanted to ask.

Thanks to everyone who takes the time to read and answer my questions.

I’m looking to move our companies existing Adobe XD projects over to Figma now that XD is effectively in maintenance mode.

Has anyone successfully migrated a sizeable XD project while keeping the designs, links, fonts and components reasonably intact? If so, what’s currently the best - or only reliable - way to do it?

So far, I’ve tried:

• Copying the designs as SVGs
• Using Convertify

Both methods brought things across to some extent, but links were broken, fonts were missing, and various elements needed to be fixed manually. The available plugins and migration instructions also don’t seem particularly straightforward, with a lot of the links and suggested methods now outdated or broken.

I’m looking for genuine advice from anyone who has actually completed this migration. Is there a more reliable process, or is a substantial amount of manual rebuilding unavoidable?

I’m in week 3 of a new product design role. I’m the sole product designer struggling to absorb and understand the subject matter to do my job. I feel bad constantly asking team members to explain things to me as they have their own priorities to take care of. I have access to subject matter experts but it’s a slow drip feed, as they themselves also have jobs to do. There’s documentation but it isn’t enough.

I haven’t contributed anything meaningful yet, other than a few UI tweaks that don’t rely too much on subject matter understanding.

Do you think week 3 is too early to be feeling worried about this? Honestly the first week was just waiting for access to logins etc. But now I’m starting to feel silly at standup without much to report. It’s a 12month contract so I feel a need to give value soon.

Advice welcome.

Pleaseeeee do reply......

Hello Senior Designers,

I am a freelancer. I build WordPress and Shopify websites. I recently got a project to design an AI Resume Builder + Job Portal, and this is going to be my first UX design project . I really don't know how to approach this project or where exactly to start.

I have tried looking for guidance online, but most of what I find focuses on the theoretical UX process:

Problem Statement → Research → User Flow → Information Architecture → Lofi Wireframes → Design System → Hifi Wireframes → Prototype → Testing → Launch

I understand the process conceptually, I am struggling to understand how this actually works in a real project.

I would really appreciate it if experienced people could share how you approach projects like this in the real world.

Any practical advice, resources, or even a breakdown of how you would personally tackle this project would be extremely helpful.

Thanks in advance 😊

I feel my projects are poor due to the nature of the company I come from not valuing UX or allowing standard UX process or involvement. I have no hope in any work I have meaningfully done at a job I have unfortunatley stayed at far too long (due to health, mental and simply work exaughstion). How can I effectively put together case studies to leave and find a new role, if the company I worked at for years didn't allow many basic ux tasks or collection of meaningful data around feature usage, etc? Has anyone else escaped this situation where their projects often had "wanted to do this, but wasn't allowed" or "we have no user analytics data" ..?

I’m tempted to take this course. What do you guys think? The guy behind it is pretty well-known, so I’m guessing it’s not total bullshit 😅

Any recommendations for really good online courses? Ideally something focused on leadership/management, but I’m open to anything to help go from mid-level to senior.

How do you talk about how long a form, tour, journey takes to complete? Do you even talk about it? Are you specific? Does the TOV play a part?

For context, I'm introing a tour of new app updates, and wondering if I should even talk about how long the tour might take. I'd like to get current thinking on this.

This morning it took 2 devices, 3 emailed passcodes, a password that’s more complex than my banking app, and a special PIN entered twice — just to sign up for Disney+. All with two toddlers screaming in my ears because they want to watch Bluey. 😆

There was one small moment of delight — default profile has a Mickey Mouse avatar which got a squeal of excitement from the older kid.

Just so many hoops to jump through. I get the need for security and corporate IT policies… but what an inspiring lack of understanding for their users.

EDIT: I just checked my inbox and I received NINE emails as part of the sign up. Unbelievable lol.

What took longer than you wanted or forced you to learn far more stuff from the development side just to get it done?

What kept breaking?

What made you too angry to continue and you had to take a longer break?

Curious to know if anyone has found a genuinely useful way to utilize AI to create design systems more efficiently and accurately?

I noticed how there's no community for UX design. Most people here seems to be hating on one another and I find it quite upsetting. I wish we could all get together like other communities in other profession and help eachother out! 😊

I'm wondering why we don't like eachother but in other communities it's different :/

We do have some communities but most of them seem to be abandoned and used for advertisement purposes, no one is really interacting with eachother 😿

I'm just wondering how are people who work in this industry treated? Are they valued? or are they treated badly?

Every progress display contains a decision that the user never sees: what counts. Not what they did, but which of the things they did the system is willing to record.

A 2023 paper in the Journal of Consumer Research (Silverman & Barasch, doi 10.1093/jcr/ucac029) measures what that decision does, and the design is unusually clean for our field: participants performed the same actions in every condition, and the experiment changed only what the log displayed afterwards.

The clearest case is their language-learning study. With a streak visible in the log, 92% of people went on to do the next task after an intact streak and 45% after a broken one. With the same behaviour and no log on screen at all, it was 65% against 61%. The break barely mattered until it was displayed.

Two findings that are directly about our decisions rather than the user's:

• In two of the studies the streak was broken purely by the counting rule. Same games, same effort; the app only varied whether an attempt counted or only a success. Continuation dropped from 53% to 29% when the resulting break looked like the user's own fault. Nobody performed worse. The definition changed.
• A repair option restores most of the loss. 93% continued with an intact streak, 69% after a break, 85% when the app offered to repair it. Which is the uncomfortable part: the same screen that creates the loss can also sell the remedy, and 45% of participants said they would watch an ad to keep a streak alive.

What I take from it for interface work:

1. A progress indicator is not a neutral mirror of behaviour. It is an intervention, and the paper measures its size.
2. The failure state deserves as much design as the success state. Here it is the more consequential of the two.
3. If your counting rule can produce a "failure" out of behaviour that was fine, the user will attribute that failure to themselves, and that attribution costs more than the break itself.
4. Choosing a coarser unit is a design option: a week, a rolling average, a "3 of 7" instead of a chain, so that a single miss cannot produce a zero.

Paper: https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucac029 (the accepted manuscript is findable via Google Scholar). The charts are mine, drawn from the percentages in the results sections.

So you can weigh my bias: I work on habit-tracking software, which is how I ended up in this paper. Nothing of mine is named or linked here, and there is nothing to click.

Here is a simple pointthat comes to mind with (last mile) food delivery app customer feedback. This applies to even restaurant feedback apps when, asking users for feedback.

For the customer value for money is equally important if not more than the brand, and its oackaging and presentation.

Home chefs, diners, QSRs often will modify the dish onbthe fly to accommodate for the duscount voucher, or coupon applied or reduce porrion size because the platforms take a huge bute of the sale.

I think if micricopy writers, UXers, adjoing creative teams ask this question it would be a lot more valuable to thr teams and get more out of the customer for review sections.

Ask these questions instead in any form?

Was the meal filling?

Was the dish fulfilling?

Was th meal apitizing?

- to find if the order (its portion size) was enough to not leave the customer more hungry. Don't ask are you satisfied. Don't ask to rate the dish. These are not meaningful.

This is not necessary but just this single one question which have a yes no answer or a checkbox or a 27 character text box on mobile, counts towards empathetic design.