#ux-design

#ux-design

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.

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.

Expectation: Came, saw, conquered. Reality: Logged in, got confused, left. That's pretty much what happens when you run into a poorly designed interface. The only "intuition" you feel is the urge to run away. So what does confusion really look like? It's not one single obstacle. It's a whole pile of rocks scattered across the user's path. And people don't always leave right away. Sometimes they give up after a few failed attempts.

Businesses replacing human support agents with chatbots isn't new. Even before the AI chatbots of today, which are extremely common now, companies were using heavily engineered chatbots that could understand only certain keywords and respond with specific answers. They were terrible, but the one remarkable thing about them is that they showed us what different demographics really expect from customer support and set the standard for how AI-first helpdesks should work - not only in terms of support agents but support overall, including documentation.

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

Using the internet with the help of an AI is a real thing-and it became even more real Tuesday when OpenAI, the generative AI industry's de facto avatar, announced the release of its new ChatGPT Atlas browser. A new race has begun to reinvent the Chrome-style browser experience we've used for so long: The race to reinvent the browser around natural language AI.

"What am I supposed to do if my company pivots like 4 times a year?" a Lead Designer asked me recently. It's a question that captures the current reality of design work. While the job market remains challenging, designers who are still employed face a different pressure: businesses are demanding faster output with smaller teams. Many designers find themselves forced into startup environments, not by choice. 0A combination of AI tools and layoffs has reduced mid-size companies to skeleton crews that must operate at startup speed.

A product team once spent weeks debating why their new signup process wasn't working. The forms looked simple, the copy was clear, and the buttons were exactly where they thought users wanted them. But when they mapped out the steps a customer actually took, they saw the problem: users were bouncing midway because the journey was cluttered with extra clicks. 🫤

Each minute, millions of teens scroll through videos on social media platforms. These platforms are designed to connect people, but their overuse among young users is leading to serious, unintended consequences. The impact of social media on teen mental health has received significant media attention. After Facebook became available to American college students, their rates of depression rose by 7% and anxiety by 20%.

A lot has been written about filters in the context of the user's journey, complex enterprise software, UI patterns, and UX patterns.

The future of the human experience with digital products necessarily depends on the relationship we will have with information - whether predicted or post-dicted. The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and, soon, quantum computing, will dictate the evolution of the digital environment we live in and, consequently, the evolution of human beings themselves over the coming decades - or perhaps the next century.

Seeing your life as a Hero's Journey can make you happier, more resilient, and more fulfilled. But these same principles can also transform your digital products, helping you create more motivating and meaningful user experiences. In this article, I'll share insights from a recent paper on the psychology of the Hero's Journey. I'll explain what it is, guide you through a simple exercise to help you experience its psychological effects, and explore how you might heroify your own digital products.

Recently, I was asked to work on a platform for an industry facing real headwinds. Layoffs and overwork have left many people drained, and the question from the client was simple but profound: can design ease some of that mental burden for the people using our platform? Not with gimmicks or forced fun, but with subtle sparks of relief. When we talk about ease, two factors consistently emerge in both psychology and design research:

Real-time dashboards are decision assistants, not passive displays. In environments like fleet management, healthcare, and operations, the cost of a delay or misstep is high. Karan Rawal explores strategic UX patterns that shorten time-to-decision, reduce cognitive overload, and make live systems trustworthy. I once worked with a fleet operations team that monitored dozens of vehicles in multiple cities. Their dashboard showed fuel consumption, live GPS locations, and real-time driver updates.

UX designers frequently work in ambiguous spaces, most notably the discovery phase. We collaborate closely with product managers to identify new problems, understand users' goals and frustrations, and strategically develop solutions to address their needs. However, the best solutions aren't always straightforward, and with AI being embedded in every new product and feature, it makes things a bit more challenging. Just as we get comfortable using AI, something changes or evolves. This makes AI features unpredictable and difficult to document requirements for.

When I felt I was making a solid revenue from YouTube ads and sponsorships, I quit my six-figure tech job at eBay and went all in on my long-term goal. I wanted to create my education program called Fast Track UX - an online course. In the two years since then, I've built a strong clientele and grown my income back to six figures,

"Maintaining user trust matters a ton, especially in the age of AI. Whether you're in a highly regulated industry like FinTech or working B2B/SaaS, choices that erode user trust aren't just a UX problem: it's a business issue that costs companies millions."

As long as there is a solid university foundation, school rankings do not matter much as long as the resources you're looking for are there.