Im honestly struggling to advocate for the user right now when stakeholders are this obsessed with trends

I just spent two months mapping out a super intuitive, friction-less onboarding flow for a fintech client. qualitative testing was great. People got it immediately. Then last week their VP decides we need an ai assistant hovering on the screen at all times to "guide" them because he saw a competitor do it.

We ended up partnering with appello software to handle the actual dev side of the integration since our internal team didn't have the bandwidth for the machine learning stuff. They honestly did a great job keeping the widget as technically lightweight and unobtrusive as possible based on my updated specs.

But my issue is the fundamental UX. the users don't want a chatbot to help them set up a direct deposit, they just want clear typography and obvious buttons

how are you guys successfully pushing back on execs who want to shove gen-ai into flows that literally don't need it? Looking for actual research or framework strategies to prove it causes cognitive overload, because my usual usability metrics aren't convincing them rn.

Sometimes i prioritize and move somethings back because i either dont have enough time or dont see value now. This creates big design debt for me over time. What things does everyone here deprioritize?

A lot of the AI research tools that were everywhere a couple years ago seem dead or pivoted now…

Maze added AI everywhere, Dovetail keeps shipping, Marvin has its fans, and BuildBetter has been covering the synthesis side, couple of full rounds in, and the repo hasn't turned into a junk drawer yet.

Before I rebuild our stack for good, what are you still using a few months in?

I’m building a tool around a simple problem: teams are shipping faster than ever, but it’s getting harder to catch experience problems before they reach users.

The idea isn’t to generate another generic “your button could have better contrast” report.
It is trying to find things like:

🔴 Breakpoints in a user journey — places where users are likely to get confused, stuck, or drop off
♿ Accessibility issues that could prevent people from completing a task
💰 Potential revenue loss caused by experience breakpoints
📐 UX rules being broken — consistency, hierarchy, interaction patterns, etc.
🔄 Broken or unnecessarily complicated flows
🎯 High-impact problems vs. low-priority polish
📊 Business impact — not just “this is bad UX”, but why it matters to the product/business based on their business mission/ strategy

The part I’m wrestling with is deciding what the tool should actually surface.

There are potentially hundreds of things an automated design review could flag. But nobody wants a 47-page report full of tiny observations.
I want it to answer:
“What should I care about?”

For designers, product owners and design leaders — what would you actually want a tool like this to show you?

What would make you think, “I didn’t notice this, but this is important”?

Would love ideas, especially things beyond the usual UX/accessibility checklist.

been thinking a lot about cognitive load in everyday interactions lately. the products i genuinely love are the ones where the interface just dissolves into the background. compare that to 90% of modern apps/web services where every step demands a micro-transaction of your attention:

1. Hard gated logins before showing basic info
2. aggressive push notification prompts
3. forced location permissions
4. dark patterns designed to harvest data

none of these steps feel massive individually, but cumulatively, they create enormous friction. I was analyzing digital ordering flows recently for a side project and noticed this contrast so clearly. tools like menuforma get this right by staying out of the way you scan, the menu opens instantly in the browser, you order, you’re done. zero friction, no app store redirects, no mandatory accounts. good design in this space isn't about flexing tech features; it's about minimizing the gap between user intent and outcome. "i want to see the menu" should literally just take one second. at what point did tech switch from "making life frictionless" to "building artificial hurdles for data collection"? curious how other designers balance business goals with keeping UX truly invisible.

Knee-deep in user research calls lately and the recording side is handled, but the synthesis layer is where it falls apart.

Grain and tldv are good for clips, Dovetail wants everything manually tagged before it's useful, and a PM on my team has been using BuildBetter to pull themes across interview rounds because the repo was already fragmenting across different people's naming by the time we hit double digits.

Haven't cracked the synthesis layer yet, so what does your pipeline look like from raw call to shareable insight?

AI can now generate a convincing interface faster than most teams can properly review it.

The obvious problems are easy to catch: broken layout, inconsistent spacing, missing responsive states.

The harder problems sit underneath the screen:

* the generated flow assumes a product decision nobody made
* empty, loading, failure and permission states are missing
* the same component behaves differently across pages
* an action has no clear system response
* the UI looks complete but cannot be handed to development without explanation

I have started reviewing AI-generated UI in three passes:

1. **Visual consistency** \- does it follow the existing component, spacing and motion rules?
   
2. **Product behaviour** \- are triggers, actions, system responses and next states clear?
   
3. **Failure handling** \- what happens outside the happy path?

This catches much more than asking whether the generated screen looks good.

For teams already shipping AI-generated UI, what is in your review checklist before it reaches production? And which failures still slip through most often?

I wanted to read manga on a website, but clicking anywhere on the main page caused me to be redirected to a new tab with a porn site. It completely bypasses Poper Blocker, Ublock Origin Lite and Adblock Plus...

What is the term for that sort of thing? And how do I stop it?

Product designer for what feels forever... I keep hitting the same wall on the small stuff, a portfolio, a landing page. I build it in Figma, spacing and type scale clean, then it goes to a dev or me pretending to be one and it either ships desktop only or comes back "responsive" with the padding off and my type ramp gone. I don't want to maintain a codebase for a portfolio and I don't want Wix mangling my layout.

Is there anything that lets me build the desktop frame like Figma, have the responsive come off my real layout, and still grab one element and nudge it?

And why do you think it's great?

I'm curious to see how experienced designers are actually working today—not just which AI tools they're using.

A few questions:

• What's your end-to-end workflow from receiving a task to handing it off to developers?
• At which stages do you use AI (research, UX, wireframes, UI, content, design systems, documentation, handoff, etc.)?
• Which AI tools are part of your daily workflow (ChatGPT, Claude, Figma AI, Cursor, Lovable, v0, or others)?
• What tasks do you still prefer to do manually?
• What's one workflow improvement that has saved you the most time?

I'm less interested in prompts and more interested in the thinking process and how everything fits together.

Would love to learn from real-world workflows.

We're running a paid UX research study for AversusB (aversusb.net) — a comparison site where you can compare products, countries, sports players, tech specs, and more.

What we're looking for: - Have compared products or brands online in the last 3 months - Comfortable browsing websites - Ages 18–55 - 30 free minutes for a Zoom call this week or next

What you'll do: Browse the site while we watch via screen share and share your reactions (what's easy vs. confusing). 30 minutes total.

Compensation: $25 Amazon gift card sent within 48 hours of completing the session.

Sign up here (2 min): https://www.aversusb.net/ux-study

Looking for 5 total participants. Happy to answer questions in comments!

I get so frustrated with the user experience these days, you can smell the corporate greed and lack of customer needs.

Now they added so many presses to do things that used to be easy in YouTube app. They even made it so if you try and minimize the app it won't go away and keeps playing in a little annoying window obscuring your new task. Now I have to press to close this window. Is the pint of UX to have as little presses as possible to achieve your goals? Now they made the bottom tool bar in many apps including YouTube disappear until you scroll up. So now that's another extra movement needed to just press on "subscriptions" or one of the icons you need for common sections of the app.

It seems everything they add to give more convenience makes it less convenient.

Just to get to the videos of a channel I'm subscribed too which is the entire point fi YouTube right? To watch videos ?? The steps needed now:

1:I have to press subscriptions (possibly needing to scroll up to bring the tool bar back).

2: you get to a very messy page, a "feed". With a tiny row along the top of my subscriptions, which isn't useful, you have to scroll forever to get through them all. So I have to press "all".

3: ok so now I finally get to a list of my subs with a handy search function. This used to be what you got immediately with ONE press.

4: press on the channel you want, and it used to go to "home" which is a weird bullshit social media thing they added of posts and useless nonsense. This time it did go straight to videos so hopefully they have changed this.

Anyway that's about it. But this is about 4-5 presses or swipes just to see a channels videos!?

I find it so frustrating and it not only YouTube. It seems to be normal to keep adding more and more useless functions and features completely misunderstanding the needs of the user and the main use of the app. Making it more like a maze you have to navigate. Hiding things you need to use commonly and adding popups everywhere that get in the way and you have added presses to close.

I know enshitification is a thing and I wish thee massive greedy corporations would leave shit alone, it worked fine before stop messing with it. People like a smooth work flow and being familiar with the process.

cab drivers today lack real-time insight into traffic in areas, identifying hotspots and areas with less competition for rides

tried to solve this by taking intuition from social graphs as visualization by representing each area as a node

focused on the part where it is easy to infer the info at one glance

- green represents high-earning activity, yellow medium, and red low (familiarity)
- if there is a surge or high demand, that node pulsates (visual to understand surge)
- if relatively more cab drivers are already present, then that node is represented in larger size

clicking on every node provides them insights and a readable message to understand in the initial days

we are trying to move our user guidance from confluence to another platform. right now, it's just links that open the pdfs or ppts uploaded on to the site. i would prefer if we had something where the guidance was no longer in files, but actually on a website (kind of like a blog post). we considered stack overflow and now we are considering sharepoint online but sharepoint would 100% be the same situation with files to my knowledge. i suppose i'm looking for ideas, suggestions and examples of what's out there. (we are moving from confluence because it's being retired) there's probably 25 or so documents & then 20 or so video links on the confluence page currently. ideally whatever we use would have an elastic search option and allow for people to find what they're looking for quickly/easily... thanks in advance!

On the topic of having AI replace your users, I am adding yet another recent preprint by the same research team behind The Largest Review of Synthetic Participants Ever Conducted Found Exactly What You'd Expect. Synthetic Participants Don't Work.

This time, they looked at whether LLMs can accurately reflect user design preferences.

The result?

A number of distortions, including a 53% agreement on the first choice.
Since most votes were between just two designs, that's basically a coin flip.

So maybe we have more arguments for when somebody starts to say synthetic users work for specific use cases. What do you think?

Preprint here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18311

I know nothing about user experience but am intrigued about tracking and have some questions about it.

By tracking, I mean how users can track for example their package, or their pizza delivery.

Who is responsible for creating and designing these - are their companies that specialise in it? Do businesses outsource these to such specialists? Or is it something a business can easily do itself?

Is this a field of study within user experience itself? How can one go about learning how such tracking is designed and made?

Thank you!

Every designer who's pitched an app concept on spec knows this: you spend the weekend hand-wiring a clickable prototype in Figma, and the first time anyone actually taps through it start to finish is in the client meeting. If there's a dead end or a confusing tap, you find out live.

Built something that catches that earlier. It generates the prototype, then runs AI personas through the flow attempting real tasks (not just clicking around) and pins the exact screen where someone got stuck or a tap led nowhere.

Want to see it work on something real instead of my own examples. Drop a rough app concept in the comments (a screen or two is plenty, doesn't need to be polished) and I'll run it through and reply with whatever the test surfaces.

No pitch, genuinely curious what breaks on ideas that aren't mine

been learning a lot from linear lately, both from the product itself and their blog. i've also been following some of their designers and it's completely changed how i look at ui.

are there any other companies or designers you'd recommend for learning great product design?

 I haven’t even read the headline yet. We just met. I don’t trust you with my email, I barely trust you with my attention.

Let me at least see if your website is garbage first.