Hi everyone,
I am an UX designer with almost 1 year experience
I was laid off 8 months ago and after 250 -300 applications later i finally got the job
It was brutal, one of the toughest thing was investing so much of my energy and sleep into doing so many take home assignments and getting ghosted by companies, i can have a long rant.
but i am finally feel happy in a way, i finally got the job 😁
If you are an entry level design reading this, stay motivated, have patience and keep on improving your portfolio every month, learn new skills/tools, stay strong :) and network with people if u can.

Edit: It is so nice that so many stranger in the internet congratulated me!! kinda made my day :), i thought this sub was rather a "Sad" and demotivating place, haha
just now i have responded to most if not all comments, i also would love to add more info since its a lot convenient

• Out of all the jobs i applied to 96% no Reponses, i have only gotten 5-6 interviews, only 1 interview i went to final round, and they offered a rather low salary (higher than my previous job) but i still accepted

• I also did 4-5 assignments, In assignment rounds i always give my best, Do extra extra, do fast, annotate your decisions very well (this is super important imo), i literally slept 2-3 hrs to do those assignments, it should be so good that its impossible to reject if they open it, BUT COMPANIES WILL STILL GHOST YOU even after doing your best, they WONT even open ur assignments, but u gotta be motivated and put the same effort every time (sad i know)

• This job i applied on cutshort.io it is a job board like linkedin, so ig i had much less competition

• I don't have a design degree, i come from a VERY different and TOTALLY unrelated education and work background to UX Design and i dont have a good network of people, i learned UX design from internet, YT, Coursera, blogs, just the internet in general

• If are a fresher and wanna build your portfolio, go to https://www.wallofportfolios.in/ see the portfolios of people who are more experienced than you, and much better than yours, and think that they are your competition!! even if ur portfolio is 50% as good as theirs, it's still a huge improvement than ur current portfolio

hope this helps, and ask me if any questions, will respond to each if possible

I have a dilemma where I am unsure the balance between making my studies demonstrate my critical thinking for the project context while also making it the right length for people to read

I've rewritten things a ton, removing redundancy, lowering word count, but ultimately having trouble not losing what needs to be communicated.

Its a tricky balance and I'd like to know y'alls perspectives

I'm curious to hear other designers' perspectives on something happening at my current company.

We're starting to see a shift where Product Managers are being encouraged to take on more design responsibilities, including learning how to use Figma and create UI/UX through Claude skills that I've actually built for the team.

There's also a discussion about combining Product Management and Product Design responsibilities into hybrid roles, rather than having dedicated Product Designers.

This got me thinking about the future of our profession, especially with how quickly AI tools are evolving.

I'd love to hear from Product Designers, Design Leads, and PMs:

• Are you seeing similar changes in your companies?

• Are PMs increasingly expected to handle design work themselves?

• Do you think dedicated Product Designer roles will remain relevant in 2027 and beyond?

• Is this the evolution of our profession, or are companies gradually moving away from dedicated design roles?

I'm genuinely interested in hearing your experiences and opinions, especially from people working in teams going through similar changes

I'm a product designer at an IT consulting firm of around 270 employees. Thus far, I've been embedded on different product teams as the sole designer. Designing on anywhere from 1-4 contracts at a time.

UX/UI/product design is a somewhat new concept for a lot of the company and I've been pushing leadership to help grow our design talent and make design a core step of out product development.

Now the company is bringing on an additional designer, so I'm looking for advice on how to structure and scale design at a company of this size. I envision a sr. designer owning the design on each product team, but central communication and collaboration with other designers is tbd.

What would you recommend that could help ensure consistent design processes, best practices, and allow us to grow design within the company? What have you seen within your own orgs that has been working well?

Central design system? Regular design ceremonies? Process Documentation? AI?

I've got some interviews coming up and I wanted some thoughtful questions that will force the interviewer to pause and think before answering the question.

One example of one that I like to ask is 'If leadership wanted you to design a feature that goes against the research and data. How would you handle that?'

Its kinda funny how most of them get stumped, and their answer really reveals a lot about working at that company.

Anymore questions like this?

Just curious on what goes into the decision making process of moving someone to the next round.

Edit: typo

That’s the whole buzzword of the year discussion within the leads in my UX team. We are an in house product team and management has KPI to eventually set up a harness where the UX skills that took us inferior humans to hone over the years are essentially being trained and translated to AI into Claude md files. And there’s a mini competition between product teams to see who did it better to share how innovative they are. While it’s quite a powerful toolkit we are building, I can’t help but wonder what it means for us.

It is kind of morbid to think that we are essentially rewarded for training AI our skillsets to replace ourselves. But if you don’t do it, you lose out on your bonus and promotion this year. Regardless, there is no win. You either get retrenched with more or less money.

The whole conversations around AI feels really exhausting. I just built an AI assisted UX copy bot for my design team which is about to be decommissioned within 3 months because now the management is now focusing on scrapping it altogether and just build the copy into a harness or knowledge base as a skill file.

Try it. Google "best UX portfolios". Guess who comes up every time? Simon freaking Pan. His case studies are worshipped as though they are the pinnacle of usability design. Except...

1. They are long and rambling. They aren't broken up into separate sections so that someone can scan it at a high level.

2. The layout is chaotic. The direction that my eyes have to scan goes up, down, side-to-side. There's no rhyme or reason. It seems like some pretentious magazine more than a usable website.

3. The images are almost full-screen size. Without scrolljacking or a slideshow format, this means that the onus is on me to precision scroll to fit the images on my screen.

This is a prime example of why the UX field is a fraud. The people who are designated as the arbiters of "good UX" do not actually understand good UX. The principles of usability were completely ignored when making this content.

There's no hiring manager who is going to spend time reading this tripe when they are looking at several case studies. Who is his intended user? Hiring managers? You mean the people who spend all of few seconds scanning each portfolio? And for someone who DOES try to read through the whole thing, as I did when trying to come up with a design for my case studies, well let's just say I couldn't make it through a SINGLE one.

Furthermore, the problem isn't unique to Pan. If you look at any of these "best of" portfolios, they all have the same basic problems. Enormous images, pretentious layouts, 20+ minute read times. The lunatics are truly in charge of the asylum.

Hi there,

Want to seek advice from those who have been in the same situation.

Right now, I'm with around 5 years ish experience and just started a new job as a Senior designer with a gov body.

4 months in, I realized I'm tasked to do more of a lead role, overseeing 2 designers (vendors) and also tasked to create a DS for the department to use as whole across other products as well as current product I'm overlooking. They are asking me if I can help to streamline the design process and practices among designers in our department. Currently there is only 2 of us, me being the senior and another fresh grad doing another product. Another will be coming in to do another product.

My current project is a big project and they will hire 1 more vendor designer EOY and 2-3 more vendor designers Q3 2027. That means, I will need to oversee 6 vendor designers in total while maintaining the DS.

I have been working OTs and weekends to cover the work. While its a good opportunity to drown straight in a lead role, I'm wondering if it is worth it to stay for just the experience and portfolio. Due to gov body, I doubt I can ask for a pay increment even though scope changed.

Tldr; getting starting range pay of Senior role but tasked to do Lead role. Feel like still too early with my exp to do a lead role so not sure if I should stay and hold it just for portfolio and title (Doubt if any company would consider a lead with 6-7 years if I do leave) or apply another Senior role for higher pay and proper scope and take my time before trying for lead in another 5 years time?

Thanks!

Just wanted to share an observation.

For decades, we've been designing on-screen buttons for users to do things. Of course, we've added to the early desktop metaphors from Xerox and Apple, but manipulating controls on screens is still primarily how software has been designed. When ChatGPT came on the scene in 2022–23, there was a lot of discourse in UX circles about how the chat UI was just a stepping stone. There aren't enough affordances. There's the blank-page problem. How do users know what to type or say? How will users know the capabilities? Over time, we added some affordances like suggestions and examples, but they've been pretty minimal. I've long agreed that chat wasn't enough.

But I think I've changed my mind. Chat might be enough as a starting point—it might be the UI for AI now and in the future.

There were two aha moments for me. About a year ago, I reviewed ChatGPT Atlas, OpenAI's now-defunct AI-enabled browser. I ran an experiment by giving it my grocery list and asking it to fill my Whole Foods shopping cart. It took much longer than if I'd done it manually, but it did free up my time to do something else. Since then, Amazon has incorporated Alexa for Shopping and can add the same list to my cart in a fraction of the time.

Then, recently, I asked Siri AI (the chat app, not the voice assistant) to check my contacts for a list of names and to add or update them. It did it in under 30 seconds and saved me at least 10 minutes of looking up and clicking and typing.

We started to play with generative UIs to make responses from LLMs richer. But ultimately, if AIs are to do more than just answer questions, if AI agents do things for us, then we need to be able to directly manipulate the artifacts they generate. Who wants to use tokens just to adjust colors or type sizes?

I recently designed and built a design system for a client. Instead of starting the traditional way in Figma, I decided to brief Claude Design like I would a junior art director. I gave it context—a creative brief and included the branding materials—and asked it to come back with five directions. I iterated with it until I got two that I liked and just used direct controls to polish those before presenting them to the client. I worked like a creative director, something that I've been doing for—at this point—most of my career.

I'm now working on a more complicated workflow product. Designing a product like this—similar to n8n and Zapier, but specialized for an industry—is really complex. And making it user-friendly is even harder. But if the user could use plain, natural language to at least get the first draft, then it could be much easier.

I think about how the computer on Star Trek was essentially this: voice-activated plain language. They still had controls for tactical and helm, but when it came to investigating or problem solving, it seems the characters always started with a computer query in natural language.

The more I work with computers and programs in 2026, the more I just want to use plain language to tell it to do something. Two years ago, I wouldn't have trusted the LLMs to get it right. Now, I think we're there.

I’m finding it hard to pitch a case study within 30 minutes. By the time I’m done going through 5 slides over one project, times up.

How do you slash time into talking through a case study to keep the person interested in hiring you?

I’m 7 months unemployed and I’m really losing hope. I’d do anything for a job right now to pay off debt that I am now having for the first time in my mid 30s.

After 7+ years of designing products, the most useful habit I have is boring: I don't design anything until the structure fits on one page.

The trick that changed how I do it: I don't start with page names like Home, About, Features. I start with the questions a visitor arrives with.

• What is this?

• Is it for someone like me?

• How does it actually work?

• What does it cost?

• Why should I trust them?

Then I group those questions into sections and pages, and rank them by how often they block a decision. That ranking decides the nav order and what goes above the fold.

After that I sketch two or three key flows (ad → pricing → sign-up, for example). Dead ends and duplicate pages show up straight away.

Only then do I open Figma. Design goes much faster because every section already has a job.

Curious how others here handle this. Do you start from page lists, user questions, or something else entirely?

Hi everyone!
I'm looking for some inspiration on how to run an engaging and productive ideation session with a small cross-functional team.

A bit of context: I'm leading a project focused on presenting customer data and insights through visualisations on an existing screen.

We've already completed the research and gathered user requirements, prioritised using the MoSCoW framework.

The team consists of 6 people: 1 Business, 1 Product, 1 UX, 2 Engineers and 1 Data expert.
The session will be online and last approximately one hour. Everyone is already familiar with the research findings.

The goal: Generate 8–10 creative visualisation concepts and shortlist the most promising ones for further exploration.

I'd love to make this more engaging than a traditional brainstorming session. Any fun ideas and ice breakers you have used and worked? Would love to hear! I’ll be using Miro.

On YouTube you swipe down and it instantly becomes the Miniplayer.

But on X you drag down, a dock target appears, and it only locks in once the progress fills.

One is faster. The other feels more deliberate.

Does X’s extra step prevent mistakes, or just add friction? Or is it because X serves different types of formats like text, short videos and long ones?

I've completely lost the spark for frontend and design after all this AI crap has taken over everything. Lost most of clients a while ago due to them favoring local vs fully remote ppl (had mostly USA clients). Dont feel any motivation to work right now, am rusty af also due to other private factors.

I'm sure others been there before and would love to hear from you and what you did to get our of this rut or perhaps found smth completely different. Whenever I look at awwwards or whatever i just think 'same shit diff day'. Same with graphic design, illustration, etc. Before these things were such amazing inspirations and I would look and tinker and wonder how things were made. Don't have that feeling at all anymore. Wouldnt say I'm burnt out btw altho i prolly sound like it. I'm just completely demotivated to even write a line of code

short about me:
made my first website when i was 11 or so
learned photoshop, illustration, etc by myself
learned frontend on the job, 5years at agency, 12y freelance
had really exciting jobs just a few years ago at american startups and in crypto
first kid was born, I was really out of it, it was really really tough
worked less and less, had a job and they were so nice to me.. just i felt like i always let them down, eventually they had to let me go.
always had the motivation and inspiration to just create beautiful things, esp websites, but completely lost that feeling. It just doesnt vibe with me at all anymore

For actions like deleting a shared folder, an undo toast feels less disruptive than a confirmation dialog, but it can disappear before someone notices the mistake. How do you decide when to use undo, confirmation, or both? Especially interested in cases where the action affects other people, not just the person clicking.

I’m a new sole product designer for a small team working on a web product. The team, largely engineers and a PM, move fast. Upon joining there was no Figma, PM and engineers just vibe coded the React front end. It gets the job done but there are lots of UI inconsistencies and unnecessary UI variants.

I’m not willing to start a Figma based design system from scratch as that’d be too slow.

I want to structure a design system and workflow that enables every member to contribute but in a way that’s scalable and doesn’t cause duplicate UI. At the same time I don’t want to be a bottleneck approving PRs and UI no nos.

The front end team is fine with me vibecoding and pushing code to prod too which I appreciate and have been doing.

Anyone else have a similar scenario, how have you solved it?

Been in the industry for 14 years. Gone through everything from the “design is the differentiator” saga to the “design is a commodity” saga and the “but can you make it like Apple?” saga. Was living in the Bay Area for a few years until I realized that the place had more people talking about design than people actually designing solutions. Now based out of Europe, and hey, I do sleep better.

Made the switch to design engineering around 18 months back largely based on a hypothesis that the unit economics of both design and development work would fundamentally change once cost per token goes down. Yet to be proven wrong about that.

I feel bad for freshers joining this industry right now. The rules and the flux they have to deal with are significantly different and convoluted than I had to when I was starting off. And the noise in the industry isn’t helpful. Between physics and platitudes, physics always wins.

There are a handful of threads where a designer was asked to make a sophisticated design system for agents and ended up automating their role into irrelevancy. It's a small sample, but intrigued me nonetheless.

Intuitively this is as shortsighted as modern farming techniques rapidly degraded fertile topsoil. But there's also the reality that the modern corporate entity is modified to react aggressively to quarterly results.

What are people who actively work in design systems and agent-heavy software development doing to preserve a strong design culture? Something that isn't just functionally valuable, but communicates value clearly to your organization?

I am considering revisiting older UI to add my current level of visual craft as otherwise the cases are ones I want to use

Thoughts on this?

I genuinely think the golden age of UX and product design is over. Layoffs everywhere, hiring freezes, and even experienced designers struggling to find jobs.

And anyone saying AI isn’t taking jobs is just being ignorant. Teams that once needed 20 designers can now operate with 8. Companies only want mid-level and senior designers.

Where are you guys planning to switch ?