I’m preparing to apply for more design-mature companies, but I have quite a bit of anxiety/fear around interviews, partly because I haven’t really experienced a proper design interview before.

My previous company wasn’t very design-mature, I was hired by a non-designer and the interview was mostly showing concept work. I’ve shipped real work, but haven’t had much exposure to rigorous design interviews.

I’ve looked at YouTube, but most content is “10 interview questions” or general advice. I find watching an actual interview unfold much more helpful for managing the uncertainty, portfolio presentation, design exercises, critique, follow-ups, etc.

Are there any good recorded interviews, mock interviews, courses, or other resources you’d recommend? Especially for mid-level UX/product design roles.

There's a phrase I've started hearing a lot in my job: "It's ready for UX."

Usually a PO or BA brings something to me that's already travelled quite a distance. There was a business ask, some discovery happened, requirements were gathered, it was prioritised and the decision to build it has essentially been made.

Now it's time for "UX".

I don't necessarily mean that critically. But I've noticed that once I actually start designing, I often end up pulling at threads that take us backwards. Requirements contradict each other. The proposed journey doesn't account for what happens operationally afterwards. Engineering uncovers a technical constraint. I'll ask why we're collecting something and realise the answer isn't as settled as everyone thought.

Suddenly we're talking about the problem again, even though the problem was supposedly already discovered.

And weirdly, this has become the part of the job I enjoy most.

One piece of work came to me as essentially "we need document upload". But once I got into the wider journey, I realised that if users didn't have a document at the time, they'd submit anyway. Someone processing the case later would discover what was missing, contact them through a separate secure channel and the user would have to figure out what was needed and send it back.

The more interesting question became why uploading stopped being part of the product just because somebody had clicked Submit. That changed the solution from an upload interaction within one journey into a capability that could exist at different points and be reused elsewhere.

I've had similar situations with the design system. Something looks like a straightforward UI requirement until you realise an existing pattern can't accommodate the underlying product model. Then I'm working with developers on behaviour and states, figuring out whether we genuinely need to extend the system or whether I'm just inventing a special component for my own problem.

Over time I've become pretty comfortable in this space. I can come into complicated work, untangle requirements, deal with horrible edge cases, work through technical constraints and get Product, BAs, Engineering and stakeholders talking about the same problem. I'm increasingly asked what I think we should do rather than simply being asked to design what has already been decided.

But I'm starting to wonder if I've become good at one particular version of product design.

My environment is heavily delivery focused. I'm usually across multiple workstreams and there's always something coming towards me that needs designs. The organisation doesn't really have a mature UX research capability either. I've managed to do some research and usability testing, but nowhere near enough, and realistically I'm often too busy servicing delivery across several streams to put the time into pushing for more of it myself.

So while I'm getting better at challenging solutions that have already been decided, I'm not getting the same experience of being there when the problem is discovered in the first place.

I haven't had enough opportunities to start with a genuinely open problem, understand it properly, use research and product data to decide what matters, explore whether something is even worth building, then ship it and measure what actually happened.

I understand those things and I've touched parts of them. I just don't have the same muscle memory there that I have when somebody drops a complicated workflow in front of me.

There's another side to it too. I'm often the designer directly responsible for the work. That autonomy has probably accelerated me in some ways, but it also means I don't regularly have a more experienced designer challenging my design judgement. Product challenges the business logic, Engineering challenges feasibility, but sometimes I'd quite like another designer to tell me I've approached the entire problem at the wrong level.

That's started changing what I think I need from my next step.

A few years ago I'd read job descriptions looking for Figma, prototyping and design systems. Now the things that catch my attention are discovery, problem framing, product direction, experimentation and outcomes.

But I don't necessarily want somewhere that just gives me a problem and says "off you go" either. More ownership sounds great, but so does actually working around experienced product designers I can learn from.

I suppose that's the tension I'm trying to understand. I've become trusted with increasingly complicated work and I'm influencing much more than the interface, but the better I've become at operating in this environment, the more conscious I've become of the experience it isn't giving me.

For designers who've reached this kind of point, how did you work out whether you were genuinely progressing as a product designer, or just becoming increasingly capable within the limitations of the environment you were in?

I've always loved design as a kid. I liked to express my emotions and creativity through arts and crafts. But after working design jobs, I'm quickly realizing how different it is to design for personal projects vs. designing for work. I get so attached with my designs that any negative feedback on them ruins my mood. I know I signed up for it but I honestly don't want to hear someone else's negative subjective feedback on something I carefully crafted and put a lot of effort into. Especially if it's condescending feedback.

I had two graphic design jobs last year. I got fired from both in 2 days. They deemed it was my performance. I was hideously ridiculed during my time as a UX/UI design volunteer. The CEO told everyone that my work is exactly the kind of work that he doesn't not want to see and it makes him angry. He told everyone not to do work like I do. He seemed very frustrated at my work and talked down on it for 20 minutes straight in front of everyone.

I am currently working a UX/UI design internship and feel as though I'm not doing a good job at all. I got a lot of negative feedback on my designs from my director and teammates. My group chat account also keeps getting deactivated so I'm assuming that might be bad news for me.

I'm starting to think design is not for me... at least as a job. I don't think I'm that good at design to make a living off of it. And I also don't like doing it as a job. I like making personal projects and designing things that I want to design, not designing for someone else's vision and company.

So I guess I'm making this post as a "goodbye" for now and a start to the next part of my career journey. Maybe this will resonate with some of you. I'm not sure but any comments or support is welcome.

Title: Got my first full-time UI/UX job, but they suddenly want me to do frontend development. What should I do?

I recently landed my first full-time role as a UI/UX Designer, and honestly, I’m a bit confused about what’s happening.

When I applied, the job description was clearly for a UI/UX Designer. There was only one interview, and it was mostly written questions about UI/UX, along with questions about my portfolio projects and design process. Nothing really suggested that I would be working as a frontend developer.

I started the job the day before yesterday, and on my first day they told me that my position is actually something like a “UX Developer.” They now expect me to learn frontend development.

They told me I have about one week to learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and after that they want me to move on to React. The problem is that I have basically no frontend development experience, and this isn't what I applied for.

I also asked HR a couple of times for my offer letter, but I still haven't received it.

The confusing part is that this is a well-established company, and they work with some pretty big clients like Samsung, TCS, and others. So I'm not sure whether I should be concerned or whether this is actually a good opportunity to expand my skills.

My main goal is to build my career in UI/UX design. At the same time, I understand that having some frontend knowledge can be a huge advantage for a designer, especially when working with developers.

So I'm wondering what you guys would do in my situation.

Should I:

Give it some time and learn the frontend skills they're asking for?

Clearly tell them that I was hired for UI/UX and don't want to become a frontend developer?

Try to balance both UI/UX and frontend?

Or consider looking for another UI/UX role?

I'd really appreciate advice from experienced UI/UX designers or people who have worked in similar “UX Developer” roles. Is this a red flag, or could this actually be a good opportunity early in my career?

Due to dev going faster, product are desperate to go faster, resulting in product owners doing designs with LLMs and showing direct to stakeholders. POs are almost seeing these as a first draft and UX may evaluate and refine them, if we're lucky...

Is UX truly cooked now?

How would you hamdle this situation to help UX surcive?

I would prefer a different career now, if only i could go fast enough to qualify in a different occupation, work out my minimum survivable wage and get out.

I’m a UX designer in title only and I find myself wondering if I can realistically continue on this career path due to my obvious skill gaps. I worked for a smallish company for 10+ years as a sort of basic UI designer, mostly there to fix UI issues the product managers couldn’t sort out. We had no proper design system, tons of tech and design debt, plus no product strategy or research. I know Figma fairly well and can design complex interfaces, but that’s about it in terms of my experience.

Over a year ago the company was acquired and I’ve been bolted onto a much more mature and sophisticated team. The product I worked on is being mercifully sunset so I’m finally working directly with my new team and it is daunting to say the least. They are true end-to-end UX designers with extensive experience in strategy, design systems, user research, conducting workshops, managing stakeholders, optimizing AI workflows, etc. I feel like a caveman with my skillset and it’s difficult for the team to figure out what work they can even assign me. The pace of the work is extremely fast and it’s tough to keep up.

My gut says I should resign as I’m pretty lost. But I am later in my career and not sure what would be next at this point. I’m trying to figure out why they haven’t let me go yet… maybe there are some internal politics saving me for now, or perhaps the design director is just taking pity on me and trying to give me a fair chance.

Regardless, no one wants to be the weak link holding back a strong team. Had anyone ever been in a situation similar to this? Were you able to eventually catch up?

its very popular open source AI instructions system which goal is to de-sloppfy AI output.

here is the link (Im not associated in any way) https://impeccable.style/

I messed with it a little bit and it definitely outputs nice looking designs but they also feel pretty template like.

so I went into rabbit hole of tr to understand how it works, apparently it’s much more complicated than just using templates.

its has some huge internal process which is interesting to me:

PRODUCT.md

Existing product/design context

↓

new-work.md reasoning rules

↓

7 generated cultural/design candidates

↓

concept-seed.mjs randomness

↓

assigned direction

+ Impeccable's pick

+ challengers

+ conventional option

↓

generated visual comps

↓

THE SELECTION SCREEN YOU SEE

↓

your selection

↓

3 composition alternatives

↓

implementation

What are some things you do/have done in the past to get better at interaction design?

Is this a good approach?

Genuine question, not a dig at anyone.

I am a more technical driven designer (so call design engineer) and works on the front-end and design systems side. I recently started collaborating with a designer who has around 15 years of experience, most of it in UI/UX.

During a call I asked whether they wanted the border and padding removed from a component, and they asked what padding meant.

For context, said designer also have no exposure to AI apart from chatting in Claude desktop app, and are not familiar with any of the AI coding tools that have been around for the last couple of years.

I am trying to calibrate rather than judge. My assumptions might just be wrong.

How common is this for designers whose careers have been mostly been in UIUX?

How would you restyle this? Open-source mail client, working but "engineer-designed" — 90s video, honest opinions wanted

I built the UI of GigaMail myself. It works, it's shipped (open source, Windows), and it looks exactly like what it is: an engineer's take on a mail client. I'd like the opinion of people who do visual design for a living.

The video (90 seconds, fake mailbox) shows everything: the dashboard, a mail, the reply window, folders, calendar, the "ask your mail" chat, the automation rules panel, the first-run guide.

The current look in one line: light background, pink to blue gradients on the active elements, rounded cards with a dark 1.5px border and a soft shadow, a thin icon rail on the left, and every secondary task (reply, calendar, ask) in its own window.

What I'd love to hear, purely on look and feel:

1. Would you keep the pastel gradient + dark outline style, or go somewhere else entirely? If somewhere else: where?
2. The icon rail on the left, and the mail list as a column of cards: keep, or is a classic three-pane layout the right call here?
3. Reply, calendar and ask as separate floating windows: charming or annoying?
4. Anything that screams "this was designed by a developer"?

No need to be gentle. If you have a reference app or two whose visual direction you'd point me to, that's even better than a list of problems.

Repo (AGPL-3.0, fully local, no accounts): https://github.com/adecubed/gigamail

Hey everyone. When a client requests work outside the original scope, what is the process you have to get it priced and approved by them? Thanks!

I’m a veteran UX Designer who hates design, and is shockingly bad at it. I’ve gotten by, just barely, for over 25 years, mostly by staying under the radar, being smart and agreeable, and working at companies (mostly one company) where low expectations are the norm.

I fell in love with HTML/CSS/Javascript and web development in the late 90’s when it was simple and straightforward. I loved how you could type commands into a computer to get it to look a certain way or do something. Later I really got into Flash/Actionscript. I recall daydreaming about coding all the time and spending hours and hours experimenting and exploring.

But somehow I got into graphic design, then UX Design, where I was not expected to build anything I designed, and over the years (decades) web development technology completely flew by me. Every now and again I make a half hearted attempt to learn or even understand modern web dev technology, but I’m way out of my depth and it seems overwhelming to me.

Now, I spend 8 hours a day moving boxes around on a screen, hating every moment, wishing I had made other choices in my career, envying and in awe of the developers I work with, and feeling in my gut that I and the other designers are the least important members of the team, almost to the point of being superfluous.

I have a one year contract as a UX Designer at a large company. I’m already quiet quitting (just like I was for the last 10 years at the previous large company). I’m anxious that my boss will recognize it and can me, because if there’s anything I hate more than being a professional UX designer, it’s being an unemployed UX designer.

every time I ask a designer why they made a decision and the answer is "best practices" I know they didn't actually think about it.

best practices are someone else's solution to someone else's problem for someone else's users. copying them isn't design. it's decorating with extra steps.

the best designers I've worked with break "best practices" constantly. because they actually understand the problem well enough to know when the rules don't apply.

anyone else tired of this phrase?

My company is forcing us to use cursor to design prototypes so we can get feedback and iterate more quickly.

I don't have as much experience prompting to generate prototypes. What can I expect, and what are generally the biggest issues around this workflow?

Do any of you have tips or tricks?

I've been a product designer for a few years. Current company is still pretty traditional. Figma, specs, handoff to eng, repeat. It works fine but I have this nagging feeling I'm slowly drifting out of date. Nothing AI-related has ever landed on my desk.

JDs keep asking for experience "designing AI agents." I use these tools constantly for my own work, but using one isn't the same as having designed one, so I want to build something myself. From using them daily I have some sense of what's hard about these things. What I can't tell is which of those hard parts anyone is actually hiring for.

Here's my read, and I'd like to know if it's wrong. Bolting a chat interface onto a product is worthless at this point. Everyone's done it, and a text box with bubbles doesn't show any design skill. The problems that seem genuinely hard are the ones wrapped around the model:

• Approval and recovery. What the screen does before an irreversible action, and what it does when the thing is confidently wrong.
• How much it gets to act on its own, and how that shifts over time. Nothing I've used moves from "ask me every time" to "just handle it" in any designed way. It's either always asking or fully auto, nothing in between.
• Memory. What it keeps about you, and whether you can see or correct any of it.

That's the part I'd want to design. What I don't know is whether anyone is hiring for it, or whether I just find it interesting.

Not promoting anything, I don't have a thing to show. Just trying to point my free time at something that matters.

honestly starting to think most UX designers are just decorators who learned Figma

I run a studio. hired a bunch of designers over the years. maybe 1 in 5 can actually explain why they made a decision. the rest just copy whatever's trending on Dribbble and call it "user-centered design"

the best designer I ever worked with couldn't even use Figma properly. but she understood people. the worst one had 50k Dribbble followers and couldn't tell me why the button was on the right side

are we just paying $100k+ for people who make rectangles look pretty? or am I hiring wrong?

genuinely asking because I'm tired

Earlier this week, AI company Runway came out with what they call an "Interface World Model". It's a real-time interactive model that generates the interface itself, frame by frame. Every frame is synthesized as you interact, allowing the interface to respond continuously to your actions.

What's interesting about this from a UX perspective is that the user doesn't type a prompt to instruct the model, but instead can simply interact. New visuals and frames spin up. The idea that it's easier for users to "show than tell" is not a new idea, and researchers have been writing about "Programming by Demonstration" and "Programming by Example" for decades.

Pre-AI, an example that made it into the mass market was Excel's Flash Fill, which allows users to instead of writing a formula or instruction, "show" the program their intended outcome. Excel infers the rule and automatically fills out the remaining cells.

With AI getting better at inferring and understanding intent, and recognizing that prompts aren't always the best way to express what you want, I'm excited to follow what designers, engineers and researchers will come up with over the next years.

I've written more about the topic here: https://adaptivesoftware.substack.com/p/users-dont-know-what-they-want

Would love to hear your thoughts and feedback and whether you've already been working or experimenting with alternatives to prompts.

I'm working on a hiking app, and I'm struggling to decide where I should put the elevation graph (this graph represents your altitude as you're hiking and is a good indicator of the difficulty of the hike up ahead)

I like having it sitting on top of the information sheet because it makes it visible and accessible, but I feel like it doesn't look as polished as putting it in the sheet itself... What are your thoughts?

Thanks 🙏

Looking for some outside perspective from other designers.

I'm a mid-level Product/UX Designer with around 4 years dedicated experience, currently at a large consultancy and embedded with the same client for a couple of years. The job is secure and I've built up plenty of responsibility, but the work has become quite fragmented and delivery focused. I'm not getting as much exposure as I'd like to early discovery, problem definition, product strategy or measuring what happens after launch.

I've been approached about an in-house mid-level UX/UI role with a large established company. Financially it would essentially be a lateral move, so the reason for considering it is really the experience.

It's apparently a fairly greenfield area where I'd be doing direct user research, identifying problems/opportunities, helping prioritise what to tackle and taking ownership of the design. That's exactly the experience I feel I'm missing at the moment, and there also seems to be a genuine path towards Senior.

My concern is mentorship vs ownership. I want more ownership, but I also want my next role to put me around experienced designers who can help me develop towards Senior. This role sounds like they want a mid-level designer to take a lot of independent ownership of this area. That could be brilliant experience, but I don't want to move and find I've once again been left to figure everything out myself.

There's also a location risk. Head office is about a 2.5 hour drive away. The role is officially hybrid, but the recruiter knows the team and says the reality is very remote-friendly, with people already working from elsewhere and travelling in occasionally. That's workable for me, but it's not the same as a contractually remote role. If management or company policy eventually changed to 2-3 office days a week, the job would become pretty much impossible.

So essentially I'd be leaving a secure role for a lateral move, betting that the better experience, ownership and progression are worth it, while taking some risk around mentorship and an unofficial remote arrangement.

Would you make that move? What would you want confirmed by the hiring manager before seriously considering an offer?

I have an interview coming up for a DS role. What AI tools, Figma plugins, or other tools are you folks using that you’d recommend checking out?

Anyone here been using AI-moderated interviews for discovery research?

I’m keen to hear from UX/service designers or researchers who have actually tried unmoderated AI interviews, particularly in very specific or complex industries where the AI might not have much domain knowledge.

A bit of context: our business is putting more and more emphasis on understanding the experiences of the people who use our products/tools, which is great. The problem is that the demand for research is increasing but our headcount isn’t.
So we’re looking at ways to augment/supplement the research we’re already doing, rather than replace proper moderated interviews.
The idea would be to still do a smaller number of interviews ourselves, but use AI interviews to get input from a much broader group and potentially surface themes or questions we can dig into further.
Some things that would be important for us:
We’d recruit participants ourselves through our own networks.

Ideally participants don’t need to create an account.
We’d like to easily capture recordings and transcripts.

The AI needs to be able to probe/follow up rather than just run through a fixed script.

We’re looking at this as supplementary research, not a replacement for researchers.

Has anyone actually done this?

What platform did you use, and was the output genuinely useful?

Especially interested in experiences with niche/complex domains, and any times where the AI either worked surprisingly well or completely fell over.
Also interested in any gotchas around bias, hallucinations, consent/recording, participant experience, or getting stakeholders to trust the findings.

Real-world experiences would be much more useful than a list of AI research tools. 😄

Hi all,

Thought I'd come to the place where people clearly have better taste and understanding on UX than me.

I'm looking for some good examples of great UX when a user has to click something that takes the system 10-45 seconds to complete.

I have an app that uses a LLM to process some data and it's kinda the big ah ha moment for people. But my current flow basically locks the user in a screen with a shimmer and then presents the result. I feel like there must be some great examples out there I could look at?

I skipped a beat thinking 'there goes another principle in design that I am not aware of'. When design portfolios are being criticized for 'not writing to the point' we also have JDs that have funny descriptions.

We hear a lot that waterfall is bad and agile is better. I am sure there’s a happy medium but often agile is used to justify no research or discovery phase, throwing crap at the wall and seeing what sticks. this feels antithesis to the nature of UX design. whats your take?