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?
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!
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.
Second Article about UX in TCGs
Let me know your thoughts :)
Spent the last few years working on fintech products and one thing keeps coming up: trust isn't a nice-to-have feature, it basically IS the product.
Think about it. Nobody's "delighted" by a banking app the way they might be delighted by a fun consumer app. Nobody opens it for fun. They open it to check if their money is where it should be. Every weird error message, every inconsistent button style, every confusing flow doesn't just annoy people, but makes them genuinely nervous about their money.
Had a case recently where a lending app's confirmation screen after submitting a loan application just said "Processing." Users were refreshing the page every few minutes thinking it was broken. It wasn't a bug, the backend was working fine. It was just a UX gap that made people anxious about money that wasn't even moved yet.
The part most teams get wrong is onboarding. KYC, identity verification, document uploads - all of it is mandatory and none of it is fun. The instinct is to cram everything into one screen and get it over with. But that's exactly where people drop off. Breaking it into smaller steps, explaining why each piece of info is needed, showing clear progress - sounds basic but it's the difference between someone finishing signup or abandoning halfway through.
Compliance is non-negotiable but it doesn't have to feel like reading terms and conditions. A disclosure screen can be readable. A consent flow can feel respectful instead of forced. That's a design problem as much as a legal one.
Anyone else working in fintech run into this?
I'm designing a desktop web app and looking for examples (or a name) for a specific interaction pattern.
This is an analogy, but imagine a map app where you explore locations and view historical satellite imagery. 2 independent things to select:
The catch: not every location has imagery for every year. City A might have 2018/2020/2023, City B only 2021/2024. So in 2023, imagery exists for some cities but not others.
They can only view one location/year combination at a time. Users start by viewing a specific location/year combo and might want to change which city they're viewing or which year they're viewing, so neither selector is inherently primary.
The issues I'm dealing with:
I'm experimenting with one modal that has two scrolling selectors where clicking one immediately grays out options in the other selector that are disabled, then the user can click "apply", but it's not perfect and I haven't seen examples of this in the wild.
Has anyone seen an example that does this? Is there a name for this pattern? Truly any ideas would be appreciated.
I’ve been building client-facing dashboards for a few years now, and I keep hitting the same wall. Clients want something polished and premium, but then they demand 20+ metrics on a single screen because they’re afraid to “miss anything.” The classic UX heuristic, says 5 9 metrics is optimal for quick comprehension though that’s more of a guideline than a hard rule, since context and user expertise matter a lot. And while error rates do tend to increase past 15 metrics, recent research shows cognitive load depends more on metric relevance and visual hierarchy than raw count alone. Good luck telling that to a stakeholder used to seeing everything at once. I’ve leaned into progressive disclosure with collapsible panels and tabbed views, plus early mockups to get buy-in. Still, pushback happens. One client literally asked me to “make it look like a Bloomberg terminal but also pretty.” (These days, most pros use platforms like Refinitiv Workspace or custom UIs, but the sentiment is the same.) How do you handle it? Do you lean on usability data and show them how AI-driven dashboards surface only critical insights so they see anomalies and forecasts without the clutter? Or do you build the dense version and let them realize it doesn’t work? I’d love to hear what’s actually convincing stakeholders in 2026.
We have tried improving the copy and adding more screenshots and feature lists but it has not moved the needle much. New visitors seem to bounce before they get to the benefits. We do not have video skills in the team so we have been looking at outside help for a short video that shows the main problem we solve and how the tool works. I have come across a few names like vidico when searching for options but I want to know what works for similar startups before spending on it. What has been your experience with explainer videos for SaaS products?
Curious to hear how designers here interpret the mobile-first philosophy. Till now I’ve agreed with the sentiment—mobile layouts should be the priority when it comes to how a page is conceptualized and executed—but I still wireframe and build out desktop layouts first, keeping in mind as I go the implications for responsive layouts (e.g., “this text + image section will be stacked with the image on top”).
But I’m wondering if for my next project whether I should start from a mobile screen, and move up the min-width breakpoint ladder. It’s a very different approach for me and my mental library of containers are in wide layout form, so it’ll be a big change for my workflow.
What do you all do?
Trying to build a better understanding on TCG games and their UX design.
First article is about Yu-Gi-Oh! which, I mean, how couldn't I start with the massive wall of text on the cards.
Let me know what you all think, and whether or not TCG's can have general better UX Design