I'm learning about UX and UI design, and I need websites/case studies to decode what makes them work and, maybe... steal some elements 😈

Share projects/designers you consider good for reference.

Hello! I’m exploring ways to enhance my orgs accessibility game. I have some ideas based on other roles I’ve had in the past (integrated into design system documentation, a11y office hours, annotations for hand off) but wanted to see what other folks are doing.

I'm (M30) 7th year in tech and currently Product Design Manager (still trying to be as hands on as possible). Lately I've been thinking about how my future will play out and what I wanna do and I was pondering with the thought of becoming design engineer in the next 5 years. UI and motion/interaction design are my absolute strongest domains and I'm more than decent in UX ( but I do hate doing research, questioners etc. with my soul ). I do think that there is value in me learning how to build the very things that I design and hopefully one day closing the circle (design+FE+BE = product) and being able to create my own products or deliver value in different teams. I'm kinda worried of AI progression but also I see that now (with zero coding experience) I really cannot use AI to create quality product or understand complicated concepts like software architecture for example.

The other path that's interesting to me is leaning heavily into motion graphics and mastering AE for SaaS explainers, demos and such, but this feel much more restrictive and less long term value compared to be able to build my own designs.

What do you thing of going the design engineer path from pure product designer in 2026 ?

We are fully remote and every time I need to explain something, i start talking and people zone out or ask me to slow down, so I have to end up pulling up docs or screensharing and walking through every step. Last meeting took 45 minutes for what should have been 10.

I tried writing it out ahead in long docs but then they say its too much to read before the meeting. And since everyone is on different time zones its hard to schedule without messing up productivity.

I see a lot of ppl mention online whiteboard visual collaboration tools and infinite canvas stuff for this, but im not sure which ones actually cut the time down.

I’m planning to take on freelance design work, but I’ve heard others say solo/freelance designers can become the single point of failure for design rationale.

Not because we’re doing anything wrong, but because so much of the “why” behind a design lives in our heads. As a result, a client, engineer, or PM has to constantly go back and forth with the designer to ask why a flow works a certain way, why one pattern was chosen over another, or why an alternative was rejected.

If this is an issue, then I’d assume it would also be really valuable for designers to log their decision making as they go.

For people who work as a solo founding designer or freelancer

• Is this constant back and forth a big issue and have any of you guys faced it?
• How important/valuable is it to keep a decision log for my design work as a freelancer/solo designer
  • Does it mostly help with client/stakeholder communication, or does having these also help substantially improve design judgment/taste over time?
  • I have also heard that many designers don't feel the need to log decisions, but does this ever become a big problem in the future?

I’m trying to understand whether decision logs are valuable in helping designers build better judgment/taste over time, or whether they mostly become documentation nobody looks at again. Thank you guys in advance!

I sit here in this meeting and I feel a profound sadness watching the AI-brainrot progress.

I got into UX because I care about people. I design because I care about my mastery in the craft.

We by no means had a mature UX team, but our few people cared deeply. We worked to build systems and artifacts, create collaboratively, and understand our users.

Now we are an AI-first company, complete with AI-hopeful layoffs that left only me behind. I’ve been given the instruction to do the work of 3 people with no salary change and 90% shorter deadlines.

These days I talk to Claude instead of leading creative jam sessions with colleagues. 4 wireframes used 10% of my weekly AI usage allocation and the lack of humans makes for such a lonely workday.

Leadership asks me to deliver fast, but they don’t know what they want delivered. They ask Claude what to deliver and then spew tech nonsense. The work is aimless and lacks meaning.

What we do ship is unusable. When users say it is unusable, leadership trash-talks the users for being too stupid to appreciate the greatness of what Claude created. It becomes increasingly difficult to educate anyone on the importance of UX because the narcissism is rampant. I am not permitted to speak directly with users.

I can feel my depression lingering on the periphery as I try to escape this hell.

Hugs to you all in the UX field dealing with something similar. I know I am not alone. We will be bonded by this atrocious moment in time and look back on it from better days ahead.

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.

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.

Hi, I’m currently the only UX Designer (not senior) for a business unit at a company in the industrial automation space, and honestly I’ve been struggling with how work gets handed to me from my PM/PO (same person).

Usually when the PM/PO and devs decide something needs design, all I get is basically, “we need designs for this". There’s rarely any actual requirements, workflows, feature definitions, or even clarity around what’s supposed to be built. So most of the time I end up having to research the feature myself just to understand what it even is.

A lot of times I have to dig through DevOps tickets or the Wiki to see if the developers documented anything. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. If it’s a brand new feature and nothing’s documented, then I have to come up with all the discovery questions myself and meet with the PM/PO just to get basic context. Even after that, things still feel super ambiguous, so I end up needing more follow-up conversations about scope, behavior, edge cases, etc.

The biggest issue with this process is that important use cases don’t come up until dev has already started building. Then suddenly developers are waiting on me for answers or direction, and the PM/PO acts like it’s my fault those cases weren’t considered earlier. But from my side, I’m already trying to think through as many scenarios as possible with very little information to start from.

What also makes this hard it’s a highly technical industrial automation product tied to hardware that ships globally. I don’t have an electrical engineering background, so there’s only so much domain knowledge I can magically figure out on my own. I already spend a ton of time researching before asking questions because that’s kind of the culture, and honestly my PM/PO prefers when I come in already having done all the homework.

On top of all that, I’m also the lead designer on another project and managing an intern, so I’m getting stretched really thin. The constant ambiguity and having to basically help define product requirements while also doing UX work is starting to burn me out.

My manager is nice person, but they’re not really strong from a management/problem-solving standpoint, so I honestly don’t even bother escalating most of this because nothing really changes.

I’m mostly curious if this is normal for other UX designers, especially in technical B2B environments?

He is also using the same AI (Figma Make) to audit its own AI generated designs for accessibility and scalability. The results don’t look good, are very cluttered and structurally are just a bunch of frames, not like components or anything. I’m the Sr product designer. How would you handle this? I was hoping the results would at least be useful as rough concepts or wireframes, but I don’t think even that is true because of how much of the design process he outsourced and locked into the AI.

This is maybe a silly question, but lately I've been struggling to approach UX design tasks (I'm ~2-3yrs into UX and have one of those in-house catchall UX/UI/product/brand/graphic design remote jobs). Nothing feels connected to anything, the teams I work with are distracted and/or misaligned, I look at user experience problems and am just like, "why?" Everything is B2B SaaS and nothing is about real life or real people, but also prod can't build things and I feel disconnected from real people. Other companies don't seem to be interested in hiring me, and I'm not sure why anyone is making software anyway; haven't we all had enough of screens? It's weird vibes all around.

Is this just creative block? Do I just need therapy? Is/has anyone else gone through something similar? And what's a good way to approach moving past it? I don't really have anyone to mentor/guide me so here I am on Reddit lol

• AI-native (we all are)
• Craft and taste (nobody knows what these mean. Inflated gut-feel)
• Judgement (likewise)
• Tokens (burning these so much it makes more sense to hire a junior)
• X is Cooked (we all are)
• Y is Dead (long live Y)
• Vibe-coding (and don't look back)
• Vibe-design (looks pretty, what did mom tell us about books and covers, though)
• Agentic workflow (let's just ignore everything we knew about security. yolo)
• Founder mode (mm, toxic life balance)
• 10x (impressive amount of output – who cares about outcomes anyway)
• Z is cooking with fire (and something irreversible is gonna happen pretty soon)

Makes my skin itch.

How does your large team organize pages (sidebar) in Figma?

How standardized are things across each designer? Are you using emoji? How are you labeling things like ready for dev handoff, vs ready for review, or pages that only contain systems, that you don't want PMs getting distracted by?

We are trying to get a system down so any designer can at a glance know how pages are organized in any file. A lot of us use emoji in the names but they vary. We also have a recurring issue of PMs getting into our system pages and making comments on building blocks like variants.

Thanks, looking forward to your insights.

I work for a company as a "Web Designer," but my boss recently brought up the topic of a promotion; which is great, as I have been asked a couple times in the two years I have been with the company.

When they brought up the topic of a promotion (via email) I had responded with how I envision my role and growth on the team. Essentially, I asked to be promoted to a "Lead UX Designer," as I have vastly matured UX within our department and have had significant results from doing so.

However, the following is what my boss said in response:

1. Because I have focused my work on UX research and design, and didn't necessarily meet all of the objectives from the "Web Design" job description I was hired for, my boss is creating a new promotion track for me specifically for a "UX Designer." (I like this).
2. The company approaches promotions in a specific way. With every promotion there is a small pay increase (like 4%). It doesn't matter that I would be promoted from web designer to senior UX designer. They do not adjust pay based on the difference in compensation between web design and UX design roles at the senior level. Even if I was promoted to Director of UX Design, my pay increase would be 4%.

Is it just me, or is that bogus?

With a promotion to senior UX Designer, my salary will be $85,000, when the avg pay for a UX Designer in the U.S. is between $130,000 and $185,000.

I do work for a non-profit, so I understand that I will not make as much as a larger tech company. But the growth ceiling here seems extremely limited and the pay seems greatly unfair.

Thoughts?

I have this doubt about the Design System topic.

If I have all the components, tokens, rules and documentation inside Figma, but the team don’t have the same components coded, is still a design system? If the components are not coded, and the dev uses another lib like tailwind or Material UI, and only changes the color to match de ID of my components on Figma, they are using my Design System?

Or what i have it’s not a design system, and is more like a style guide?

Hello! Senior UX/UI designer here!!

I wanted to ask something to people involved in hiring / design leads / recruiters, or other senior UX/UI designers out there. Do you actually see a difference between candidates sharing their portfolio through a personal website vs sharing a Figma portfolio link?

I’ve seen a lot of designers lately using polished Figma portfolio presentations instead of building a full website, and honestly some of them look great and feel much easier to control/update. (It’s also worth mentioning that, in my case, I’m not really a coding professional, even with platforms like Webflow where everything seems more accessible).

I was discussing this with a friend and we both seem to share the same opinion, but I’m really curious to know what you guys think. Does sending a Figma portfolio feel less professional to you and.. would it make a candidate lose points compared to having their own portfolio website?

I’m planning to redesign my portfolio after spending the last 4 years working in gaming and with Riot API-related projects, so I’ve been wondering what the best option really is.

Thank you in advance, I really appreciate any opinion or insight!!

Hello, junior designer here.

Working on a mobile app as the solo designer, and I know for a fact there are dozens of edge cases I'm unaware of. I want to uncover them to design solutions before dev handoff.

Does anyone have an actual workflow for this?

Hey all

I’m a junior designer and I've been getting some traffic to my landing page (around 63 unique visitors in the last month, mostly from Instagram) but zero waitlist signups. Average session is 3+ minutes so I guess people are reading, but something's stopping them from converting.

Context: Gatherly is a social event planning app for adults who want to actually see their friends in person, not another algorithmic feed.

Landing page: https://miseenplacedesign.framer.website/gatherlybeta

Honest question: what's stopping you from signing up? Is it the copy, the design, the value prop, the trust signals, the form itself? Brutal feedback welcome!
I'd rather hear it now than keep wondering.

an important part of an app i want to redesign is the scanning of qr codes but i couldnt find anything via google on how to incorporate the actual scanning into a prototype