UX design

UX design

This is a free Local Group meetup You don't have to be a member to attend. What are Local Groups? Local Groups will expand your career network-whether you are interested in learning new skills, finding job opportunities or looking for a new employee. A Local Group is a group of people who, like you, are passionate about design. Local Groups organize meetings to get inspired, have fun and learn from one another.

Instead, interaction data - the digital breadcrumbs left behind by real users - has become a vital lens for understanding audience behavior. Consider how Netflix fine-tunes its recommendation interface. Every hover, pause, and scroll through a content row contributes to decisions about what shows to highlight or which thumbnails perform best. Similarly, Airbnb uses journey tracking to identify where users abandon booking flows, helping them streamline page layouts and increase conversion rates.

One prompt = one image. Don't ask ChatGPT to generate a few different images in a single prompt because you will likely get a messy output. If you need a few images, simply submit a few prompts. Aspect ratio. If you generate illustrations or background patterns, specify the aspect ratio that aligns with your goal. For example, if you want to generate a hero image for the web, use 16:9, but if you want to have imagery for mobile, use a 1:1 ratio.

When you put Apple Music and Spotify side by side, you realize how two products serving the same purpose can feel completely different. Both are leaders in their space, both have years of design evolution behind them, yet their choices say a lot about design philosophy, brand personality, and user behavior. Let's break down how these two approach their core screens and interactions and what we can take away from them.

When my order arrived, I kept wondering how I could've missed something so obvious. The answer? Selective attention - our brain's way of focusing on what seems most important in the moment, while filtering out the rest. Cognitive principles like selective attention shape every user interaction - what people notice, remember, learn, and even the mistakes they make. Apply them thoughtfully, and you can reduce mental effort, guide users' attention, ease recall and retention, and even motivate users.

The web has always had an uneasy relationship with connectivity. Most applications are designed as if the network will be fast and reliable, and only later patched with loading states and error messages when that assumption fails. That mindset no longer matches how people actually use software. Offline functionality is no longer a nice-to-have or an edge case. It is becoming a core principle of user experience design.

It's happened to you countless times: You're waiting for a website to load, only to see a box with a little mountain range where an image should be. It's the placeholder icon for a "missing image." But have you ever wondered why this scene came to be universally adopted? As a scholar of environmental humanities, I pay attention to how symbols of wilderness appear in everyday life.

If you've been around, you might've noticed that our relationships with programs have changed. Older programs were all about what you need: you can do this, that, whatever you want, just let me know. You were in control, you were giving orders, and programs obeyed. But recently (a decade, more or less), this relationship has subtly changed. Newer programs (which are called apps now, yes, I know) started to want things from you.

The PM used Stitch by Google to create designs after our Miro session. To the untrained eye, it looks like a finished design. But when you look closer, it's not quite right and a little bit broken in places.

To add an image, either click the image icon or-if you're using the site on a computer and the image is in your clipboard-just hit Ctrl+V or Cmd+V to paste it in. Use the Cursor tool to select items that you want to move or delete, and use the Hand tool to move around the canvas. Excalidraw lets you save works-in-progress as files on whatever device you're using.

"Fail fast" has become a defining principle of modern product development. It encouraged teams to move rapidly, validate assumptions, and avoid spending time on ideas that don't work. However, as experimentation has increased, so have the consequences. In organizations where products are linked to sensitive data, social influence, or financial decision-making, reckless speed can result in user loss, broken trust, or reputational damage.

They Informed Users First Before changing anything, Instagram showed an announcement right inside the feed. "Swipe between Reels and messages." The banner explained the upcoming navigation update with a short sentence, a clean visual, and a "Learn more" button. It didn't interrupt your session. It didn't feel forced. It invited curiosity. That alone is a big shift in mindset, from forcing change to introducing change.

I use AI to help me write blog posts, LinkedIn updates, and YouTube scripts. It is part of how I share my design ideas. But there is something small that kept bothering me. Every time I asked an AI tool to write something, it added a long dash and the medium dash. The em dash. This one ( - ). And the en dash. This one (-).

What's coming into sharper focus isn't fidelity, it's foresight. Part of the work of Product Design today is conceptual: sensing trends, building future-proof systems, and thinking years ahead. But besides the current momentum, we still have to focus on real problems that bring real value as of now. This balance is sometimes challenging, but also creates opportunities to reform our thinking and approaches.

VeJa is a company that creates guitar plugins simulating amplifiers for music production. They were selling exclusively on the MOD Devices platform but wanted to expand their reach with their own online store. The challenge? They had great products, a loyal niche following, but no website. Just a logo. And us. The brief was simple: Our bootcamp team of three had just 8 days to prototype a e-commerce platform that would help VeJa compete in a saturated market dominated by giants like Neural DSP and IK Multimedia.

I remember being in the third year of design college when I was introduced to this massive book titled "Indian Anthropometric Dimensions." For the uninitiated, this book contained practically all the dimensions of the average (and non-average) Indian person, male and female, old and young. The purpose of such a book was to understand ergonomics numerically, rather than visually. And for designers, this meant adding the ultimate constraint to our wild designs... so humans could actually use them.

I dream of a future where everyone has what they need and where design supports human and planetary flourishing. This vision fills me with hope while also making me acutely aware of the reality many designers face today. Our work is done within the dominant capitalist framework that prioritizes financial growth above all else, often at the expense of true flourishing.

Over the past few months, the UX design field has been flooded with AI-powered prototyping tools that generate interfaces instantly from natural-language prompts. Despite the massive marketing hype, our evaluation with real design scenarios revealed that these tools can follow instructions to achieve a general goal, but they lack the sophistication to weigh design tradeoffs and produce thoughtful, high-quality designs without extensive guidance from humans.

You no longer have to stitch together pageview logs or guess where users are falling off. Browser User Journeys brings it all together into a single view so you are able to easily visualize what your users are doing and quickly connect that to performance data. This saves teams valuable time on manual work and enables them to focus on what's important: solving customer issues fast and delivering great experiences every time.

The growth of AI, especially generative AI-related innovations, has introduced a promising way to automate manual activities in every computer-related field, including programming, technical writing, and even UI/UX design. The generative AI core has a predictive, probabilistic nature and high dependence on human-created data inputs, so AI can't ever be trusted to be used beyond human-reviewed automation. But professionals, including product designers, began to overuse AI and ruin their own professional fields.

UX Strategy isn't a goal; it's a journey towards that goal. A journey connecting where UX is today with a desired future state of UX. And as such, it guides our actions and decisions, things we do and don't do. And its goal is very simple: to maximize our chances of success while considering risks, bottlenecks and anything that might endanger the project.

For your company and your products, your logo, packaging, and the impression you make via search engines and digital channels are the first things that clients and consumers will register. Controlling your brand image is linked to your success, and a polished professional look is vital. Design needs today aren't restricted to graphic design - they also include effective website and UX/UI design.