Design tokens were supposed to make our lives easier—but now they’re eating us alive. What started as a way to create harmony between design and code has turned into an endless maze of abstractions, debates, and JSON files nobody understands. This is the story of how our obsession with consistency turned design systems into bureaucracies.
Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.“In the last week of February 2026, something unusual happened. A sitting US president took to social media to brand a private technology company a political threat. The Secretary of Defense designated that same company a supply chain risk, a classification previously reserved for foreign adversaries. And hours later, a rival AI lab swooped in and took the government contract that had just been refused.”Product ethics have never matter
Ten years ago, persuasive design was a relatively new frontier in the field of UX. In a 2015 Smashing article, I was among those who showed a way for practitioners to move from being primarily focused on improving usability and removing friction to also guide users toward a desired outcome. The premise was simple: by leveraging psychology, we could influence user behavior and drive outcomes like higher sign-ups, faster and richer onboarding, and stronger retention and engagement.A decade later,
In the age of AI, “working” is a commodity while “winning” is the new mandate.Continue reading on UX Collective »
And the different kinds of cute design techniques.Photo by Ant Rozetsky on UnsplashMany designers are applying cute design to their robots for good reason: research shows that cute design enhances social presence, helps people form attachments faster, and makes users more forgiving when things go wrong.At CES in recent years, cute robots have been everywhere. The variety shows that cuteness in design has more layers than just the traditional ‘round shape, big eyes’ baby look.Cuteness competition
Design principles Vitruvius defined 2,000 years ago are now your most critical AI tool.Too much software today is built like the Winchester Mystery House: rooms added one at a time, stairways to nowhere. It’s called a mystery house. The mystery isn’t ghosts — it’s why anyone would build it this way.The house wasn’t built for you to live in. It was built for one person, and it worked for her. But walk through it now, and you feel the difference between a space designed for its owner and one desig
The estimate everyone repeated and nobody verifiedContinue reading on UX Collective »
Will AI agents kill design as we know it?At the end of February a report by Citrini Research caused major shockwaves through the software industry, sending the stock prices of heavyweight SaaS organisations like Atlassian and Slack to nosedive. The Citrini Report follows AI’s current trajectory and projects that 2028 will bring a self-inflicted corporate doom loop: AI makes software so cheap to build that SaaS companies will cannibalise themselves out of business.The report is a deliberately pro
User Experience design, like so many other disciplines, has a lower representation of women as compared to men. Things are changing now, though. Slowly, but surely. From strategy to tactics and from ideas to actionable tips, here is a curated playlist of talks by, and stories of just some of the most influential voices in business, technology and design.“How often do you use a voice assistant like Siri, Alexa or even Cortana?” asks Kriti Sharma in her talk, How to keep human bias out of AI. Each
In user experience design, we use techniques like workshops and interviews to understand users. We turn our research into user stories and process flows. We use personas and wireframes to share our ideas with our teams.But it’s important to remember the real people we design for. We need to know what happens in their lives. We must see how our product can improve their lives. And that’s where a UX storyboard can help us.What is a UX Storyboard?A UX storyboard is a visual tool—one that illustrate
People tend to choose the path that requires the least effort. When something is easy to do, they do it. When it requires too much effort, they delay, abandon, or avoid the task entirely.
Miller’s 7±2 rule was about memory, not how many elements you can put on the screen. Learn why it doesn’t apply to menu items and what UX designers should take from the original research.
Miller’s 7±2 rule was about memory, not how many elements you can put on the screen. Learn why it doesn’t apply to menu items and what UX designers should take from the original research.
Hi HN,I am the founder of SprintPulse. Like many of you, I used to dread retrospective meetings. They often turned into a repetitive cycle where we wrote down the same issues every sprint but never actually fixed them. "Better communication" was on our action item list for months.I built SprintPulse to fix that loop. It is a tool designed not just to collect feedback, but to make sure it leads to real change.When I looked at the tools available, I found they fell into two camps.On one
Hi HN,A few months ago we noticed a pattern. Every GTM, product, and marketing team we talked to had the same problem. They were drowning in external data from Reddit, Discord, Slack communities, competitor sites, and social channels. But turning all of that noise into something structured and useful took an enormous amount of time.We watched people spend days copying screenshots into spreadsheets, tagging posts, and checking competitor websites by hand. We were doing the same thing ourselves an
Sharing a build-in-public update.I’ve been working with my assistant “Gideon” (running inside OpenClaw) to solve a very specific problem:I want the agent to control my real browser (logged-in sites, my normal cookies, my actual tabs) - not a sandboxed headless browser - while still keeping the control surface simple and auditable. This means my OpenClaw won't break the moment a site gets "clever".So... We built it! I say we but it was mostly Gideon and I was along for the ride as
I kept opening different websites for simple dev tasks — formatting JSON, encoding Base64, testing regex patterns. Each one had ads, signup walls, or sent my data to a server. I wanted a single place where everything runs client-side with nothing leaving my browser.Each tool is a stateless pure function defined with Zod schemas. The schemas validate input at runtime and also generate the UI automatically — editor language, form fields, and output format are all inferred from the schema shape. To
Hi HN,I’m the solo developer behind VantageKit. I was a PM for a long time and recently decided to get back into coding. I’ve been building this part-time for just under two months (first commit was Dec 26). I was able to move this fast largely by leaning heavily on Claude Code to accelerate my workflow, and I wanted to share the result here to get your feedback.THE PROBLEM: - Sharing pitch decks, proposals, or due diligence docs is full of friction. You either send PDF attachments (and fly blin
Hey HN!I built UseWhisper.dev — an AI code reviewer that analyzes your code diffs, PRs, or snippets and returns review feedback instantly. It runs in the browser with no signup required, and is meant to give developers quick second opinions on logic, style, security, and best practices.https://usewhisper.devWhat it does:Paste a diff, GitHub PR link, or code snippetGet line-by-line intelligent feedbackSuggestions on readability, errors, anti-patternsNo login, minimal UI, fast responsesW
Hey HN,We built a different kind of AI benchmark for UI generation.Instead of static leaderboards or curated screenshots, you can watch multiple models generate the same design live, side-by-side, and decide which output is actually better.Under the hood, we call AI models from Anthropic (Opus), OpenAI (GPT), Google (Gemini), and Moonshot AI (Kimi).Each model generates a real, editable project using Tailwind CSS (not screenshots or canvas exports). You can export it for Next.js, Laravel (Blade),