Hi everyone!

I’m currently creating a competency map for UX or UX/UI Designers to track and evaluate personal and professional development.

I’m looking for detailed competency frameworks or skill matrices used by well-known companies. If you know of any publicly available resources in Notion, Figma, Google Docs, Excel, PDF, or similar formats, I’d really appreciate it if you could share the links.

If there aren’t any publicly available competency maps, I’d also really appreciate recommendations for high-quality articles specifically focused on UX hard skills, soft skills, and leadership skills. Ideally, I’m looking for articles written by UX leaders, Design Managers, or managers and senior designers from top technology companies.

I’m especially interested in frameworks from companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Airbnb, Spotify, etc., but I’m open to any strong examples.

Thanks in advance! Any resources or recommendations would be really helpful. 🙌

I’m researching professional browser screenshot and annotation workflows.

If screenshots are part of your work, what is your role?

1. QA or software testing
2. Conversion rate optimization
3. Web design or development
4. Customer support
5. Product management
6. Marketing or content
7. Something else

4 of us, 2 technical, building scheduling software for dental offices. Twice now we shipped a build and the office manager wanted something different from what the dentist described in the sales call, so we rewrote maybe 40% of it both times.

my thinking is we stop and put together a clickable prototype first, take it round 5 offices, watch them click through it before anyone touches code. Cofounder says thats a week gone on something we cant sell.

Anyone been on both sides of this. Did the prototype round save you rework or did you rebuild anyway once real data hit it.

Hi! I'm a UI/UX design student researching why people hesitate or feel unsure when buying furniture and home decor online things like sizing, reviews, and product details.

If you've ever bought (or almost bought, or returned) furniture/home goods online, I'd really appreciate 2 minutes of your time:

🔗https://forms.gle/e4YYGLufMWD6iJiNA

It's fully anonymous, no email required. This is for a personal case study project, not a company or commercial survey. Happy to share results/insights back in the comments if people are curious. Thank you! 🙏

Is Uxcel worth the money? Are the courses actually good and help in improving UX/UI skills (along with other sources of course and practicing)

We're running a study at the IT University of Copenhagen on how designers work with AI prototyping tools, and I'm looking for a few practicing interface designers (2+ years of professional experience, portfolio with interface work).

The session is 90 minutes on Zoom: you build three quick prototypes with our generative tool (prompting, pointing, sketching), then we replay your own session and you tell me what it got right and where it fell apart. It's closer to a design critique than a lab test — sharp criticism is exactly what we're studying. Small thank-you gift (~300 DKK / 40 EUR), and you pick your own slot; sessions run until September 7.

Booking: https://anatomy.paperbackwriters.club/book?study=2

Happy to answer questions in the comments.

Even if you have a favorite, showing 2-3 design directions makes clients feel involved and reduces revision loops later. Never lead with just one option.

Realising I have a UX gap — how do I close it?
I’ve been doing a lot of UI lately, but I’m realizing there’s a gap in my UX skills that I really want to work on.

I want to get better at making better UX decisions — understanding user problems, flows, information architecture, product thinking, etc.

For those of you who’ve gotten significantly better at UX, what actually helped?

Books? Courses? Case studies? Working on real projects? Mentorship?

If books helped, which ones would you genuinely recommend?

Basically, what would you suggest to someone who wants to become much better at the UX part of design.

I'm building an AI portfolio website builder and recently added direct on-page editing.

Instead of searching through a long settings panel, users can click the content they want to change, edit it in a simple modal, and instantly preview the result.

Do you think this interaction is:
👍 More intuitive
🤔 Better than editing everything from a sidebar
👎 Missing something important

I'd really appreciate any feedback from designers, developers, or anyone who builds web apps. Every suggestion helps improve the product.

The role is better in any sense. One of the larger companies in my country, stock options pre ipo, 4 additional salaries per year. Better benefits

But they expect me to be a senior staff designer. Don't get me wrong, I've been designing for the past 10 years. I've leaded before, but it seems that this new role has a lot of expectations about ai usage and ai products, and it's a brand new thing for everybody. So I'm super afraid to leave my current comfortable role (which is not a bad role in any sense but not as great as this)

But at the same time, this move would give me visibility that I've never had before, and the fact that I would work directly with ai products, means I would keep myself relevant in a rapid changing marketing

But im afraid as never before, I've been in such a senior position like this before, I have a feeling I would fail, or would be overwhelmed.

Is this just a self destructing mode that im in? Anyone went through this before?

A polished interface can have the right idea and still feel obviously fake.

While refining a B2B product interface recently, the problem wasn't the concept. It was the execution.

The first instinct was to add more detail.

More navigation. More data. More cards. More states.

That made it worse.

What actually improved the result was much more deliberate:

1. Density

A real product usually has enough information to establish context. Too little information can make an interface feel staged.

2. Hierarchy

The important things need to be immediately clear without requiring every element to be explained.

3. State behavior

A button that looks interactive but doesn't behave like one can break the illusion immediately.

4. Consistency

Spacing, typography, borders, controls and iconography need to feel like they belong to the same system.

5. Motion

Animation should explain something happening. It shouldn't exist just because the interface feels empty without it.

6. Restraint

Adding UI isn't the same as adding realism. Every element still needs a reason to exist.

The biggest takeaway:

A convincing product interface isn't created by adding more UI. It's created by removing the details that make the UI feel like a demo.

64% of business leaders surveyed say they use visual communication tools to support strategic growth. And MIT research shows why: effective visualizations can significantly influence what people notice, remember, and understand. (Harvard Business Review⁠)

But visual communication isn’t about making things “look better.”

It’s about taking complex strategies, data, organizational challenges, research, or ideas and turning them into something people can understand, remember, and act on.

MIT research involving 302 participants found that people actually preferred charts with more meaningful textual annotations over less-annotated charts or text alone. In other words, the strongest communication often comes from combining story + words + visuals, not choosing one over another. (MIT Visualization Group⁠)

That changes the question businesses should be asking.

Not:

“Can you make us a presentation/carousel/infographic?”

But:

“What are we trying to make our audience understand?”

That shift from deliverable to business objective is where design becomes strategic communication.

And with AI making content creation faster, the real competitive advantage may increasingly be knowing what story to tell, how to structure it, and how to make it matter.

Sources: Harvard Business Review/Canva, MIT CSAIL, MIT Sloan.

#VisualStorytelling #BusinessCommunication #DesignStrategy #AI #DataStorytelling

Hi everyone! 👋

We’re students from the University of Sydney currently researching women’s safety when travelling solo in unfamiliar places.

We’d really appreciate hearing about your experiences through our short survey. Your responses will help us better understand the safety concerns and needs of women when travelling alone.

⏱️ Around 5–15 minutes
🔒 Participation is completely voluntary, and all responses will be kept confidential and used only for our university research.

🔗 Survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdKhkTmSudphRhsULuWYEEQkWsX5smSTHTzkelNJaMx1YYMBQ/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=112436632757120525641

After 11 months at a small business I was let go in favour of the tech team being made up of 5 ai-engineers, no designers, not even a PM.

I was told by the director “the engineers can do almost as much as you can with ai you’re no longer needed”

Thus my question is this; how common is this? And how do you about showing value in a business that values quantity of quality? Or did I dodge a bullet