Long short story I'm working with client as UI/UX designer and he wants me learn about "Atomic design" and wants me to merge it into my ecosystem and here's the thing, when I read about it, I feel like I'm on chemistry class, it feel it's not something meant for designer. is this legit system that known and used or nothing burger?
My company is starting to use Claude for rapid prototyping. We’re not replacing Figma completely. Figma will still be used for the design system, visual polish, and handoff. Right now we’re only talking about rapid prototyping, not AI-generated production code.
What I’m struggling with is the transition itself.
I keep seeing people say things like “I don’t use Figma anymore” or “I prototype directly in Claude,” but I don’t really see anyone talk about what the first few weeks/months look like.
For example, let’s say I build a prototype in Claude, test it with users, iterate a few times, and by version 4 the big UX problems are already solved. At that point I’m probably faster polishing the UI in Figma because changing spacing, typography, colors, etc is just easier for me there. So what happens after that? Do you just do the final round of testing with a Figma prototype? Or do you somehow keep your Claude prototype updated with the polished Figma version? Or am I thinking about this the wrong way?
I’m also wondering what you prepared before making the transition. Did you create prompt templates first? Design principles (we’ve been wanting to do this for ages but somehow managed to go on without it. Is it finally the time it becomes mandatory?)? Documentation for your design system? Or did you just start using Claude and figure it out as you went?
Would love to hear from people who have actually gone through this transition. I’m interested in how your workflow changed and what surprised you the most. Thanks for your help!
I'm trying to improve my UX skills and so I made a website that runs entirely clientside that should replace commonly searched tools that are usually behind subscriptions, ads, credits or that don't work as intended. The website is https://localhub.cc, I choose this project because it potentially needs different UX for different tools, so it's great to improve my skills. I'm not searching for any promotion, as I will never monetize from this, nothing is sent anywhere and everything works in your browser without an account (you can't create one even if you want to), it can be even used offline. If you could give feedbacks on general UI/UX and tool specific, they would be greatly appreciated.
This is a career questions thread intended for people interested in starting work in UX, or for designers with less than three years of formal freelance/professional experience.
Please use this thread to ask questions about breaking into the field, choosing educational programs, changing career tracks, and other entry-level topics.
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As an alternative for portfolio reviews, consider posting on r/UXPortfolioReviews
As an alternative for entry-level career questions, consider posting on r/uxcareerquestions, r/UX_Design, or r/userexperiencedesign, all of which accept career questions from people just getting started in the field.
This thread is posted each Sunday at midnight EST.
Read “Real UX/UI design test of the best Design AI tool out there.“ by Michal Malewicz on Medium: https://michalmalewicz.medium.com/claude-fable-5-real-ux-ui-design-test-87696215b703
In the Nutschell, it highlights a truth rarely shared or even understood outside of the design communities: models can design in one shot and deliver junior results, because it is trained on junior outputs. And we are to be vigilant to not trust the AI outcomes blindly.
Designer human in the loop is critical.
Hi folks!
I was contacted by a recruiter for a "Product Designer" role (UX/UI...). Did the whole process and ended up getting an offer. On my offer, it says "Senior Product Designer" and not "Product Designer". Does anyone have an idea as to why someone would get that title instead? I didn't even ask for it.
Also, what expectations would you imagine they have compared to not giving me the senior title?
I'm guessing I got the title since I managed to negotiate close to the top of their budget for the role. Also I have the senior title on my LinkedIn. I'm just a bit confused as to why they'd give me that title voluntarily. I'm not going to ask since it would make me sound insecure.
Thanks!
So I am currently building a SaaS and also my own CRM, both related to web-design.
Since I didn't want to just build components on the fly in one app and then have to copy it to my other project, I started building my own system.
It's based on Base-UI, shadcn compatible and influenced by systems like COSS, HeroUI and more. I really like interactivity and I think UI should feel "alive" and responsive in the literal term.
I'm planning on releasing it at some point in the future for free, but it still needs some work and more components etc.
Would love to get some opinions on it's current state. I also added the ability to change size und border type globally.
To be more specific what kind of feedback I am looking for;
- Do the different sizing options feel natural in the sense of how elements change in relation to each other?
- Are the animations/interactions subtle enough to be usable by a larger audience?
- Do you think the UI feels right for apps, with non-technical users as a target group?
Hi everyone! I'm a UI/UX designer currently working at a company that has a reading platform, and I want to convince my manager that adding a streak system does actually make people come back to the app, which could be an enough hook for them to actually end up reading using the app.
Apps like Duolingo, Snapchat, and others use daily streaks to encourage users to come back. I'm curious about your real experiences rather than just whether you like or dislike them.
Do streaks actually increase your engagement and make you use an app more consistently, or do they eventually become stressful, frustrating, or something you ignore?
If you're a parent, I'd also love to hear whether you've noticed streaks motivating your child to keep learning or reading.
Feel free to share examples of apps that got streaks right—or completely wrong. Every perspective is helpful. Thanks!
Seriously why do so many platforms look the same? GitHub, Discord, chatbots, open source apps, some messengers and social networks, even the occasional local grocery store website. Dark backgrounds, gray boxes everywhere, almost characterless and depressing, as if they were forced from the 80s. Sometimes it feels like the goal is for the UI to be something between a matchbox and an obituary. Is there an unwritten rule that the deader and uglier the UI is, the more professional it is?
Of course, I completely understand why these apps are simple. If you use something for 8 hours or more a day, you don't want flashy animations or a rainbow that explodes every time you click. Speed and simplicity are important But many developers have this mindset: "It works? Great, release it
as if focusing on visual design automatically means making the app slower or less professional. I really don't agree with that. You can keep the UI clean, light, and distraction-free while still making it look modern. Better spacing, typography, subtle depth, a little color, microinteractions...none of these should hurt performance. Especially for products that aren't built just for developers. I don't know, maybe I'm being weird here but I think minimalism and looking like a matchbox are two different things.
I'm curious what others think. (Of course, the image in this post is just an example and some people might not like it, but developers can definitely come up with something better)
I’ve been a UX designer for four years and want to land projects paid in dollars (or euros). I’m Brazilian, and I know that the first and most important step is English proficiency…however, I wanted to go a step further and get insights from those who are already landing international projects or those who have just started and are already making progress. What was that initial transition like? What tips would you give?
TL;DR: Claude kept "designing" its own icons out of circles and rectangles instead of using our published Figma library. Fixed it with a reusable skill containing a component-key map. Now it imports real library components automatically. Setup took one afternoon, works for the whole team. Many people asked for this here all the time and maybe this is not the best way, but this is how i spend 180k token today to setup and it WORKS for me and reated a design with a correct navigation. This is not about Figma Make or other non-directly-figma things.
This post is 98% AI written text! I usually don't like that myself but it knows all the context of the setup and i thought, i am happy, maybe it can help someone else.
If you have any questions about this, you can ask here (how to share it with coworkers, understanding issues).
P.S. if i would be you i would not blindly use the scripts out of this page and just feed my AI with all of this text and tell it to step-by-step guide me. Also the focus on icons here is because i have a design system figma file and a icon figma file which i track differently
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If you've tried letting Claude build screens in Figma, you've probably seen this: you ask for a screen with your product's icons, and instead of using the components sitting right there in your design system, it draws a sad little approximation out of vector primitives. A clover made of paths. Your logo as text in a colored rectangle.
The thing is — it's not a capability problem, it's a discoverability problem. The Figma Plugin API can instantiate any published library component via importComponentByKeyAsync(key). Claude just doesn't know the keys, so it improvises.
Two pieces:
1. Claude Code (terminal) + Figma MCP with write access. Important detail: the Figma MCP in the desktop/web chat app is currently read-only (screenshots, metadata, design context). The MCP available through Claude Code in the terminal has the use_figma tool, which executes JavaScript in the file context — that's your write access. So the workflow runs in the terminal, not the chat app. (You may need a recent Figma desktop version for the write tools to show up.)
2. A skill with a component map. Skills are folders with a SKILL.md (rules + trigger description) plus optional reference files and scripts. They live in ~/.claude/skills/ and load automatically when the task matches the description. Mine contains:
You do NOT click through 1000 components copying keys. Run a script via use_figma inside the library file that walks all pages and dumps every component:
js
const nodes = page.findAll(n => n.type === "COMPONENT" || n.type === "COMPONENT_SET");
// for each: name, n.key, and for sets: componentPropertyDefinitions (variant options)
Skip variant children inside component sets (you address those via the set + setProperties()). Pipe the output into a markdown table. When new components get published, rerun the dump — the map is a snapshot, so regenerating becomes part of your publish workflow.
Gotchas we hit:
importComponentByKeyAsync. Verify by actually test-importing one key from another file — that's the definitive check.link with different keys) mean grep returns multiple hits. Decide if you care; we didn't, a wrong pick is a 10-second fix in review.js
// single component
const c = await figma.importComponentByKeyAsync("KEY_FROM_MAP");
c.createInstance();
// component set with variants
const set = await figma.importComponentSetByKeyAsync("SET_KEY");
const inst = set.defaultVariant.createInstance();
inst.setProperties({ "Style": "linear", "Size": "24px" });
Put one concrete, copy-pasteable example of your most-used component directly in the SKILL.md. Concrete examples beat abstract ones for reliability.
Cold test in a fresh session, prompt: "Build me a small frame with [two product icons, Navigation element etc pp] side by side." No mention of the skill, the map, or importing.
It loaded the skill on its own (the trigger description matches any Figma design task), grepped the icon map, imported the component set, set the variant properties — and placed the actual library components. Real instances, linked to the library, updating when the library updates. It even pulled our navbar component for context without being asked.
Token math: building the map cost a lot once (~180k in our case, mostly the tool responses from dumping 1000+ components and writing the tables). But every session after that is cheap — a grep plus an import call, versus thousands of tokens of vector-drawing that produced wrong results anyway.
The skill is just a folder — zip it, send it, colleagues drop it into ~/.claude/skills/ and it works. That's the main reason to prefer a skill over putting the rules in CLAUDE.md: it's portable, versionable, and it only loads when relevant instead of on every session.
Happy to answer questions about the dump script or the skill structure.
Hi! I'm an Industrial Design student and I'm becoming very interested in UX design. I'd love to learn more about the field, especially what skills are the most valuable to develop, what separates a good UX designer from an average one, and what the day-to-day work is actually like.
I'm also looking for great UX portfolios to study and learn from. Where can I find high-quality portfolio examples or case studies? If you have any favorite designers, websites, or other resources, I'd really appreciate the recommendations.
I recently came across a couple of TikTok videos showing how to design Instagram carousels in under 60 seconds. The latest one even included Canva. If you connect your Canva account, you can edit the design that Claude creates for you.
I don't use Canva, and I haven't used AI in any of my design projects but I see people bragging about this. At this point, I'm starting to wonder if I'm missing out because everyone keeps talking about how much time AI saves.
Designing Instagram carousels takes time, so I'm genuinely curious whether AI could actually speed up my workflow. I tried but every time I try to "hack" the design process to make my life easier, I end up getting frustrated and eventually doing everything the old-fashioned way.
This is the video I'm talking about (I'm not promoting or endorsing it):
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNRKF5AAM/
Has anyone here actually tried this? Does it genuinely save time, or is it mostly just good marketing? At this point, I just feel stupid.
As the title says I’m currently asking myself what necessary skills a UX designer needs to learn in order for them to not only land a solid job but also thrive and grow in our field.
I myself am currently at the start of my masters degree in Human Centered design but my practical work experience have been limited to conducting user testing studies. I obviously have built Protoypes, have created CI s and conducted user research.
Apart from these standard practices, what would you say are necessary soft and hard skills for working in the UX industry?
I only have a cursory understanding of UX design. One of my employees presented me with several certificates claiming that he is now proficient in UX design. Honestly, I am not seeing much if any change in his products that he’s been producing. How would you move forward if this employee belongs to you?
We're building a map-based social discovery app — and we're just getting started.
Looking for a Brand & UI/UX Designer based in India to join us on this journey. Full-time, contract, or internship — open to all. DM if you're interested with your portfolio, we'd love to hear from you.
Has anyone transitioned from UXR role to any adjacent roles? What are the possible , sensible directions to move into? End of the day if leadership don't value, then they eliminate the roles, cut costs. We don't have time to educate the leadership. We have to be adaptable. So, what next?
I’m so tired of every website opening to a swarm of pop-ups like this. I use standard pop-up and ad blockers, so I’m mainly talking about some of the things you see here (cookie prompts, AI chatbots trying to talk to me, agreements, etc.).
I understand that most of the time these things are required, but the reason I’m even posting this screenshot was because it just made me laugh. The red lines show the only portion of the actual webpage I was trying to view D: I guess I’ll just get the app haha. Hopefully anyone who works with this stuff can tell me their point of view!! Thanks :)
Edited to fix typos
I’m curious if anyone has been in a situation like this.
I work at a company with a great culture, and our remote team is very close-knit. On Monday, our team lead announced he was quitting, and today is his last day. He took PTO since telling us he quit and has been unresponsive.
He had been leading several projects, and since we haven’t been able to reach him, we don’t know where he left off or what still needs to be done. He said he doesn’t have another job lined up.
If you’ve ever left a job this way, what was the reason? Burnout? Personal reasons? Something happening behind the scenes? Or something else?
I’m honestly worried about him. Do I reach out?
Okay, I don't even know where to begin. This is going to be looooong one.
I'm the sole UX/UI designer at a B2B SaaS company. I work on the marketing website, not the product itself, so I sit within the marketing team. The website has been around for years, but there was no designer for it, content editors just went into the CMS and built whatever they liked. The company finally hired a design intern for 6 months before me who tried her best but ofc couldn’t do much. I have two developers, but no project manager. I somehow have three stakeholders making design decisions:
All three have visual input and decision-making power. They almost never agree with each other, and there doesn't seem to be any chain of command. I genuinely don't know whose opinion is final.
To make things more complicated, I inherited no design system. There were a few pages in Figma, but a lot of pages were built directly in the CMS by content editors. Whenever they needed something, they just asked developers to build a component or use whatever colors they wanted. As a result, almost every page on the website looks different.
My job has basically become:
Since we have no PM there is no actual plan, everything has to be done parallely and ASAP, deadlines and priorities shift randomly, one VP will tell me via slack to pause this and focus on that, another will email me saying something totally different. I somehow get team alignment on slack with all including devs, but they can all say YES now, and suddenly one will randomly comment on slack or email or directly in my file or some random call and say no change this. Nothing is ever documented centrally. The devs and I try our best to manage ourselves and document things but we can only do so much.
Here's an example of my current situation.
I was assigned a new page that was supposed to become the proof of concept for the new visual direction. The idea was that once this the visual design of page was approved, I'd extract the foundations from it—tokens, variables, component library, etc.—and use that as the basis for all future pages.
For now, that workflow made sense. I would:
This is also my first time building a design system like this, so there's naturally been a lot of back and forth with the developers and we're all figuring things out together. On top of that, the developers themselves have very different opinions about naming conventions, which has created another layer of discussion.
Anyway, I designed about half the page when management asked how much longer it would take. I explained that I was also juggling five other projects with the exact same deadline and asked for a little more time. Instead they said, "Let's just review what you have." So we did. There were four stakeholders in the meeting, all giving completely different opinions. We somehow reviewed the whole page anyway. I tried explaining the reasoning behind my design decisions, but a lot of the time I was simply vetoed because someone personally preferred something else. However we went OVER single section on the website, and at the end, I got a green signal from everyone. Great, I can move forward now.
I start with the foundations, grids, spacing, etc etc do the whole tokens, variables thing, start applying them to page. Page is ‘good enough’ so it moves to devs. When development was already well underway and we were very close to launch, the same stakeholders suddenly came back saying they no longer liked certain sections and wanted significant changes.
At that point I explained that yes, I could absolutely redesign those sections, but it would break the workflow we'd originally agreed on. I could no longer properly build everything around reusable tokens and variables because we were redesigning things after implementation had already started.
So we basically I went back to the drawing board. I had to do another round of visual explorations for the brand refresh, eventually got approval again, and then ran into another problem.
There simply wasn't enough time left to properly prepare the design for development.
I told everyone that I couldn't fully build and export clean tokens and variables anymore, so parts of the page would essentially have to be "freestyled." I'd do my best with what we had, but it wasn't going to be as clean or maintainable as originally planned.
Aside from a messy project itself, there’s the additional workflow problem that’s even bigger than the design problem. Unfortunately, I don't have much influence over it.
Most of the stakeholders and one of the developers work together in the US office and have been working together for years. I joined seven months ago, I'm based in Europe, and I work remotely. I only really interact with them during a few hours of video calls each week, so I also have to be realistic about that team dynamic.
The half-baked page, which is doesn’t look great, it isn't as developer-friendly as it could have been is going to be launched soon. I now have to go and fix the mess of the basic foundations and tokens etc that was set. Some foundations exist now, we've at least aligned the grid and started defining some color and spacing tokens, but I'm constantly changing things because I'm not working from a stable, approved visual direction. Every few weeks another opinion comes in and something changes. I know this will continue to happen.
On top of all of that, I can't dedicate 40 hours a week to building the design system because I'm constantly pulled into urgent website requests. Everything is always the highest priority.
So I guess I have two questions.
First, how would you approach building a design system in this kind of environment? One where there are barely any foundations, the visual direction keeps changing, and you're expected to continue shipping pages while trying to build the system at the same time?
Second, how would you navigate the workflow itself? Is there a better way to manage this kind of process when stakeholder approval isn't really final and priorities constantly shift?
If there's any context I've missed, please let me know. I'm genuinely looking for advice from designers who've built design systems, dealt with difficult stakeholder management, and worked in messy environments like this.
I cannot quit for multiple reasons, I have to find a way to work with this.
Thank you