r/userexperience

I’ve been working on the ux of this page for a while: episto.ch

Thanks for your attention on this matter :)

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?