UX design

UX design

Because we're products of a system that excludes certain people, it's surprisingly easy to do the same. Unless we've experienced exclusion or someone has pointed it out to us. Gradually, this exclusion seeps into design, and not only through inaccessible interfaces. Ableist design shows up in the user needs we forget to anticipate, who we don't invite for user research, and how we deprioritise tasks of a project.

Google Sheets, for example, does this. Go to "File" or "Edit" or "View" and you'll see a menu with a list of options, every single one having an icon (same thing with the right-click context menu). It's extra noise to me. It's not that I think menu items should never have icons. I think they can be incredibly useful (more on that below).

Zorin OS gives you the choice of four different layouts, two of which are similar to Windows and two are very Linux-centric. That's just the free version. If you pony up for the Pro edition, you get six more layouts (including one that resembles MacOS). You choose your layout during your first login, but you can change it any time, using the Zorin Appearance tool.

Last Tuesday, I watched a designer at a design tools company sketch a FigJam interface on paper, snap a photo, and ask an AI model to build it. Twelve seconds later, they had a working prototype with animations, interactive components, and proper design system implementation. No mockups. No handoff documentation. Just a sketch and a conversation. This wasn't science fiction. It was Gemini 3 Pro, and it's forcing us to rethink what "design" actually means.

While agency work has a lot of positive aspects to it, I didn't think I was a good fit for it. I found the relationship and ultimately sense of ownership with a solution very fleeting, since in essence the engagement with the client had a time stamp on it, after which you simply started working on something else. For some Design professionals, that's what they crave the most: diversity of projects, jumping around from challenge to challenge.

The main goal of the site is to help players: Calculate forging probabilities based on different ore combinations Optimize their inventory for tank/damage builds Preview weapon and armor stats before committing resources From a web dev perspective, this project has a few interesting challenges: Real-time probability calculations with many different ores and multipliers Keeping the UI clear and readable even when there's a lot of data on screen Performance on lower-end devices (mobile, older laptops)

This article won't start out well, because I'm sort of at rock bottom in my career and it seems that I'm projecting my frustrations of the industry out in the open. But I promise you, my rants are merely neutral observations and opinions. I love talking to people, and over the last 2 months of unemployment (I am now employed), I called upon designer friends all in Asia and Europe to get their opinion on the current state of Design leadership and how it has impacted our careers. Spoiler alert: It ain't great. Hence the article.

A hero section is the first, visually prominent UI block at the top of a web page or digital product screen. Its job is to welcome users, present the product value at a glance, and effectively guide them to a desired primary action. It improves the first user impression with the product using a compelling headline, supporting copy, and CTAs (call-to-action), and other visual enhancements.

So we synthesized the findings and presented them to stakeholders. The first response was: "We can't make business decisions from talking to just 6 or 12 people." And the follow-up request: "Let's interview 150 users instead." In that moment, it became obvious that the issue wasn't the quality of our insights. The real debate was about the validity of qualitative research itself.

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.

There's a moment in Andor, the Star Wars series, that I think is far more human than sci-fi, when Luthen Rael tells Cassian Andor: "These days will end." It's not a threat. It's a truth. A signal. A reminder. A reminder that change is coming. It's fast and unrelenting, and you can either cling to the past or get to your feet and fight, fight for the future you want.

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.