helped a friend set up a newsletter for her pottery shop yesterday. she's not technical, just wanted to send a nice email to like 200 people

We tried a few tools and honestly the experience was baffling. Drag and drop interfaces that fight you on every block placement. mobile previews that lie to your face. Pricing tiers designed by accountants on cocaine - congrats on your 201st subscriber, that'll be $30 now.

after way too much clicking around we just settled on yaplet cause it was the least painful option. she sent her first email in like 20 minutes and it actually looked decent on her phone. Low bar I know but here we are

Thing is - we obsess over every pixel in our products, a/b test button colors for weeks, argue about border-radius on pages nobody visits. Meanwhile millions of people are fighting email builders that haven't meaningfully improved in a decade. and these are the tools people actually use to make money.

feels like UX as a field just collectively decided email is someone else's problem and walked away

We're designing our marketing website, and our designer wants to incorporate animated illustrations, animated illustrations, motion graphics and subtle interactions throughout the experience.

The mockups look fantastic but our developer is convinced they'll hurt page speed, especially on mobile and ultimately reduce conversions. Both sides keep pointing to studies that support their argument so I'm struggling to figure out which approach is actually right.

Has anyone measured the impact of thoughtful motion design on landing page performance?

I'm curious to see how experienced designers are actually working today—not just which AI tools they're using.

A few questions:

• What's your end-to-end workflow from receiving a task to handing it off to developers?
• At which stages do you use AI (research, UX, wireframes, UI, content, design systems, documentation, handoff, etc.)?
• Which AI tools are part of your daily workflow (ChatGPT, Claude, Figma AI, Cursor, Lovable, v0, or others)?
• What tasks do you still prefer to do manually?
• What's one workflow improvement that has saved you the most time?

I'm less interested in prompts and more interested in the thinking process and how everything fits together.

Would love to learn from real-world workflows.

We're running a paid UX research study for AversusB (aversusb.net) — a comparison site where you can compare products, countries, sports players, tech specs, and more.

What we're looking for: - Have compared products or brands online in the last 3 months - Comfortable browsing websites - Ages 18–55 - 30 free minutes for a Zoom call this week or next

What you'll do: Browse the site while we watch via screen share and share your reactions (what's easy vs. confusing). 30 minutes total.

Compensation: $25 Amazon gift card sent within 48 hours of completing the session.

Sign up here (2 min): https://www.aversusb.net/ux-study

Looking for 5 total participants. Happy to answer questions in comments!

I get so frustrated with the user experience these days, you can smell the corporate greed and lack of customer needs.

Now they added so many presses to do things that used to be easy in YouTube app. They even made it so if you try and minimize the app it won't go away and keeps playing in a little annoying window obscuring your new task. Now I have to press to close this window. Is the pint of UX to have as little presses as possible to achieve your goals? Now they made the bottom tool bar in many apps including YouTube disappear until you scroll up. So now that's another extra movement needed to just press on "subscriptions" or one of the icons you need for common sections of the app.

It seems everything they add to give more convenience makes it less convenient.

Just to get to the videos of a channel I'm subscribed too which is the entire point fi YouTube right? To watch videos ?? The steps needed now:

1:I have to press subscriptions (possibly needing to scroll up to bring the tool bar back).

2: you get to a very messy page, a "feed". With a tiny row along the top of my subscriptions, which isn't useful, you have to scroll forever to get through them all. So I have to press "all".

3: ok so now I finally get to a list of my subs with a handy search function. This used to be what you got immediately with ONE press.

4: press on the channel you want, and it used to go to "home" which is a weird bullshit social media thing they added of posts and useless nonsense. This time it did go straight to videos so hopefully they have changed this.

Anyway that's about it. But this is about 4-5 presses or swipes just to see a channels videos!?

I find it so frustrating and it not only YouTube. It seems to be normal to keep adding more and more useless functions and features completely misunderstanding the needs of the user and the main use of the app. Making it more like a maze you have to navigate. Hiding things you need to use commonly and adding popups everywhere that get in the way and you have added presses to close.

I know enshitification is a thing and I wish thee massive greedy corporations would leave shit alone, it worked fine before stop messing with it. People like a smooth work flow and being familiar with the process.

cab drivers today lack real-time insight into traffic in areas, identifying hotspots and areas with less competition for rides

tried to solve this by taking intuition from social graphs as visualization by representing each area as a node

focused on the part where it is easy to infer the info at one glance

- green represents high-earning activity, yellow medium, and red low (familiarity)
- if there is a surge or high demand, that node pulsates (visual to understand surge)
- if relatively more cab drivers are already present, then that node is represented in larger size

clicking on every node provides them insights and a readable message to understand in the initial days

we are trying to move our user guidance from confluence to another platform. right now, it's just links that open the pdfs or ppts uploaded on to the site. i would prefer if we had something where the guidance was no longer in files, but actually on a website (kind of like a blog post). we considered stack overflow and now we are considering sharepoint online but sharepoint would 100% be the same situation with files to my knowledge. i suppose i'm looking for ideas, suggestions and examples of what's out there. (we are moving from confluence because it's being retired) there's probably 25 or so documents & then 20 or so video links on the confluence page currently. ideally whatever we use would have an elastic search option and allow for people to find what they're looking for quickly/easily... thanks in advance!

On the topic of having AI replace your users, I am adding yet another recent preprint by the same research team behind The Largest Review of Synthetic Participants Ever Conducted Found Exactly What You'd Expect. Synthetic Participants Don't Work.

This time, they looked at whether LLMs can accurately reflect user design preferences.

The result?

A number of distortions, including a 53% agreement on the first choice.
Since most votes were between just two designs, that's basically a coin flip.

So maybe we have more arguments for when somebody starts to say synthetic users work for specific use cases. What do you think?

Preprint here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.18311

I know nothing about user experience but am intrigued about tracking and have some questions about it.

By tracking, I mean how users can track for example their package, or their pizza delivery.

Who is responsible for creating and designing these - are their companies that specialise in it? Do businesses outsource these to such specialists? Or is it something a business can easily do itself?

Is this a field of study within user experience itself? How can one go about learning how such tracking is designed and made?

Thank you!

Every designer who's pitched an app concept on spec knows this: you spend the weekend hand-wiring a clickable prototype in Figma, and the first time anyone actually taps through it start to finish is in the client meeting. If there's a dead end or a confusing tap, you find out live.

Built something that catches that earlier. It generates the prototype, then runs AI personas through the flow attempting real tasks (not just clicking around) and pins the exact screen where someone got stuck or a tap led nowhere.

Want to see it work on something real instead of my own examples. Drop a rough app concept in the comments (a screen or two is plenty, doesn't need to be polished) and I'll run it through and reply with whatever the test surfaces.

No pitch, genuinely curious what breaks on ideas that aren't mine

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?

 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.

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!

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?

Second Article about UX in TCGs

Let me know your thoughts :)

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:

• Location (City A, City B, ... 10-20 options)
• Year the imagery was captured (2018-2025)

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:

• With two dropdowns, changing one alters what's valid in the other. How do you communicate that in a way that makes sense?
• A full matrix (locations * years) feels overwhelming with this many options.
• I don't want the intermediate state (only one selection made) to trigger an expensive reload before the user finishes choosing (though an "apply" button is an option)

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 always found WhatsApp's Status privacy settings a bit repetitive.

Say I have:

• Friends
• Family
• Colleagues

Right now, if I want to share something only with friends, I have to manually configure the audience (or maintain a long "My Contacts Except..." list). If tomorrow I want to share something with family instead, I have to go back and change it again.

What if WhatsApp had Audience Presets?

For example:

• 👥 Friends
• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Family
• 💼 Colleagues
• 👥👨‍👩‍👧 Friends + Family

You'd create these once by selecting contacts, and then whenever you post a Status/story, you'd simply choose the preset from a dropdown.

Some use cases:

• Vacation photos → Friends
• Family events → Family
• Work achievements → Colleagues
• Wedding photos → Friends + Family

This would save a lot of time for people with hundreds of contacts and avoid repeatedly changing privacy settings.

I've designed a prototype of how this could fit into WhatsApp's / Instagram's existing UI because I thought it would be a fun product design exercise.

Would you use something like this, or do you think the current system is already good enough? I'm also interested in hearing if there are any edge cases or improvements you can think of.

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?

https://blog.osull.com/2026/06/22/just-because-each-item-makes-sense/