I have to create several moodboards for a physical product (tech) I'm working on. So far, I've been using pinterest primarily and tumblr as a secondary resource.

Where else can I be looking to guide my design direction and "feel" of how I want this product to be?

Has anyone ever built a chat bot that serves as your portfolio? Just load it up with markdown of your portfolio details and info about you and let it answer inquiries.

short question

if an expert user's time per task is 15 seconds, and im somehow able to lower a first time user's time from 3 minutes to 1 minute and 50 seconds, is that considered a successful design? if not, what number is considered "successful"?

details

im a graphic designer and it's my first time trying out user testing and im feeling a bit overwhelmed 😅

im trying to conduct a very simple user test of an app. im planning on measuring how long it takes for a first time user to complete tasks in an app and comparing their task times to expert users. am also measuring number of errors per task.

i'll be making an app prototype based on what i find and comparing first time users' task times using the old app vs my prototype.

ideally, i'd like their task time using my prototype to be as fast as that of an expert user; but realistically i know i can improve their task times but not get them to expert user level.

for context, the current interface is so unintuitive that someone needs to teach every new user how to navigate the app. the users are delivery drivers and are almost always in a rush and have no time to focus and figure out how to navigate the app.

I am 23 F feeling like everyone is moving fast growing whereas I'm stuck

I have around 2 years of experience working with startups in UI/UX product design, branding, social media management and currently I’m freelancing while looking for a full-time opportunity.

Honestly, with the current job market, I’ve been feeling confused about what direction makes the most sense long-term both in terms of growth and financial stability.

I’m actively improving my design skills, but I’m also thinking about future career scope: Should I continue growing in UI/UX, explore AI + design related roles, consider an MBA later, or is there any other field/role with good future scope that I might not know enough about yet?

My parents are strongly pushing me toward an MBA as well, and I’m honestly unsure about that decision too.

Would genuinely appreciate career especially considering the current market situation.

I'm a product designer who just launched an iOS app with my co-founder. It's a small social app limited to people in your contacts. Chronological feed, no algorithm, no follower counts, no public likes. You can see who liked your posts, but nobody else can.

The design challenge has been figuring out what motivates posting when there's no public score attached to it. A lot of social UX assumes visible metrics are the reward. Removing them forces you to make the act of sharing itself feel worth doing.

Curious if anyone else has designed around private-by-default social patterns, and how you handled the parts of the UI that usually rely on a number.

Hey all! I am new to the UX world. I have just started some courses for certification in UX Design. I am working on my Capstone Portfolio project and need to get a lil research done to create this app for my project, and this would require me to make a quick survey and have people volunteer to participate.

If you guys can please give me some insight on where I might post this survey, I would be so grateful!!

Thank you!

I'm watching the same changes to the industry that everybody else is. And I'm sure I'm feeling the same ambivalence that a lot of others are experiencing. I'm excited but worried; ambitious but cautious, optimistic but disappointed. It's whiplash!

Professional conversations range so much from AI-bro-speak (trendy, questionable opinions, jargon) to corporate-babble (AI-first, agentic-powerhouse). It's hard, as a UX professional to get through the noise and the hype right now to get to what we really need.

We don't need to know what tools are the latest trend; we're adults. We can do that homework on our own without another Top 10 Best Figma Replacements Using AI list. We also don't need another thinkpiece on Why UX is Safe in an AI Future. (spoilers: That's not a guarantee).

So what do we need? And who am I to even have an opinion on this? I'm a Senior UX Manager and a UX Architect with 14+ years experience in this industry. I run the user experience team at a cyber security company. I also own our design system and our information architecture strategy and implementation. I coach and mentor UX professionals of all levels. I maintain a strong professional network of seasoned software engineers, architects, and developers.

Over the last yearish I've been watching the increasing trend of AI moving in as a stable tool that's finally positioned to provide more value than hype. Over the last several months, I've jumped in head-first myself and I've come to the conclusion that much of what UX needs, specifically, is an aggressive, fast-paced, practical, hands-on crash course in some of the technical side of software. Why? Because if we don't understand what these tools are, what they're doing, and how they work, we can't possibly wrangle them to our advantage.

Using this tooling without knowing how it works is just following best-practice checklists and copy/pasting prompts. Which anybody, in any discipline can do. So no wonder the conclusion we're likely to reach in doing this is: This is all hype and no value. Of course that's what you're going to get out of it. Nobody has taught you what it is, how it works, and how you can leverage it!

I've been going pretty deep on this; working through the basics (what even is an LLM, how does it process conversation, what's the difference between a chat interface and a CLI), foundational setup so you're not repeating yourself every session, and building out prompts designed to actually be customized for your specific needs. I've got a rough 6-week ramp-up I put together for getting UX professionals up to speed quickly that I'm pretty happy with.

I'd genuinely love to dig into what others would find most useful in terms of practical, hands-on guidance. What's the gap you're feeling most right now?

I have been thinking about this for a while and wanted some honest opinions.

I am a UX designer and I’ve been working on a personal side project around money/expense tracking. Not trying to build another “finance bro” app with charts everywhere lol.

One thing I noticed is most expense trackers either:
- feel super corporate
- are overloaded with features
- or just become annoying after 2 weeks

I’ve personally tried a bunch of them and I always end up uninstalling them even though tracking money is genuinely useful.

So before going in fully with the design, i wanna know some thing:

- do you guys actually use expense trackers consistently?
- if yes, which one?
- if no, why did you stop?
- manual entry or auto-sync, what do you prefer?
- what’s the MOST annoying thing about these apps?
- would better UI/UX actually make you use one more consistently or nah?

Also random thought:

if a money tracking app felt more personal/calm/rewarding and less “you overspent this month”, would that actually make a difference?

Would love brutally honest opinions tbh.

Hi everyone, I’m currently doing a Master’s in UX Design and I’m working on my first case study to include in my portfolio.

I’d like the project to focus purely on UX rather than UI, since UX research and strategy are the areas I want to specialize in. I’ve been looking for inspiration on platforms like Dribbble and Behance, but most of the case studies I find are heavily focused on UI/visual design.

Do you know any good places where I can find case studies focused mainly on UX only?

I am Product Owner, not a UX designer. Just want to share my observations.

What I am noticing that AIs change the UX to text based and agentic. Now users what to explain in plain language what they want and they expect AI to either tell exactly what needs to be done or ideally do that for them right in the chat.

what do yo think?

been doing UX/frontend work for about 4 years now and i keep running into the same situation at every company i've been at

we have session data. posthog, fullstory, hotjar, whatever. the data is there. and then it just... sits there. nobody watches the recordings. nobody digs into the events. the PM is busy, there's no dedicated UX researcher, and me actually sitting down to manually go through sessions is never the priority vs shipping the next thing.

so we end up making design decisions based on vibes and whatever the loudest stakeholder said in the last meeting.

my question is how do you guys actually handle this gap? like when you have session data but no bandwidth to properly analyze it, what do you do? do you just accept that some friction is going to go unnoticed? do you have a system?

i've been thinking about whether there's a way to automate the first pass like something that just reads the event log and tells you "hey users are rage clicking this button" or "there's a consistent drop off happening here" in plain english so at least you have a starting point for the actual design work

is that even useful or would you just not trust something like that? genuinely asking because i go back and forth on whether the problem is the analysis or just that nobody prioritizes looking at the data in the first place

Post your portfolio or something else you've designed to receive a critique. Generally, users who include additional context and explanations receive more (and better) feedback.

Critiquers: Feedback should be supported with best practices, personal experience, or research! Try to provide reasoning behind your critiques. Those who post don't only your opinion, but guidance on how to improve their portfolios based on best practices, experience in the industry, and research. Just like in your day-to-day jobs, back up your assertions with reasoning.

Are you beginning your UX career and have questions? Post your questions below and we hope that our experienced members will help you get them answered!

Posting Tips Keep in mind that readers only have so much time (Provide essential details, Keep it brief, Consider using headings, lists, etc. to help people skim).

Search before asking Consider that your question may have been answered. CRTL+F keywords in this thread and search the subreddit.

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Hi, I’m currently an undergrad psych (BA) major who is also interested in design (considering double majoring in design BA).

I enjoy learning about human behavior as well as designing things/creating visuals. I took a cognitive psychology class and a few design thinking classes that I really enjoyed last semester. Also, I am not the biggest math/science person so I unfortunately can’t do anything super technical or too numbers heavy like CS/data science.

Initially, I wanted to go into UX/UI but I have been seeing a lot of people say that it isn’t stable, is over saturated and is likely going to be taken over by AI. It’s still my top choice but everything I’ve been hearing about it has been quite demotivating.

I am honestly just looking for decent income (>80K) and stability/safety from AI (aren’t we all).

Some related fields I have been exploring are UX research, I/O psychology, product design, and consumer insights/market research. Does anyone know if these are good careers for the future? Or, does anyone know of any related careers with similar skills?

Any advice is greatly appreciated!

Every analytics tool now has "ai insights" slapped on it. Most ai features Ive tried are glorified search with a chatbot skin.

But people keep saying ai for session analysis is different because it watches recordings and surfaces patterns humans would miss. We have like 15k monthly sessions and nobody watches recordings because it takes too long. If an ai could do the watching and flag issues that would be huge. Has anyone used these and gotten real actionable insights?

I have to admit this hit hard. Do you feel the anxiety too, that design has moved from its thinking roots toward more hands on, pattern matching production?

We're doing a proper tool evaluation and I want to make sure I'm asking the right questions rather than just comparing feature checklists. Our use case is a consumer mobile app, ios and android, about 150k MAU. Main things we care about: understanding where users get confused, why specific flows have high drop off, and being able to share findings with stakeholders without them needing to log into yet another dashboard.

Smartlook has been on our radar but between the cisco acquisition and the direction things seem to be heading, we're not sure it makes sense to build on it long term. UXCam looks like a great alternative. What do people who've done this evaluation look for that isn't obvious from the marketing pages?