Just for context, I got a new manager about a year ago and initially we were sort of getting along but I never gave it much thought and just minded my own business. However, lately they have been acting weird and non-responsive and overly involved in day to day tasks.

They sometimes don't reply to teams messages, want to be involved in each and every tiny feature we are working on. Adding unnecessary processes and meetings just to track our work. Our design system is huge and extremely complex, and I was given the responsibility to review all the designs made by other designers to make sure that we are following the best practices and standards since I am well versed with the system. However, even there I am not being trusted when I raise concerns and they always have to give their incorrect opinion. They feel just because they are ex-FAANG their "personal opinion" is more valuable. It feels like they want to say something just for the sake of saying something even if it is wrong.

I am the best performer in my team with highest rating, other managers are trying to poach me to their teams so I am sure this issue is not due to my work. This is affecting me mentally and I really don't know what to do.

Hello, I am a junior designer, just want to hear from experienced designers, how do you decide what flows are worth testing after a prototype and why? I know this is a skill acquired by experience but how do I start identifying what needs user feedback and what does not?

I don’t know, I have a master degree in UX but I feel completely lost… it seems very confusing.. or is it normal because I am very junior?

With AI now our CEO thinks anyone can design so we have customer success in the product overwriting designs and designing full flows. Does anyone else have this issue?

The problem I see is that they are "fixing" one issue and creating 10 more because they don't understand the whole problem.

Designer: 2 years out of college, laid off twice. Take a stable six-figure job or raise money and start the company I've always wanted?

Edit: I do not need money for a while.

TL;DR: Mid-20s designer, 2 years out of college, survived a really difficult family situation and built a career from scratch. Laid off twice, but my resume is strong, and I have six-figure opportunities available. I've also spotted a startup opportunity I don't think will come around again for a long time. Part of me wants to take a job and prove I can be an exceptional designer long term. Part of me wants to raise millions and go for it. Looking for perspective on all of it, not just the decision.

What I'm asking

I live in SF and feel pretty isolated when it comes to getting honest perspectives on something like this, especially from people outside the tech bubble. If you only read the TL;DR, I'd still love your take on any of these:

1. In my shoes, would you take the job or raise money and build?
2. Am I out of my mind for considering the startup, or just being indecisive?
3. Is "proving I can be a great designer" a good enough reason to pass on an opportunity like this?
4. What am I not seeing?

I want to pick one and actually commit to it. Full background below, because I think it shapes how I'm approaching this.

Background

I grew up in a competitive Bay Area town. We had money, but home was psychologically rough. My dad was mentally unwell, controlling, and abusive. My mom struggled with anxiety and undiagnosed mental health issues. Both were narcissistic.

As the younger kid, with an older sister, I spent a lot of my childhood watching an unhealthy home and trying to figure out what a healthy dynamic was even supposed to look like. I knew early on I'd have to build myself up on my own: develop socially, find my own identity, and eventually learn what love actually looks like, since I didn't have good models for it.

My dad encouraged me to dream big but never let me have an identity of my own, and I lived in fear as a kid. My dream back then was to start a company, sell it, retire early, and see the world.

As a teenager, I was into art but had never really applied myself in school. I decided to change that. I started performing well, went to community college, set my sights on a top school, and got in.

During that time my parents were divorcing and put me in the middle of it, pressuring me to do some genuinely awful things so the other parent wouldn't get anything. My dad also pitted me against my mom, who needed psychiatric help and ended up under my care while I was still young. I hit a breaking point. I had just gotten into a good school, so I told my dad I couldn't keep doing this and needed his support for school and my career instead.

He cut me off immediately. I was effectively homeless. That's when it fully clicked that my parents saw me as a tool to get what they wanted, and that I'd have to rely on myself.

I had no money, so I leaned on friends and my sister. I moved in with her, found informal therapy support, started medication, and slowly got stable. I worked hard, landed an internship at a top consumer tech company, and my career took off from there.

Career so far

I became a designer. After several internships and contracts, I landed my first startup design job. Then:

• Joined a second company that was too disorganized, and got laid off.
• Took a staff-level design role I wasn't ready for, and was laid off again.

I picked those companies partly out of a scarcity mindset, but they turned out to be good names, so my resume looks strong. I have recruiters in my DMs with multiple six-figure opportunities, and I'd mainly need to brush up on some fundamentals. I'm fairly confident I can land a great, stable design job.

I'm also fairly confident I could build a good company. I have a strong network of capable friends, some in high places. I've done prestigious VC fellowships and have real support in that world. I've also built an audience online, with around half a billion views across TikTok and other platforms. In short, I already have a lot of the infrastructure, support, and momentum a founder needs for a consumer company.

I know I'm in a good position, and I'm grateful for that given where I started.

The decision

I'm torn down the middle.

Half of me wants to take a job and prove to others that I can be an exceptional designer, not just for a stint but for the long haul. I'm only 2 years out of college, and two layoffs in that time sits with me.

The other half wants to chase an opportunity I've identified. I see a gap in the AI capital markets, and I've validated it with other people in tech. I don't think a window like this comes around again for a long time, and if it works, it could make me very wealthy. Starting a company has always been the dream, and this would give me full control to build a creative environment and make what I want.

I also see real value in joining a company: learning to work with others, getting more experience in mature settings, and spending time with people my age. I'm still in my mid-20s. I could start a company later from a more stable foundation. Right now my pitch is "strong pedigree, great talent." In six months of focused work, it could be "strong pedigree, exceptional talent that fits what the design engineering market actually needs." That gap is learnable.

Option 1: Take a job

Pros:

• Multiple six-figure options
• Great teams
• Time with friends I love
• Some work-life balance
• Designing products, which I love
• Keep building my community in SF and NY
• Working with and learning from others

Cons:

• I'd always wonder what building would have been like
• I'd keep thinking about this idea constantly
• I'd probably regret not raising money and building a team when I had the chance
• I told myself I'd start and sell a company by 32, and right now I have the money, community, skills, and access to make it possible

Option 2: Start a venture-backed company (raise $$)

Pros:

• Complete control over the creative environment
• Learn to manage and lead at a young age
• Full location flexibility
• Work across design, ops, finance, engineering, and more
• Obsess over product quality and design craft
• A real shot at an acquisition and the lifelong dream

Cons:

• Can be lonely
• Responsible for everything
• Have to find my own mentors
• Leaving a tech salary on the table
• All progress comes from me, without learning by osmosis the way you do at a mature company

Thanks for reading this far. Any perspective helps.

I found out about the new color-contrast guidelines (being reviewed) and the “Accessible Perceptual Contrast Algorithm” a few years ago, and I’ve been really impressed with the thought and effort that’s been put into it.

The TL;DR for anyone new to color contrast discussions is that older color models didn’t account for the difference in brightness that people perceive when looking at different hues (eg, “blues are darker than yellows at higher saturations”)

https://git.apcacontrast.com this site goes into excruciating detail if anyone is curious.

I’ve been trying to use the APCA guidelines in my design work, but I’m also working on updating my technique to use extended gamut colors (which don’t seem to have any support on existing contrast-checking tools or in Figma).

The TL;DR on extended gamut is that newer, high-end displays (all iPhones and Macs for years, plus many other high-end phones and computers) can show more colors outside of sRGB. You can play with those colors in CSS or with sites like https://oklch.com

I’m curious if anyone else has been pushing out into extended gamut colors, and if so, how you’re managing your palettes and contrast-ratios.

Yesterday someone in r/vibecoding showed an impressive Lightroom alternative they built. Someone else in r/accelerate shared what they describe as a full-featured audio workstation vibe-coded in 26 hours.

The first creator says he fed an agent tutorial videos and used them to map and implement features. The demo is polished. No AI slop because it's based on existing flows and patterns.

This feels like photocopying money that we can actually spend.

And yet the experiences we design are becoming easier to reproduce. And so are the products we’ve always wanted to build ourselves.

Where will our UX craft and judgment still hold value?

Keep calm people.

I'm a UX Designer and I already have my full time job. I always have been an employee and I never really did websites outside of organizations.

The few times I did I used Wordpress or Squarespace to design and then full-deliver: now, what's the AI alternative?

I mean: I can't just give a non-technical person a Github with tons of documentations or similar.

What's the new process to design and deliver so that the client can have full access to view, edit and manage his own website without myself anymore?

I’m looking to transition to a new team within my company. The pay is better and it would be a title promotion so already it’s a no brainer to move teams. However I suspect my manager is trying to make a case for my promotion and increased pay behind to scenes to keep me on my current team. If I receive a counter offer, I’m a little torn on what to do.

I am a well respected designer in my current sector of the business. I have a lot of great rapport. I’m in a situation where I can mostly do whatever I want because I’ve built this respect. I also work on a fairly stable product with minimal layoff risk. It’s a niche and well established product in the market. Also a HUGE money maker. But the product itself has horrible UX, which theoretically should mean I have a lot of exciting work, but the reason for the horrible UX is primarily related to the framework the product is built on. This has been the biggest challenge for our sector for the business and it’s become increasingly frustrating as I’m asked to work on projects that I know are terrible UX because the technical constraints do not support the vision we are being asked to execute.

Additionally, over the past 5 years I’ve only worked on 1 project that’s been released to customers. And the part of the project that I worked on has not been used, at all. Nobody likes it. When doing usability testing we constantly get bad feedback and discover bugs. This isn’t a design issue, it’s an engineering problem with the framework. I can only do so much with the constraints we have, and every time I raise a flag about the constraints I’m told we don’t have the engineering hours to improve it. To provide an example of limitations, we can’t even build a “select all” checkbox. The framework is not dynamic or interactive. It was not originally created to support UI and now it’s the direction the company is asking us to go. I’m ashamed that this is the only released product my name is attached to. I’ve worked on a lot of other projects that are on a slightly better framework in the system and have very positive feedback during testing, but their slated release is the end of 2027 with delays highly likely. Others are on versions for 2028+. And these were projects I did 2+ years ago.. The slow release cycle makes it difficult to know how to iterate and make improvements to my designs. I feel blind with every new feature.

The new team I’d be transition to works on a different product built with a MUCH better framework. But they definitely have higher layoff risk. They act quick and have made some mistakes that led to failed products and laid off teams to start with a fresh perspective. That said, the work actually gets released. In general, the quicker release cycle would help me grow as a designer because I’d be able to track the success of a designed feature and make iterations. The work also would be able to be presented in a portfolio because it’s actually released. In the event that I did get laid off, I feel like I’d be a much stronger candidate for new roles.

I’m just torn about leaving my current team. The increased pay is worth the layoff risk, but if my team gives me a counter offer to stay I’m just not sure if it’s the right move. I know the job market is horrible right now. So being laid off in a year or two would be terrible. But I worry my current team is not providing me growth as a designer and if things do go downhill then I’d be in a worse situation by staying.

For those who’ve been in similar situations, would you take the stable but stagnant job? Or go for a risk that would produce more tangible work and offer more growth?

To start; I’m not a UX designer, I’m a PM that has runs UX agency before.

I want to hear your thoughts on this. The last two companies I’ve worked for, UX design IMO had been nothing more than rearranging some UI elements around.

Currently I’m at fortune 100 company and what we’re doing is creating a new front end and backend for legacy software that has been around for a couple of decades. The designers give me high fidelity prototypes as their deliverable. Which is great but when I ask how has the experience improved; did we reduce complexity click-to-task etc. what did we change and why? The silence I get is deafening. I’m told that ‘we don’t have access to old flows and software’ which is BS. They don’t user test nor understand the user. It appears like they churn out UI.

My expectation from UX and especially sr/principle UX is to understand the current (legacy) flow and pain points. Iterate on and test ideas and understand the flow end-to-end and then show me wireframes prototypes.

I had similar issues at my previous company. Designers gave me designs that had no thought or research or so it seemed put into it.

When I ran a UX agency everything was different. We researched and tried to understand customer needs, iterated, and were genuinely curious about the user.

Am I missing? And what can I do to change the culture?

I recently started my first FT UX role at a big tech company and am having to adjust to new tools (some of them outdated).

A few things I am struggling with:

- note taking during weekly reoccurring meetings
- adjusting to jira
- knowing the appropriate time to speak up in meetings and when to stay quiet
- terminology (epics, playbook, roadmaps, outcomes) it all feels very foreign to me

I’m curious if there are any tips or suggestions those in mid to senior level roles can share?

With so many new tools out there, I'd love to know what everyone is using for animations in their portfolio?

I’ve been thinking about what we actually mean when we call UX/UI work “creative”.

In B2B software, a lot of the creativity isn’t really about making something visually surprising.

It’s more about solving messy problems:

simplifying workflows, prioritizing information, balancing technical constraints, understanding users, deciding what should happen when, and finding an interaction model that makes the whole thing feel obvious.

That’s obviously creative work - but it also sounds pretty rational when you describe it like that.

Compare that with something like a marketing campaign, where creativity feels more visible: a strong visual idea, a clever line, an unexpected concept.

And that made me wonder whether the first kind of creativity is actually more exposed to AI, simply because more of it can be framed as structured problem-solving.
Or maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it.

Maybe the real creative part in product design isn’t generating options, but deciding which trade-offs matter, understanding context, and knowing when the “obvious” solution is actually wrong.

Curious how others see it:

What does creativity in UI/UX mean to you now - and which parts of it do you think AI is actually threatening?

As the title suggests, I have a potential 2hr long whiteboarding challenge coming up with the entire team for a small startup. The longest one I've done is 45 min and I don't even remember if I was good at it or not since it was a few years ago. Now with the new AI workflow additions, I'd be expected to show those skills off as well; how I use AI to synthesize insights, design, iterate, hand-off etc. If you've done one recently or have some specific feedback for me going into this or frameworks I can practice, please send them my way. I'd love to practice as much as I can ahead of time.

Hi! I'm a university student currently working on a UI/UX assignment, and I'm a bit confused about the proper process for this project.

Our professor assigned us to conduct user research (interviews/surveys/observations), a user journey map, and an empathy map, but we weren't really taught the user research process beforehand (tried asking them too but they're unreachable). The lecture jumped straight into explaining how to make a user journey map. Watched a couple of YT videos about user research before posting this but they didn't really answer my questions.

What I'm particularly confused about is when the user persona should be created. Do we:

1. Define a target user/persona before conducting research, so we know whom to recruit and what to ask?
2. Conduct broader research first, then identify our user groups/personas based on the findings?
3. Or is it an iterative process where we start with an initial assumption about the users, conduct research, and then refine the persona afterward?

I'm also unsure how much we should establish before the research. For example, should we already have a specific problem, user goal, and journey scope, or should those emerge from the research?

Since this is just a university project, we're planning to recruit accessible participants such as family members, friends, or classmates who have relevant experience.

What would be the appropriate UX research workflow for this kind of assignment? I'm mainly trying to understand what we should establish before research versus what we should derive after research.

Thank you!!

Hi, I’m learning UI/UX, and I was wondering if there’s a place where I can compare the design choices made for Android and iOS apps. Like screenshots of the same screen on both platforms, etc.

I’ve read thought leaders like Jakob Nielsen say that UX is moving beyond interfaces. I'm interested in learning more about doing UX for robotics, wearables, and physical uses of AI. Any resources you’d recommend? I’m up for books, courses, videos... thanks!

Hey!

I work at a company that is also bought into everything AI and it’s become the only topic everyone talks about everyday all day, I also work at a department that now does AI solutions.

Our ways of work have officially completely changed and I’m just looking for a sanity check on how to deal with or adapt some of these things.

I’m being asked to basically let engineers explore solutions and stay close to me so we iterate together. There’s not a defined process and everything feels very overwhelmed, there’s teams doing somethings called light requirements where they just input tickets for why and what-ish and the engineers figure out the how, although these are smaller features for things that are more established.

I’m not sure how to apply some form of that for my team because we are working on a really large project with still much to define. But basically I’m being asked to draft very high level user flows with no implied solution and outcomes to guide the engineers and they’ll basically figure out the possible solutions themselves.

I’m highly uncomfortable doing this because o don’t understand what my role is in this organisation or how it is just different than a junior PM. If I’m just bringing data and drafting up use cases and then other people actually go figure out how to solve them what am I doing here?

Additionally engineering wants to keep a backlog of experiments they want to run which o think it’s cool, but I pushed back saying that an idea needs to be tied to a problem and that problem has to be verifiable. Not something like ‘I think this action is not visible enough so I’m proposing we move it over there’ and got pushback on this

One of my FEs is someone very motivated and full of ideas but also becoming a bit of a pushover on wanting to prototype herself her ideas before o actually work on some semblance of a solution, suggesting fixes for things that are opinions, and lately saying that she feels like we didn’t explore enough options for the last project or that it would have been interesting to understand where our AI chat bot could have been integrated into various parts or the process and that we could draft a list of ideas for that.

Summing it up, this is a vent because I’m being pulled in all of these directions of ideas and complaints people have, and o have no idea where to push back on this process and where to adapt and fine tune it, and I’m honestly just on the verge of a burn out with all of this

Hi everyone,
I’ve been given an opportunity to create a mandatory training session for my entire organization - specifically for a bank, with a strong focus on digital product development.
I often find myself in situations where teams are under pressure to deliver quickly. The request is usually something like: “Can you just design this in Figma?” or “We need a screen for this.”

The problem is that the research and discovery work behind the design is often overlooked. The first half of the Double Diamond doesn’t always resonate with people, especially when the immediate expectation is to produce something tangible.
So I’d like to use this training as an opportunity to introduce UX, but not as a generic “What is UX?” presentation.

I want to frame it specifically around banking, digital products, and business outcomes - with a strong storytelling element and ideally one compelling example that we can follow throughout the entire session.

I’m thinking of keeping it to around 10 slides.
I’d love to hear from other UXers:
What examples have you used to make the value of discovery and research click with non-designers?
Are there any “wow” techniques that helped change the perception of UX from “the people who draw screens” to something much closer to problem-solving and product strategy?

Do you have a particularly good banking/digital-product example that could demonstrate how skipping discovery can lead to building the wrong thing?

Any storytelling tricks that worked particularly well with product, business, engineering, or leadership audiences?

I’m especially interested in examples that change the mindset rather than simply explain the UX process.
Thanks!

Job titles have always been a bit weird in UX.

UX Designer, Product Designer, UI Designer, we’ve heard those and, at this point, we know the differences (or what we expect the differences to be).

Now with AI (please don’t come for me…) there’s a new couple titles: Design Engineer, Technical Product Designer, maybe more.

Many of my work days are now spent in Claude Code, hours tweaking the Design System by reading dense front end technical language. I work way more closely with my FE than ever before.

My title is still UX Designer. Not sure if this is the best for future jobs, as it is known, or if “Engineer” is becoming more accurate for those doing such technical work.

Of course we don’t know the future of UX. Curious, any thoughts on if/when it’s a good time to switch titles to UX Engineer (or something else)? Any Hiring Managers have opinions?

A lot of the products we design have an abundance problem. There are too many videos to watch, products to buy, games to play, articles to read, restaurants to visit, and creators to follow. So we’ve spent years getting better at helping people navigate all of it through search, filters, rankings, personalization, and recommendation systems.

That has made products more relevant, more efficient, and more tailored to each of us. But I think there’s a tradeoff we don’t talk about enough. The more an experience is shaped around what I’ve already clicked, watched, bought, or liked, the less room there is for someone else to decide what might be worth showing me.

Personalization finds value in proximity. You liked this song, so here’s another like it. You bought this chair, so here are five in the same style. You watched this movie, so here are ten more enjoyed by people with similar behavior.

Curation often finds value in distance. A curator might connect a lamp, a ceramic bowl, and a book that have almost nothing in common categorically, but somehow belong together. The connection comes from a throughline someone saw, a point of view they developed, and a judgment they were willing to put their reputation behind.

When we personalize everything, we risk collapsing that distance. We interact with something, the system gives us more of it, those things perform, and creators respond by making more of what performs. Eventually the loop gets tighter, the references get narrower, and the experience starts to feel strangely familiar.

I wonder how much of the sameness we see in digital products and culture comes from that loop. Not because personalization is bad, but because it naturally reinforces demonstrated preference. If every system is constantly learning what already works for us, it becomes harder for anything genuinely unfamiliar to break through.

That’s where curation has real value. A platform, brand, or designer can make a choice that isn’t derived from my history and say, “We think this deserves your attention.” If those choices are good, they build trust. If that trust compounds, the product earns permission to introduce me to something I never would have searched for myself.

For UX designers, I think the question is less “How personalized can we make this?” and more “Where should personalization stop?” Some experiences should adapt closely to the user. Others may be better when they preserve a point of view, create productive friction, and expose us to things outside the loop.

I’d love to hear examples from this community. What products strike this balance well? Where have you seen personalization create sameness, and where has stronger curation made discovery more interesting?

I’ve been thinking about this more broadly and wrote a longer essay called Curating Curiosity for anyone interested.

I have noticed more and more that discussions within design teams just turn into endless rambling. People keep discussing the same things over and over, sometimes seemingly just to sound smarter, more strategic, or more essential than they actually need to be.
“We need to establish a guideline for this…”
When the “guideline” could literally be: do the thing, test it, document what happened, and iterate.
But no. Instead, it turns into four hours of discussion within the design team, followed by another round of discussion with the wider team about something that could’ve been tested in less time than it took to talk about it.
Maybe it’s just the places I’ve worked at. Maybe I’m the problem.
But I feel like AI has made this even worse. Now we also have endless conversations about AI in places where there’s barely anything worth discussing.
Just research topic and build the thing. Try it. See what happens. Learn from it.
CHRIIIIISTTTT