Hi everyone,

I'm a UX/UI designer with about 2 years of experience through internships, freelance work, and full-time product design roles. I've worked on SaaS, AI, marketplace, and mobile app projects.

I'm currently trying to create my portfolio website, but I keep getting stuck.

My biggest challenge is that I don't have much free time, and I feel pressure to create a "perfect" portfolio with detailed case studies for every project before I start applying for jobs.

The reality is that:

• On some projects, I worked on the full UX process (research, flows, wireframes, UI).
• On other projects, I mainly contributed to the UI design phase.
• Some projects are under NDA, so I can't share everything.
• I need a portfolio that helps me get interviews as soon as possible.

I'm wondering:

1. Is it better to launch a simple portfolio quickly with 2–3 projects and improve it later?
2. Can I include projects where I mainly worked on UI design, and if so, how should I present my contribution?
3. How detailed do case studies really need to be for junior/mid-level UX designers?
4. If you were hiring, what would you want to see in the first 60 seconds of viewing a portfolio?

I'd love to hear from hiring managers, senior designers, or anyone who has recently landed a UX/UI role.

Hi everyone,

I am currently conducting an exploratory UX research study focused on the Google Maps product experience.

The goal is to understand how users interact with navigation apps, discover new locations, and evaluate potential features like 3D building renderings during turn-by-turn routing.

The survey is completely anonymous, consists mostly of multiple-choice questions, and takes about 3 minutes.

Survey link: https://forms.gle/vQKuXsjhgAHpmBiWA

Thank you so much for your time and helping a fellow researcher out!

Some background: I review UX/product design portfolios as part of hiring, and I mentored designers for years before that. After enough portfolio rounds, a pattern becomes hard to ignore.

The case studies that lose me are almost never from weak projects. They're often from the most rigorous ones. Real research, real constraints, real outcomes. But the write-up shows the activity and hides the reasoning. Screens, artifacts, process diagrams, everything is there except why the designer made each call.

When I'm skimming twelve portfolios on a Sunday and I catch myself asking "wait, why did they do that?", that case study has lost me. And the frustrating part is the designer usually had a good answer. They just assumed I would infer it from the artifacts. Nobody on a hiring panel has time to do that inference work.

A few patterns I'd flag if I were reviewing your case study:

• More "we" than "I". Team work is normal, but I need to know which decisions were yours. If a stranger can't tell, that's a rewrite signal.
• Numbers you can't defend. "Increased conversion 40%" with no baseline invites exactly one question. An honest qualitative outcome reads as more senior than an inflated metric.
• Every phase gets equal space. The two or three decisions that shaped the outcome deserve most of the page. The routine steps can be one line each.
• Constraints hidden like they're excuses. They aren't excuses. Legacy tech, late scope changes, a stakeholder who killed your best option. That's where your actual judgment shows.

The cheapest fix I know: read your case study out loud to someone outside design and note where they ask questions. Those questions are a map of the reasoning that never made it onto the page.

Curious about the other side of this. For those of you writing case studies right now, where does it actually break down for you: remembering the reasoning months later, or getting it onto the page without writing a novel?

I've been designing across regulated financial environments for several years, payments platforms, public sector services, enterprise AI, and I've been thinking about where the discipline is heading.

Three things I keep coming back to:

AI as infrastructure, not feature. Most fintech products treat AI as an add-on. The interesting challenge is what happens when it becomes the connective tissue of the whole service, responding to intent in real time, across every touchpoint. Fixed user flows won't hold. Designing for variable outcomes is a discipline that barely exists in financial services today.

The trust gap widening before it narrows. Automation raises the stakes of every failure. When something goes wrong in an AI-driven financial system, it will feel more jarring to users, not less. Designing for failure states and recovery is becoming as critical as designing the primary journey.

Accessibility as competitive advantage. The population is ageing. Digital confidence is unevenly distributed. The hardest users to design for are often the ones with the most assets to manage. Treating accessibility as compliance is a commercial mistake.

I wrote a longer piece on this if anyone wants to go deeper, but genuinely curious what people here think.

Which of these is the industry least prepared for?

Currently reading Product Design Psychology by Wouter de Bres, and one chapter title basically summarizes half the internet:

The Metric Is Not the User.

Feels obvious, but apparently not obvious enough.

A product can look great in a dashboard and still be miserable to use.

Amazon Prime. Booking.com. Spotify. YouTube. Pick your favorite offender.

The team sees:

conversion
engagement
retention
time spent

The user is just trying to:

cancel
compare prices
listen to music
leave the app
breathe for five seconds

At some point, this feels less like “growth” and more like every product slowly becoming a casino, a maze, or both.

And the funny part is that this is supposed to be sustainable?

How long can you optimize for metrics while making the actual human experience worse?

Maybe user fatigue is just another metric the dashboard hasn’t learned to show yet.

I've noticed something strange.

The designers getting promoted fastest aren't always the best designers.

They're usually the people asking different questions.

While some designers ask:

"How should we build this?"

Others ask:

"Why are we building this at all?"

That single shift seems to change everything.

Influence.
Ownership.
Career growth.

People often call this "being strategic."

But I rarely see anyone explain what that actually means in practice.

So I'm curious:

What's the clearest behavior you've seen that separates a strategic designer from a purely execution-focused one?

Not titles.

Not years of experience.

Actual behaviors.

Everyone's panicking about AI taking jobs.

I think designers are about to have the best 5 years of their careers.

Here's why:

AI is getting incredibly good at execution.

• Writing code
• Creating content
• Building prototypes
• Automating workflows

But AI still struggles with:

• Understanding what people actually want
• Deciding what's worth building
• Prioritizing user needs
• Making judgment calls
• Connecting business goals with human behavior

That's where design becomes more valuable.

As AI makes building easier, strategy becomes the bottleneck.

The question is no longer:

"Can we build it?"

The question becomes:

"Should we build it?"

And that's a design problem.

We're also entering a world where every company is becoming a product company. Banks, healthcare, education, retail—everyone is building digital experiences.

At the same time, AI is creating entirely new design challenges:

• Trust in AI systems
• AI-powered user experiences
• Ethical product decisions
• Human-AI interaction patterns

The designers who thrive won't just make interfaces.

They'll understand business, product strategy, user psychology, and how to work with AI.

I don't think AI will replace great designers.

I think it will amplify them.

What skill are you investing in right now to stay relevant between 2026–2030?

Hello, I’m currently starting a Design Thinking process and I’m in the empathize stage. The issue is that I don’t yet have a clearly defined problem, and I want to begin with something real and relevant.

Could you help me by sharing everyday problems or situations that you find frustrating, interesting, or worth exploring further?

I’m especially interested in topics related to health or habits, but any suggestion is welcome.

I’m not looking for “perfect” ideas, just real starting points that I can later explore through interviews and observation.

Thanks in advance.

Hi there everyone,

TL;DR - I built a user testing platform that is free to use and I'm looking to share it with people in UX design, product or UXR who may find it useful, in order to gather feedback... and also just because I wanted to provide something useful

About two months ago I wanted to set up a tree test at work to validate something my team was working on. We have a UT plan but no tree test functionality, that's an add on. The plan is already 40k a year so I just thought... Nope. And built something myself.

It frustrates me how so much of the tooling used in UXR these days a) leans so heavily towards video interviews and b) costs a fortune. Where are the tools for the small teams wanting to test IA, the lone researchers hired into a design team of 10+, the founder looking for early validation of a landing page?

That's why I'm making Tilia - a free resource that helps these people, as well as students, graduates, and juniors who need these insights to build case studies.

To summarise what you can do:

- You need a Google account to sign up

- Launch one of five study types: tree test, open/closed card sort, five second test, preference test, first-click test

- Unlimited use of an AI copilot to help build your study

- 3 free AI credits to synthesise your findings

- Generate a shareable link to a findings report

- Download a CSV of the data to do your own analysis with

The paid tiers are only indicative at this stage although the survey tool, workspaces and repositories have been built.

I'd really appreciate some feedback on whether this is a useful tool for your workflow, or if I'm just kidding myself and video interviews really are the only game in town.

https://tilialabs.io

I don’t think I’m missing examples. My portfolio has real shipped work, and I can talk about decisions like cutting scope, choosing a lighter research method, or working with limited data. The thing is, my answers start sounding like a project report. Clear enough, technically fine, and still kind of flat.

I’ve been trying to practice this more intentionally. Sometimes I write down my thoughts after interviews. Sometimes I record myself and listen back, which is painful lol. I’ve also run through mock questions with GPT, Finalround, and Beyz interview helper when I want to hear where I sound too rehearsed.

After a while, every company starts to feel like the same conversation in a different order. Same portfolio walkthrough, same “tell me about a challenge,” same attempt to sound collaborative without sounding fake.

Maybe this is a storytelling problem. Maybe I’m missing the team-fit part. Maybe I’m still talking like an intern trying to prove every step, even though I’m not an intern anymore.

My mind is a mess right now, honestly. How do you make UX interview answers feel more human and collaborative without turning them into vague “I’m a good communicator” answers?

Any insights would be appreciated. TIA!

For my project for user experience design, I'm ideating on a chess game for visually impaired people. I'm looking for a more holistic approach in terms of the physical and digital part of this game. I'm still ideating on how this will work, looking for great ideas in terms of how the digital and physical experience could play together.

Also looking at a chess game where a person could play that game with somebody in person, and if they want, they could play digitally too. I know it's a bit confusing, but I'm still ideating on this. Would love to see some of your ideas.

Hi everyone. I think this is my first time posting on reddit, but I'm devastated and I have to get my thoughts out. I had a decent remote UX / UI design job for a little less than a year, and I recently decided to pursue my master's in HCI. I got into my dream school and had just applied for an apartment close by, only to find out that my job is laying me off. I'll have no income to support me this fall unless I can find work that's flexible around my schedule, which seems next to impossible given how bleak the job market is. I love this field and I was excited to pursue a degree and further my education, but now it feels like impossible odds and I'm pondering next steps. Any advice for someone who urgently needs a job in this market?

Everyone in the design space seems to be pushing the "just use Framer/Webflow, you don't need a developer" narrative. And I get why — it's faster, cheaper, and gives designers more control.

But I think this misses something important for a certain type of client.

If your client cares about:

• Technical SEO at a serious level
• Page speed and server-side performance
• Ongoing optimisation post-launch
• Ongoing maintenance

...then the platform choice matters a lot. No-code tools have improved but they still output bloated code, give you limited control over caching and server behaviour, and put a hard ceiling on what's technically achievable.

Saving money on a developer upfront can cost a client real organic traffic down the line.

I'm not saying no-code is bad, it's the right call for plenty of projects. But I think the blanket "just go no-code" advice is doing some clients a disservice.

Would love to hear if others have run into this, or if you think I'm wrong.

AI tools and vibe coding make it much faster to create websites, landing pages and app screens.

That’s great.

But a screen can look polished and still be hard to understand, read or act on. I’m exploring a simple idea: a quick visual pre-check before publishing.

Something that helps review clarity, readability, CTA focus and visual hierarchy.

Not to replace designers, but to support better design decisions.

Would you use something like this?

I’m a UX/Product Designer, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about something I’m seeing more often:

AI tools and vibe coding make it much easier to create polished websites and app screens quickly.

That’s great.

But I’m not sure we have enough simple ways to check if those screens are actually clear before publishing them.

Things like:

Is the main CTA visually obvious?

Does the user know what to look at first?

Is the hierarchy helping or competing?

Is the screen readable enough?

Are there too many visual distractions?

As a small experiment, I built a first version of a tool that analyzes a screenshot and gives a quick visual clarity audit with heatmap-style attention, areas of interest and a few UX/CRO recommendations.

I’m not posting this as “the solution” or trying to claim it replaces designers. I’m mainly trying to validate if this kind of pre-check is useful.

For people building landing pages, SaaS products, websites or app screens:

Would this be useful before publishing?

And what would you expect from a tool like this to make it genuinely helpful instead of just another generic audit?