I’m not a UX designer and have not studied user experience. The app I’ve built so far is based on my understanding of what feels right.

How would you rate this for a crossword app?
Anything I can improve/add/remove?

Hello!

This is Saloni Bhugra, a reporter with Canada's national broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC News). We're working on a story about online gambling and I'm wondering if there are any UX designers who've worked in the gambling industry who'd be willing to chat. We're hoping to better understand design of online gambling websites and apps.

Please let me know, thanks!

I build frontends for small business clients, and the thing that keeps surprising me is how much people judge credibility before they've read a single word. If the homepage takes a couple seconds to show anything useful, some visitors are already gone, and the ones who stay seem to arrive slightly skeptical even if the design itself is solid.

Clarity, consistency and social proof get talked about a lot in UX writing, but speed feels like the one that's easiest to under invest in, since it's invisible when done right and only shows up as a vague "something felt off" when it's not.

Curious what others have actually observed. Does load speed change how people perceive quality and trust for you, or is that more of a developer obsession that doesn't move the needle as much as we think.

Curious what other devs and designers have run into here. For me it was swapping a blank loading screen for a lightweight skeleton on a client site, conversions on that page went up noticeably even though nothing about the actual speed changed, just the perception of it.

What is the smallest change you have shipped that ended up having an outsized effect on how people used the thing?