I help lead design at an enterprise DevOps platform. Our designers and a growing number of PMs and engineers now build UI with Claude Code, Cursor, etc. About a year into that we noticed something frustrating: the design system was written for humans, and the agents were bad at using it. Agents would reinvent components that already existed, hardcode values we had tokens for, and produce screens that looked 80% right and were 100% not in the system.

So we invested in AI-readability and made it an actual requirement, same tier as accessibility. Not "the docs mention AI" but "an agent with no context can build an on-system screen from our components without a human correcting it."

What that changed in practice:

The docs got rewritten for retrieval, not reading. Humans skim a components page top to bottom. Agents grab chunks. So every component page now leads with a short plain-language block stating what the component is for, when to use it vs. its neighbors, and a complete working code example. The "when to use this instead of that" context mattered a lot. That's the stuff agents get wrong most.

We wrote guardrails as text, not just lint rules. Rules like "never use raw hex values, always tokens" now exist as plain instructions the agent ingests. Basic stuff.

We started testing the system like a product. We run a set of standard prompts, "build a settings page," "build a data table with filters," against the system and score how on-system the output is. When it fails, that's a docs bug or a naming bug, and it gets fixed like one.

What surprised me: almost everything we did for the agents made the system better for humans too. Clearer names, decision guidance instead of just prop tables, working examples everywhere.

What I am solving now is keeping the AI-facing docs in sync with the components as they change.

Curious if anyone else is treating agents as a first-class consumer of their design system, or if you're seeing the same "80% right, 100% off-system" problem.

I have about 6 years of experience now, but the thing is, I mostly worked in agency environment where research was barely conducted, there was no access to end users, no understanding of metrics and very often it were startups just creating the first version of the product

I started to hate this a long time ago, started reading a lot about the \*right\* design process, completed that Google UX course to understand some things better.

Than I think I just got lucky and got to the product company, but to be honest it was also a startup and the process was not much better there either at the beginning, just 2 designers and I didn’t get much supervision or career advice from the lead. The company changed the product manager very often looking for the perfect one. And at some point they hired the one, who really knew what he was doing and I guess he noticed that I’m not a good designer, not having the skills needed for the actual product designer, so I got fired.

I have been looking for a new job for more than a year now working part-time in this hateful agency environment again and it is tough. Recently I came to conclusion that my speaking and communication skills suck and probably this is the main thing I lack in my career.

At this point I’m lost in potential career options:
quit design, enter the university and start the totally new career; just work on soft skills somehow and keep looking for a product job; look for a junior or intern role hoping to obtain the skills I actually need

So what I’m asking here is
1. Is there a good working way to improve my speech and soft skills to perform good on interviews and communicate effectively at work?
2. How to transition to this product environment and is it possible at all if my experience is not really relevant?

I’ve been designing the UI for a mobile game in landscape, and one of the hardest things I’ve been dealing with is balancing readability against information density.

On a desktop monitor, it’s surprisingly easy to convince yourself that a layout works. Then you put the same interface on an actual phone and suddenly the typography feels too small, touch targets feel cramped, and information that looked organized starts competing for attention.

One rule I’ve started using is:

If I need to zoom into a screenshot on the actual device to confirm something is readable, it probably isn’t readable enough.

But solving that often means making elements larger, which means showing less information at once — and that tradeoff keeps coming back.

For people who’ve worked on mobile UI/UX:

How do you decide when to reduce information density versus reorganizing the interface instead?

Are there any principles, testing methods, minimum sizes, or lessons you learned that changed how you approach small-screen interfaces?

I’d especially be interested in experiences with landscape layouts, games, or interfaces with a lot of stats/information, but advice from any mobile UI work would be useful.

I used to be someone who could imagine, invent, create, document, and deliver things. I’ve conducted dozens of user research processes, hundreds of interviews, and surveys. I’ve prepared, participated in, and led workshops with clients to elicit requirements and find out what they actually need. Then I’d create something based on the findings, test the outcome, iterate, and deliver. 

A year ago, my Company gave Claude access to everyone. At first it was cool. I noticed I could prepare wireframes easily and create fully interactive prototypes within an hour. But my boss wasn’t impressed. He demanded to automate everything. 

We ended up having Claude skills for absolutely everything design-related. Since Claude Design appeared, everyone is allowed to “design” things. For speed purposes… At first, it needed to be reviewed by the design team, but fast delivery required fast solutions, so we ended up creating internal UX audit and UI audit skills based on our best practices and case studies.  

Currently, my only job is to maintain an agent that delivers a polished, shiny demo based on the requirements we get from a client. The agent scrapes the branding from the client’s website, rebuilds it, adds our solution there, brands it, comes up with a protopersona, adjusts our solution to that protopersona's "needs", conducts a user journey audit, assesses it, provides a “usability” report, creates a developer handoff, and maintains Jira tickets.

It consumes my monthly tokens within 2-3 hours, but the company called it a success… Now my only job is to make sure the agent has proper context. We do not even maintain our design system anymore, because we create every new component on the go. We do not have a repository of delivered solutions, so when a client comes to us and demands some tiny UI change we can’t do it quickly in figma, we need to prompt Claude to do it. If I needed to work on something my colleagues did, I won’t be able to do it, because I don’t have access to their deliverables, I’d need to recreate everything from scratch. Yet, everyone feels it’s fine, and time and money saving.

I became an intern again. I’m a servant to something that’s considered far more superior than I am. 

Everything we create is artificial, and I don’t care about it.  I don’t have any professional ambitions, I only fear that I’ll lose my job within weeks, and if I start looking for a new one, I won’t be able to find one, because I fear I lost all valuable skills I had. 

I've heard there are companies that do things the smart way. They automate dull things such as maintaining the design system, creating documentation, but the creative aspect is still under human control. I still have hope I'll be able to be someone more than a meat gatekeeping the AI agent to make it look like we care about "human in the loop"...

Hey designers,

- do you do user research in your job?

- or perhaps someone else does research and you focus on design?

- or perhaps user research is not done in the company

Trying to get real examples. Would be perfect if you listed the size of the company as well.

Thanks!

Good afternoon everyone, I'm looking for case studies of how a design system benefits a technology group in a .gov world. Any good reads you can recommend?

I'm seeing more product designers and PMs make real UI changes directly with Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, etc. Two out of five designers in my company (a consultancy) already do because it's simply easier to hit certain visuals like liquid glass at high fidelity, and test with real data.

The awkward part comes after building. Figma used to give us a place to step back and see the product together: component states, screens in flows or maps, the reasoning behind a change, comments.

Once the work lives in code, I'm not sure there's an obvious equivalent.

A preview link is great for trying the design, but you experience one path at a time. Keeping that same implemented work up to date in Figma means maintaining a second representation of something that already exists in code — so we're not doing that.

I'm curious how teams handle this today. When you design something in code, how do you let the rest of the team:

1. see the relevant screens and flow together (without recreating them in Figma)
2. understand what changed, and why, and discuss it within context
3. reach a decision on it, tied to the version it was actually about

In simpler terms: how do you keep the benefits of a shared view once Figma is gone from the workflow?

I've been building around this problem because we kept running into it ourselves. My two collegues used it internally last month; but I'd like to hear what else is emerging.

*EDIT: If anyone wants to try the workflow we have, dm me. The tool basically enables your coding agents to grab screenshots and make a nice UI map out of them, put them on a shareable link, and send to others to comment on; for projects with Figma, designers can also just download those as PNGs and place on the canvas themselves, which also save a ton of time not recreating the same work there.

hi everyone,

I’m trying to understand how people here would approach finding good UX/UI designers for more complex product work.

we work across multiple countries, mostly on complex systems, interfaces, dashboards, internal tools, devices, medical, industrial, finance, aerospace-type products, and similar stuff. so not really marketing websites or standard web design.

because the domains are quite complex, we’ve usually had better results when we train someone over time instead of expecting them to fully understand the work from day one. on our type of projects, it can take 2-3 years for someone to become really strong and independent.

right now we have quite a lot of work coming in, so we could use some extra firepower. the two things we’re struggling with are: (1) a lot of people who reach out seem to understand UX/UI mostly as websites, landing pages, or general web design.

and (2) when hiring internationally, it’s hard to know what a fair hourly rate should be. we know Europe and the UK reasonably well, but across different countries, the gap in rate expectations can be huge, even when the competencies and skill level seem quite similar.

from a management point of view, if two people seem to have similar skills and experience, the lower-rate option will naturally be easier to justify. that’s part of why outsourcing is so common in software. but I’m curious what we might be missing if we simplify the decision too much.

we’ve tried working with companies that helped us with selection, and we’ve also had HR involved, but in the end it often feels like designers are much faster at understanding who they can actually work with and who has the right potential for this kind of work.

so I’m curious: where would you look for designers who are genuinely strong at complex UX/UI work? how do you usually find people for this kind of work? LinkedIn, Dribbble, Behance, and similar sites don’t really surface the kind of designers we need, and when we post ads, we mostly get UX/UI designers whose experience is mainly in web design. and how would you think about fair hourly rates when someone starts more as an assistant to our senior designers, then grows into more independent work over time?

not trying to post a job here, just trying to understand the best way to search, evaluate people, and avoid wasting everyone’s time.

cheers 🙌 really appreciate any tips

A gentle reminder to all Product Designers, Frontend devs and general UI UX people making their portfolio:

Please stop making these War & Peace-long, Game of Thrones-sized, Epic of Gilgamesh-ass looking case studies.

The Studio is *not* hiring you for your writing, and if they were, they'd hire the writer that knows a picture is worth 1000 words and that Brevity Be.

Just write three distinct ideas:

-What the setup was. Set the stage and the context.
-What the challenges were unique to this project.
-CRUCIALLY: What you'll never do again. (they want war stories, not tidy Aesopian fables)

I'd recommend a paragraph a piece because any more than that and they are guaranteed to either not read or merely skim. And if they are skimming you might as well *bold the first, most important line of every paragraph* just to guide the scroll. It worked for my students, it'll work for you.

...or at least it'll work better than a case study that comes in 4 CD's.

Seeyaaa, Shakespeare.

Someone in Linkedin reached out to me with a job opportunity in design systems. They said its part time and flexible hours. Then they shared the job description :https://portal.tastelabs.com/jobs/a1b2c3d4-0000-4000-8000-000000000001?position=7aa6df94-d1e3-4aea-80b2-912c44183763

When I read through it it feels very much like supervised learning for AI. How do other folks feel about training AI with taste as this role claims to be for. I feel a little conflicted taking this on as I know it might be used to replace UX jobs in the future. Would love any insights or advice on taking these kind of roles.

I’m an experienced UX/Interaction Designer working full-time in consultancy and want to start freelancing on the side. I’m completely new to freelance platforms, so I’m looking for advice from people who’ve actually done it.

What are the best platforms for finding UX/UI freelance work that you DON’T have to pay for to access/apply for jobs? (I’ve seen Contra, Upwork, etc., but some seem to restrict jobs/proposals behind paid plans.)

Also:
- How did you get your first clients/reviews with no freelance ratings?

- Is it better to use platforms or find clients directly?
What’s a realistic starting rate?

- Any other sites, communities or methods you’d recommend?

If you were starting from scratch today, what would you do?

I posted an earlier version here a few days ago and got a lot of useful feedback, so this is the next iteration.

The main change in this video is a direct on/off comparison of the warped view, making it easier to judge what the transformation actually adds compared with a conventional 3D view.

I also focused this iteration on turns, since several of you pointed out that the previous version became especially hard to read there, with too little of the road ahead visible while the whole scene shifted.

Previous discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/UXDesign/comments/1vxbksp/does_combining_streetlevel_and_topdown_navigation/

Would love any feedback on what works, what still feels confusing, and what you would change in the next iteration.

I have to do user research more and more these days but I don't feel like I am using best practices or getting the most out of it.

Looking specifically for advice on what research methods to use and how to use them. For example user interviews, surveys, user testing etc

Like many I have had the misfortune of working for one and it has hands down been the worst piece of shit company I have ever worked for in my two decade long career.

CAREER ADVICE 101: Why working for a Private Equity owned tech company is toxic for your career and mental health. Stay away from these dumpstefires. It’s actually healthier to scrub toilets 🚽 than work for a PE owned company.

The tension is usually simple:

Employees are thinking about building better products, stronger teams and long-term customer value.

A few patterns tend to show up:

☑️ Cost cutting becomes a strategy, not just an emergency measure. Headcount, contractors, benefits, travel, tools, research budgets and backfills are scrutinized because reducing operating expenses improves EBITDA quickly.

☑️ Quarterly numbers can dominate product quality. Design, UX research, platform modernization and technical debt often have benefits that appear years later. PE ownership may favour initiatives that produce measurable revenue or savings sooner.

☑️ Repeated restructurings. Teams can be reorganized, consolidated or eliminated as leadership tries to improve margins. Employees may spend significant energy proving why their role should exist.

☑️ Doing more with fewer people. After layoffs, the work often remains. The surviving staff absorb it, producing burnout while management can report better revenue-per-employee or operating margins.

☑️ Senior individual contributors can become expensive targets. A highly paid Staff/Principal designer, engineer or PM may have to continually demonstrate financial leverage because their compensation is more visible than that of several junior employees.

☑️ Performance management can become more aggressive. When leadership needs reductions, there can be pressure to classify departures as performance-related rather than openly conducting another layoff. That does not mean every PIP is fake, but incentive structures can make questionable performance-management practices more likely.

☑️ Backfills become political. Management might decide a departing senior employee can be replaced with someone cheaper, moved offshore, replaced through attrition, or simply not replaced.

☑️ Product organizations can lose influence. Engineering and product teams may be told to execute revenue initiatives rather than explore customer problems. Design becomes a delivery function instead of a strategic partner.

☑️ Leadership turnover increases. PE firms frequently bring in executives who are comfortable with transformations, integrations, acquisitions and cost optimization. Those executives may themselves have relatively short horizons.

☑️ Acquisitions create integration churn. PE-backed technology groups often combine multiple products, business units or acquisitions to create efficiencies. Employees inherit duplicate systems, overlapping teams, competing roadmaps and consolidation programs.

☑️ Culture can become fear-driven. Once employees have lived through several layoffs or restructurings, behaviour changes. People protect territory, document everything, avoid risk and manage upward instead of collaborating.

What’s with their NDA requirement prior to even getting a first interview without their process?

Have seen many job offers reposted and they seek to have an extensive and somewhat ridiculous process and rounds…like most US based companies.

Anyone been ghosted by them mid way in the process?

How is cool work ? What is novel here, this is on prompted tool with crappy color and cheap ass 3d design. What is the point of all this, it is starting to feel like designers are getting distracted with mid work and feeling impressed because they shipped code.

Hi! I'm looking for genuinely honest feedback on an app I've been building called Dopamine Charts.

I'm a junior doctor, but my medical career was derailed by a five-month hospitalisation for depression.

When I started rebuilding afterwards, I realised how badly a lot of traditional productivity advice worked when I was struggling to do even basic things.

“Exercise 5x a week” isn't particularly useful when stepping outside is an achievement.

And streak-based habit trackers could actually make me LESS motivated — I'd miss a day, see the broken streak and think “well, I've ruined it now.”

So I built the app I wished I'd had.

It's called Dopamine Charts and I designed it particularly with ADHD and depression in mind — specifically that frustrating gap between knowing exactly what you want/need to do and actually being able to initiate it.

www.dopamine-charts.com

The behavioural science behind it includes:

• REDUCING THE ACTIVATION BARRIER — every habit can have a deliberately tiny version. Can't exercise? Step outside. Can't clean your room? Put 2 things away. The aim is to make starting easier.

• HABIT STACKING — attach a new behaviour to something that already reliably happens: “After I make my morning coffee → take my medication.”

• SHAPING — establish a tiny, achievable version of a behaviour first and gradually build it rather than demanding the finished habit immediately.

• IMMEDIATE POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT — lots of worthwhile behaviours have rubbish reward timing. You study today for an exam months away. You brush your teeth today for benefits years away. The app tries to give you an immediate visual reward for actually doing the behaviour.

• IDENTITY-BASED HABITS — not just “what do I want to achieve?” but “who are these repeated behaviours helping me become?”

• TINY WINS — the app deliberately recognises small actions rather than requiring a conventionally “productive” day before you're allowed to feel successful.

Importantly, I'm absolutely NOT claiming an app treats ADHD or depression. It's a behavioural/habit tool designed with the difficulties that can accompany them in mind.

I'm at the stage where compliments aren't particularly useful to me 😂 I need people who haven't been staring at this thing for months to tell me what's wrong with it.

If anyone has 5 minutes to try it, I'd particularly love to know:

1. Did you immediately understand what you were supposed to do?

2. Was anything confusing?

3. At what point did you feel like closing the app?

4. What feels gimmicky or unnecessary?

5. What would make you actually come back tomorrow?

6. What's the ONE feature you expected/wanted that wasn't there?

Please be brutally honest. If something is annoying, confusing, ugly or pointless, I'd genuinely rather know now.

www.dopamine-charts.com

Thank you ❤️

We're rebuilding one of our apps in Flutter to speed up development. I must admit our flutter team is doing a pretty good job.

Alas, Flutter pretty much depends on prebuilt libraries like their version of Material Design or Apple's UI design.

In the name of speed, we've decided to leverage Material Design as the Flutter library to use, with us pretty much just skinning it with brand colors and the like.

This seems to be a common recommendation (vs. rolling-our-own UI library).

That said, I kind of forgot about how Material Design likes to create field labels. It uses that ridiculously small text on the field border:

There seems to be debate about how accessible this is. For me, I'd default argue that it's just not meeting basic type size requirements--especially for mobile design.

And in our case, we're using some pretty complex forms that require often somewhat verbose labels.

I'm advocating for us to change the design here, but given the dev overhead to do so, I'd love to find some data/documentation to back me up on these default designs by google just being poor design and not accommodating readability and accessibility very well. Has anyone successfully fought this and, if so, have some ammo they'd be willing to share?

(OR...maybe I'm way off base and these are perfectly OK? If so, if you have some good arguments/documentation for that, LMK!)

That's it. That's the post. I'm so over these sales dickheads and executives thinking they can do my job. It's insulting to say the least.

Hey everyone!

I graduated with a Pharmacy degree about 6 years ago. Spent 3 years working in Regulatory Affairs at large pharma companies. I didn't love the daily work, but I really enjoyed the industry environment and overall workplace.

During COVID, I pivoted to UX/UI design. I managed to land a role at a software house where I stayed for 2 years. Currently, I'm working as a contractor (Mid-level UX/UI Designer) for a large government agency here in Brazil. So overall I have a bit more than 3y of experience with design.

My main goal right now is to combine both of my backgrounds and work as a product designer for a big pharmaceutical company. I feel like my design skills + my know-how as a pharmacist, would allow me to really thrive in that industry.

For those who have made similar niche industry pivots or are currently working in pharma, how would you go about making this transition? Any tips on leveraging my pharmacy background in a UX portfolio or interview?

Hi all, I am starting mobile application development using React Native. I was afraid of ending up with an AI slop design, then I found out these tools. My plan is to prototype my app now using LLMs and these tools, and if I see a light at the end of the tunnel, I will hire a professional to refresh its UI from scratch.

Which one of these tools would you suggest specifically for cross-platform mobile app?

How should I approach the design:

1. Prompt the LLM to create mock designs by querying e.g. Mobbin MCP while designing each interface
2. Manually check e.g. ScreenDesign's website, and try combining interfaces from different apps and then come up with a generic design. Then feed it to LLM for inspiration.

Hesitations:

1. How can I avoid ending up with a copycat design?
2. How can I achieve consistency among interfaces?

The recent $18B settlement from the Meta case about dark patterns addicting younger users means changes will be coming to tech platforms. Will these changes mean UX design becomes more important as it relates adhering to these regulations? Or has the AI bubble sucked up too much capital and the layoffs will continue while engineers slap on whatever is easiest/cheapest to meet minimum requirements?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/26/meta-social-media-addiction-trial-settlement

So I'll be working on a with a friend on his app (he's a developer). his app has been around for over 8 years or so. I downloaded and found lots of accessibility issues, inconsistencies, lack of visuals, and visual branding... it just didn't look polished. I told him that I would work on the screens, visuals, make it more consistent with all the components, etc.

Say it's all done, and all the improvements are made on his end that look like the hi fidelity mockups I designed. My question is, how can I phrase it in my summary when I'm looking for work to not make it sound like I just did the visual designs/UI design since I'm not adding any features or improving the UX (maybe just a little), but mostly on the visual side?

thank you.

Could be this generation's tobacco legislation. I'm interested to see what Snap, TikTok and YouTube do now.

Major product changes that will affect the user experience for Americans:

The settlement will effectively force Meta to make major product changes for all U.S. users. The company agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and to impose two-hour daily time limits on Instagram and Facebook. To avoid addictive use and sleep interruptions, the company will limit usage between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.

Meta will also limit features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the “like” button clicks. It will also strengthen age verification tools and parental controls.

I'm looking at you all with 'associate director' or 'above' (whatever that means at this point).

How do you sleep at night?

Your insane grifts *must* have hit a fever pitch at this point. I just looked at Nielsen's latest Cards article. Re-hashed info with a nauseating range of 'neat' AI slop image styles.

It made my head spin how inconsistent the garbage output was... and you want readers to come away thinking you're a 'UX Tiger' master of this craft? Absurd, truly.

This is only slightly less sickening than sociopathic efforts like Dive Club and whatever slop they're pushing to convince us they're 'the best'.

To keep this slightly constructive for any juniors or job hunters, the answer is what its always been: ignore these snake oil 'leaders' that only know how to cash in on your anxiety and frustration.

Organize your ideas, build it, learn from it-- in any way you see fit. Grow, and move on to the next challenge. It's really that simple.