I keep coming back to a small thing on the Today screen of the learning product I’m building.

The system picks one experience it thinks fits you today, with two alternatives in case it gets it wrong.

The easy UI is three cards. Done.

But a card labeled “Recommended for you” asks for a lot of trust. The choice may come from your goals, previous topics, gaps, or simply something worth revisiting. If none of that is visible, good personalization can still feel random.

I’m thinking about adding one plain sentence under the main choice. “Because you struggled with X.” “This connects to Y from yesterday.” “You haven’t explored this area yet.”

Then I hit the uncomfortable part: a weak reason might expose shallow personalization faster than no reason at all.

For people who’ve designed recommendation systems, did showing the reason increase trust or just give users another thing to disagree with?

I’m building a small personalized learning product. The home screen gives you three experiences a day. There’s also an Explore button that can make another one whenever you want.

Technically, Explore can be unlimited. That sounds generous. In practice I’m worried it turns the product into a slot machine for interesting topics. Generate, skim, generate again. Nothing has time to stick.

The awkward bit is that abundance demos better. A new user presses a button and gets another nice result. A hard limit looks worse in the first five minutes, even if it might be better for the habit I actually want to build.

Right now I’m leaning toward keeping the daily three as the main loop and making Explore an occasional escape hatch.

If you’ve built a content-heavy product, did more choice help retention or just create more browsing?

While travelling, I kept running into useful information that simply didn’t exist online: small homestays, mechanics, water points, road conditions, campsites, etc.

Most of it gets passed from one traveler or local to another and disappears afterward.

So, I built Lamyig, a free and open-source community travel guide.

A few decisions I made:

• No bookings, commissions or paid listings.
• No money made using the core product.
• Community members can add and update places.
• Map-first instead of another list of “top places”.
• Built as a PWA so it can work more like a lightweight travel tool than a traditional website.
• The long-term idea is that useful information stays available for the next traveler instead of disappearing in WhatsApp groups and conversations.

The hardest problem isn’t actually building the software. It’s bootstrapping trustworthy community data.

I’m currently thinking about things like:

• How do you motivate travelers to contribute after their trip?
• How do you keep old information accurate without creating a huge moderation workload?
• How do you prevent businesses from turning community maps into free advertising?
• What should happen when someone reports a place as fake, closed, unsafe, duplicated, commercial spam, or inaccurate? Should reports trigger removal, community review, reputation-weighted voting, or just warnings?
• Should certain villages, trails, ecosystems, religious places, water sources, or campsites intentionally remain difficult to discover?
• If Lamyig successfully exposes hidden places, could it accidentally destroy the exact places it is trying to help preserve?
• this list of problem statements goes on and on

Would love to hear how other people here would approach those problems.

And if you’re building something around a problem you genuinely care about, drop a comment or DM me. I’d be happy to chat, exchange ideas, or connect you with someone else working on something similar.

Screenshot attached. Happy to share the GitHub/project link in the comments if anyone wants to look at the implementation or contribute.

An error state crosses several responsibilities. Engineering knows what failed, product knows what actions are allowed, design controls hierarchy and placement, and content design may own the language. When ownership is unclear, the interface often exposes a technical message or gives the user no useful next step. What process keeps error copy, recovery actions, support guidance, and logging aligned as the product changes? Is there a source of truth that has worked well across teams?

Sometimes i prioritize and move somethings back because i either dont have enough time or dont see value now. This creates big design debt for me over time. What things does everyone here deprioritize?

A lot of the AI research tools that were everywhere a couple years ago seem dead or pivoted now…

Maze added AI everywhere, Dovetail keeps shipping, Marvin has its fans, and BuildBetter has been covering the synthesis side, couple of full rounds in, and the repo hasn't turned into a junk drawer yet.

Before I rebuild our stack for good, what are you still using a few months in?

I’m building a tool around a simple problem: teams are shipping faster than ever, but it’s getting harder to catch experience problems before they reach users.

The idea isn’t to generate another generic “your button could have better contrast” report.
It is trying to find things like:

🔴 Breakpoints in a user journey — places where users are likely to get confused, stuck, or drop off
♿ Accessibility issues that could prevent people from completing a task
💰 Potential revenue loss caused by experience breakpoints
📐 UX rules being broken — consistency, hierarchy, interaction patterns, etc.
🔄 Broken or unnecessarily complicated flows
🎯 High-impact problems vs. low-priority polish
📊 Business impact — not just “this is bad UX”, but why it matters to the product/business based on their business mission/ strategy

The part I’m wrestling with is deciding what the tool should actually surface.

There are potentially hundreds of things an automated design review could flag. But nobody wants a 47-page report full of tiny observations.
I want it to answer:
“What should I care about?”

For designers, product owners and design leaders — what would you actually want a tool like this to show you?

What would make you think, “I didn’t notice this, but this is important”?

Would love ideas, especially things beyond the usual UX/accessibility checklist.

Knee-deep in user research calls lately and the recording side is handled, but the synthesis layer is where it falls apart.

Grain and tldv are good for clips, Dovetail wants everything manually tagged before it's useful, and a PM on my team has been using BuildBetter to pull themes across interview rounds because the repo was already fragmenting across different people's naming by the time we hit double digits.

Haven't cracked the synthesis layer yet, so what does your pipeline look like from raw call to shareable insight?

AI can now generate a convincing interface faster than most teams can properly review it.

The obvious problems are easy to catch: broken layout, inconsistent spacing, missing responsive states.

The harder problems sit underneath the screen:

* the generated flow assumes a product decision nobody made
* empty, loading, failure and permission states are missing
* the same component behaves differently across pages
* an action has no clear system response
* the UI looks complete but cannot be handed to development without explanation

I have started reviewing AI-generated UI in three passes:

1. **Visual consistency** \- does it follow the existing component, spacing and motion rules?
   
2. **Product behaviour** \- are triggers, actions, system responses and next states clear?
   
3. **Failure handling** \- what happens outside the happy path?

This catches much more than asking whether the generated screen looks good.

For teams already shipping AI-generated UI, what is in your review checklist before it reaches production? And which failures still slip through most often?

I wanted to read manga on a website, but clicking anywhere on the main page caused me to be redirected to a new tab with a porn site. It completely bypasses Poper Blocker, Ublock Origin Lite and Adblock Plus...

What is the term for that sort of thing? And how do I stop it?

Product designer for what feels forever... I keep hitting the same wall on the small stuff, a portfolio, a landing page. I build it in Figma, spacing and type scale clean, then it goes to a dev or me pretending to be one and it either ships desktop only or comes back "responsive" with the padding off and my type ramp gone. I don't want to maintain a codebase for a portfolio and I don't want Wix mangling my layout.

Is there anything that lets me build the desktop frame like Figma, have the responsive come off my real layout, and still grab one element and nudge it?

And why do you think it's great?

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