This person just wants to sign off on everything, even to the point of approving after validation is complete. We have product managers for that.

Apparently, user research is just a suggestion until they personally weigh in. Their personal opinion or “I like it this way” is what often dictates the outcome. And their own designs look rough….. they reject peer feedback. And forget accessibility standards. Anyone else work for a person like this?

I’m at the lead level, so at what point when can I ask: how many cooks does it take to make it work? And why are we inviting the chef back after the food has already been served?

The kicker is…I work in a medium maturity org, and I can’t believe this is going on. The designers on my team are so talented, and this manager is just…. Not…. We all question their credibility because this is how it is. But somehow they survive?

How do I deal without cashing out? Advice please…. 🙃

Are they useful in y'alls experience and how do you guys write them?

I use two paragraphs, one explaining my background and then the final one what I can contribute because of said established background. THis is coupled with applying to places with hires similar to me or who do applications that I've worked on (such as b2b saas as an example)

I'd love to hear what you guys have done / think

Hi, I’m fairly new to automotive/infotainment design and I was wondering if anyone had advice on where I can view current infotainment across brands and even internationally. I was previously a web designer so I know of dribble and other sources but I would really like to see more automotive specs.

Also welcome to any tips, on how to better understand infotainment trends and anything relevant.

Cheers!

Lots of negativity on this sub about the job market and state of industry but very little UX or design discussion. I’d like to know what people are working on? If you are out of work what are latest projects? What problems are you solving for yourself or others?

Now is definitely the best time for us to build our own things.

Or are the happily employed ones not on Reddit🤣

Saw this in Family iOS App

You tap Continue the same button area expands into Cancel and Continue.

The motion helps explain the UX that this isn’t a totally new screen or decision, it’s the next step of the same action.

Feels a lot more connected, no?

Seven months ago I posted about the spoofed recruiter emails I was receiving. Real recruiters, highly personalized and tempting opportunities.

The only tell was that they used gmail accounts.

But today I received my first InMail on LinkedIn doing the same thing.

I recognized the language right away. The tell is harder to discern because instead of spoofing a real user but using the telltale gmail account, it comes from a real LinkedIn profile. Impossible to prove as fake.

Here are the tells:

1. "I came across your work [summary of positions]." They all start with this.
2. "Your ability to [summary of accomplishments] really stood out." The "really stood out" line is frequently used
3. "Would you be open to a brief confidential conversation?" They always like to say confidential to hide the fact that it's a fake job. Sometimes they'll say confidential conversation. Sometimes confidential (unlisted) job.

There are a variety of reasons they're doing this. From the other thread someone said it was to install takeover software on their computer. Others think it's a check in the mail scam.

Have you seen these? Been scammed? Share you stories.

Apologies for maybe yet another AI post. I've looked all through the backlog of AI + design system posts here but can't find anything asking this specifically.

My org already has a robust and mature design system and a great design system manager. The issue is that the designers, as well as often PMs and sometimes devs, want to get a quick answer about a guideline/pattern/rule within that design system, and it can take quite a while of hunting. For example "which style of destructive button is the right one to use in a warning dialog?" or "when do I use the Notes component vs the Comments component?"

I've been looking at Zeroheight, which promises to do some of this, but am hoping I could put something together myself for less, though if not, will gladly pitch Zeroheight to my boss. Has anyone used this tool, or anything else, for getting answers about your design system? I've been finding plenty of tools that do this sort of knowledge referencing for straight up documents, but nothing tailored to ingesting a design system and being able to give you answers from that. Any advice is appreciated!

I beat up myself a lot for this - for not thinking or digging deep about why I was the one who got the offer among all the other applicants when I got a job offer 2 years ago. The economy was not as bad sure, but it was not the best either. So my question is:

For those of you that managed to get a job offer in this economy/market what do you think you did right or different than other candidates? And I’m not talking about years of experience, sure but I know people who have 5-10 years of experience and are struggling. For sure it’s could be something specific in your experience, specific tool or how you handled the design assignment. Or something else! Please share. Sharing is caring!

Over the past few months, it feels like more of my time would go into reviewing AI-generated code than actually building things myself.

The AI produces something that looks fine at first glance, but then someone has to check the logic, fix weird edge cases, clean up the code, and make sure it actually fits the project. Sometimes, explaining why the generated code is wrong takes longer than writing it from scratch.

I'm not against using AI tools, but I do wonder where this leaves us in the long run.

Are other developers experiencing the same thing? Do you feel AI is making your work more productive, or are you spending more time cleaning up after it than doing actual engineering?

Side/weekend project, a fitness app. First version was a quick POC with Claude and got a few testers, kept iterating with feedback.

While functional, the design had a ton of: tiny monospace everywhere, uppercase labels on every section, lots of containers, copy that read like a status report. It was a nightmare to update, undoing all the small bad design decisions Claude made, so I redesigned it.

What I changed over ~4 months with a small test group: changed the IA, fonts to one sans, sentence case, gray ground with a red accent and a seal mark, rewrote every verdict line to say what the log shows instead of judging it, addressed a ton of usability issues.

The video is showing the Today page, how the logging loop works, how the experience changes based on your fitness goals, also lots of insights based on your lift behavior. I spent a lot of time refining the data vis to make sure the language was clear and showed what people cared about.

What do you think or the visual design overall? Interaction design? Is it clear what the pages are saying? Also does it feel easy to use? Open to any feedback...

Hi, This is an on going Project, i would like to hear your feedback on the layout and overall design... Thank you in advance.

For some context:

1. This website will have an arabic version that will serve a decent some of user so i had to keep that in mind when doing the design to make sure that the overall composition, typography, and layout adapts well between English and Arabic.

2. For this landing page, I will be relying a lot on storytelling. We are not to sell a list of services, ask for donations, or anything else, We are trying to sell the idea, the problem, and how we approach it or aim to fix it. "I mentioned sell a lot but this is actually non profit there is no actual selling"

3. To support the storytelling, i'm not relying on super complicated graphics, and instead, simple animation and scroll behaviours between the screens that feel intentional and could actually help communicate our vision.

4. This is far from being done, The landing page alone has around 12 distinct sections and 23+ screens. I'm just trying to test the layout and overall design direction we are going for.

Everyone keeps saying AI is going to replace designers, or at least cut our workload in half. Honestly? I feel like my workload has actually increased—at least mentally.

Last week I was working on an onboarding flow. I gave the AI a solid brief, clear direction, and context. To its credit, it followed my direction and spat out a solution in seconds.

The problem? Within that single direction, there were at least 10 different ways to execute it.
Suddenly, my job wasn't designing the screens—it was auditing them. I had to sit there and constantly think through the why, what, and where to pick the actual best option for the company and our specific target audience. I was stuck in an exhausting loop of evaluating technical constraints, hidden assumptions, and business tradeoffs. AI executes in seconds, which is cool, but it has zero clue what to execute, what to leave out, and why.

Plus, it got me thinking: if non-design stakeholders start using AI to bypass us and push features straight to production, aren't they just going to tank their metrics and need designers to come back and fix the mess anyway?

Idk, am I missing something here? I only have about 1.5 years of experience, so I could easily be looking at this the wrong way. For those of you who have been in the industry longer—what is actually going on? Are you guys feeling this too, or am I just using AI wrong?

We're about to redo a frontend and keep arguing about whether the design language has to be locked first or if you can revamp screens in parallel and extract the system as you go. Product has chat/messaging plus some denser dashboard-adjacent UI, so consistency starts breaking fast once a few flows diverge.

Curious how people have sequenced this in practice. Did you start with tokens/components and freeze them early, or ship a few key flows first and only formalize the language after patterns settled? Also what usually bites you later - type/spacing drift, component variants exploding, or states that never got designed?

Not fishing for free work, just trying to avoid the classic "pretty screens, no system" trap before we commit more time.

Over the last month, my job has basically turned into polishing and providing feedback on the "AI slop" created by stakeholders.

They get to decide whether or not to accept my recommendations, even down to the component level (for example, advising them not to use Component X and to use Component Y instead because it’s a better fit for this use case).

Are you guys in the same situation? Are we all just polishing AI slop now? If so, it feels like this career is dying, as this type of workflow isn't sustainable. Nobody is going to pay thousands of dollars a month for a job like this.

I genuinely need some advice here.

I’ve been applying for remote product designer roles and international contract opportunities for a while now, but I’m barely getting replies.

Before people suggest the usual things, I already do these:

• tailor my resume based on the role
• apply only when the role is actually relevant
• reach out to founders / hiring managers directly
• send cold emails and follow-ups
• keep my portfolio and case studies updated
• search beyond LinkedIn too
• try to apply as early as possible

Still, the response is almost nothing.

So I’m trying to understand what I’m actually missing here.

If you’re a product designer who landed a remote role recently, or someone who hires designers, what actually helped?

I’m not looking for the usual “improve your resume / portfolio / LinkedIn” advice because I’m already doing that.

I really want to know what worked for you when you were in this situation.

In our fintech app we have investment section where we want to add its dedicated tab bar/navigation bar. Have you ever done similar experience in your work before or would you suggest this type of experience?

The problem that I'm experiencing:

Within my work with clients, stakeholders place an enormous amount of importance on speed and conversion, wanting to lower clicks and making it faster. The main user problem that we uncovered through research is lack of trust, not speed. Users are hesitant, double check. They drop off because they don't trust, not because the experience takes too long.

Whenever I attempt to bring trust into the journey map, trust feels intangible when compared to something that can be measured, such as speed.

What I've already tried:

I've included a lane for Trust signals and anxieties as well as Emotions, yet it gets ignored within reviews.

I've attempted to link trust touchpoints to UI components including reassuring copy, proof points and clear pricing within our vision wheel.

I've scoured the subreddit. I've read some threads about journey mapping - yet they all revolve around emotion or pain points, rather than the issue of trust.

My question to you:

If any of you are working on things like trust, confidence, or security on your maps - how are you documenting these in a way that they actually affect the design process and the conversations between stakeholders? Do

I know people travelling and spending huge amounts of money for flights and hotels just for this conference. Crazy

A fellow member of the community posted a video about how storytelling is a differentiator for businesses (highly recommend watching it).

TLDR:

How do you persuade your stakeholders that storytelling is valuable for design? How do you ask for more time to experiment, iterate, test in the era that values productivity, above human connection?

If you tried and didn't suceed, let's brainstorm!

Full story:

Elevating designs with good storytelling is extremely time consuming.

In my view, "storytelling" in design means the final design is cohesive. It feels like there is no element missing, and also nothing extra to add (visuals complement content and add context, there are just enough onboarding steps to give all information and to not take too long, etc) so it feels effortless for our mind to process this information.

This also means thinking about design exactly in the context of the business i work for, and for their particular users. So also knowing when to break the rules and best practices.

Oftentimes, this is tied to small details like improving one word or one icon, where the stakeholders brush it off as "perfectionism" or "unimportant" - but in my experience, those are exactly the things that compound and give a good experience, and we should be investing in and refining.

The only way i found to successfully deal with this is by investing extra time and effort to create different versions and show them side by side. In that case, 80-90% of the time, stakeholders go with my proposal.

Less successfully, but works sometimes, is to put together competitor analyses and note where we have opportunities to be better. Typically, when this is presented at the level of the product, stakeholders are convinced to invest time for improvements. But when it's presented at the level of design pattern, it gets brushed off as a tiny detail. 10 tiny details later, things are less cohesive.

Rght now, if businesses think productive > competitive, shipping more features > shipping better features, how can we persuade them that it's worth investing in good design and small details?

How do we persuade them that they need to do the 10% that AI cannot, to be competitive?

Do we even know it will move the needle for their business, or are we just hoping it would? And the non-designer users are just fine with 90% AI can do?

On my morning walk this morning I had my daily thought about the state of the industry, state of the world, etc.

For the first time I had a real thought of “If I get let go from my job do I really want to do this again?” I went from being someone who was excited about AI to hating it. I know product management is the logical step but I really don’t think I want to.

Honestly I’d love to move away from super tech centric companies and do more with smaller business, non profits, etc.

Curious what those of you who made a jump are doing and if you have any regrets.

There's a running debate about which role absorbs which. PMs absorb design. Engineers absorb PMs. Designers are done. Lenny's TrueUp data, with design hiring flat since early 2023 and PM demand rising, poured fuel on it.

I think it's the wrong question.

Across the companies I advise and people in my network, I see three camps:

1. People embracing AI because they want to

2. People moving because they can see the writing on the wall

3. People with their heads in the sand, convinced it's a fad

In my own project, two of us cover four roles by leaning on AI and, mostly, by learning fast.

The people struggling aren't losing to the tech. They're losing to their ego.

The PM who never leaves the backlog. Agents groom faster. If you're not close to customers and sales, and you can't see what's coming in your market, you're exposed.

The engineer who dismisses AI. The architectural mindset is the most durable skill in the room. Refusing the AI tools wastes it.

The designer who guards the pixels. The value was never the pixels. It's the design system, coaching PMs, and the hard usability problems.

To be honest about the downside: teams will change and some functions will shrink. A leader can wire an out-of-the-box design system to Figma, hand a PM a conversational AI, and decide that's close enough. Fewer isn't finished, but the people who keep doing the job the old way are the ones most at risk.

Why I think design got hit first: not because AI designs better, but because design rarely has a defensible metric. Engineering has velocity. Product has revenue and retention. Design often has "users found it easier," which is true but loses in a budget meeting.

The fix is translating UX into money. Rough maths for a mid-sized B2B product:

Time saved: 30 seconds on a task done 20 times a day by 50 users, over 230 working days, is about 1,900 hours. At £35 an hour, roughly £67k.

Fewer errors: 400 fewer support tickets a month at £8 each is about £38k a year.

Conversion: checkout from 2.1% to 2.5% on 50,000 monthly visitors with an £80 average order is about £192k a year.

Retention: keeping 2 more customers a month at £2,400 a year each protects about £58k of ARR.

That's roughly £355k from four fixes. These are illustrative numbers, not a case study. Be conservative and use your own data.

Curious where people land:

Are you seeing the same three camps in your org?

Designers: how are you putting a number on your team's value, if at all?

I’m anxious about AI so I need some clarity on what to look out for if my job is at risk. Other roles, especially PMs now have the tools to “design” high fidelity screens. I don’t think that is a red flag in itself, but what can I look out for that my company expects PMs to take on my role? Where is the line between adapting to these new ways of working with AI vs preparing for my role to be absorbed by product managers?

Hey guys, I’m building a school management system and I’m a bit confused about one thing.

I have a Classes section where all the classes from Nursery to Class 12 are listed. But I’m not sure what should happen when the admin clicks on a particular class.

I already have separate sections for students, teachers, subjects, attendance, fees, exams, timetable, academic calendar, etc. So I don’t want to repeat all those things inside the Classes section.

For example, if the admin clicks on Class 5, should it show sections like 5A and 5B, the class teacher, the number of students, etc.? Or should it be used for something else?

I want this section to actually serve a purpose and not just be a page that lists all the classes.

If you’ve worked on a similar project or used any school management software, I’d love to know how you’d approach this. What features would make sense here without overlapping with the other sections?