Interactivity - Crafting Better Web Experiences

Truth and certainty

Kierkegaard on how fa*th becomes a bad word.Kierkegaard — Image created using AIYou can tell something isn’t true the moment its certainty becomes mandatory.I’m Nate Sowder, and this is unquoted, installment 15. Kierkegaard.Martinus Rorbye painting of the city jail next to Copenhagen town hall and courthouse (1831)Designed certaintyFor Kierkegaard, Christianity wasn’t a choice so much as the background noise of Copenhagen. In the early 1800s, belief didn’t require conviction, it required attenda

Escaping AI sludge: why MVPs should be delightful

Function is the floor, not the ceiling. It’s time to raise the bar and prove that the most viable products are the ones that feel human.Escaping the AI SludgeAI is now omnipresent in our workflows, but it's come at a cost: a sea of sameness. Lately, products have begun to look and feel homogeneous & indistinguishable, leading to diluted brands and increasingly sterile interactions. Big tech paves the way for others to follow; It’s time to stop settling for “good enough” and blindly follo

A Nano Banana with color theory

Using Google Gemini to build an Accessible Perceptual Uniform TriadContinue reading on UX Collective »

10 UX design shifts you can’t ignore in 2026

Another year, another wave of “What to expect in 2026” guides. I’m sure you’ve already scrolled through a few.In this article, the first one I’ll be publishing this year, I won’t make bold predictions. Instead, I’m sharing what I’m observing firsthand while collaborating with enterprise design teams, and from all the news, conversations, and insights I’ve gathered at the many conferences I’ve attended in the past months.These are my top 10 UX design shifts I’m seeing for 2026, with AI (surprise!

Launch HN: Onyx (YC W24) – Open-source chat UI

Hey HN, Chris and Yuhong here from Onyx (https://github.com/onyx-dot-app/onyx). We’re building an open-source chat that works with any LLM (proprietary + open weight) and gives these LLMs the tools they need to be useful (RAG, web search, MCP, deep research, memory, etc.).Demo: https://youtu.be/2g4BxTZ9ztgTwo years ago, Yuhong and I had the same recurring problem. We were on growing teams and it was ridiculously difficult to find the right information across ou

Show HN: Zen Moment – A Developer-Friendly Breathing and Meditation Platform

Backstory: As a developer who spent years in front of screens dealing with stress and focus issues, I found most meditation apps either too childish or too commercial. I wanted to create a minimalist, developer-oriented tool that treats meditation as a productivity and mental health necessity rather than a trendy accessory. After optimizing the neumorphic design, SEO performance, and curating a library of natural soundscapes, I'm excited to share this with the HN community. What ma

Show HN: Speaker Analyzer – Get analytics on who spoke how much in your meetings

Hi HN!We built Speaker Analyzer to solve a simple problem: after long video meetings, I wanted to know who actually spoke, for how long, and how the conversation was distributed. I found myself wondering "did I dominate the conversation?" or "who barely spoke up?" With remote teams using Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet, I can now export these transcript files and easily analyze participation patterns.What we built:A privacy-first tool that turns your meeting transcript files (*.

Show HN: Skedular, a Smart Booking and Workspace Management Platform

Hi HNI have been working on Skedular a platform that helps organizations councils co working spaces and local businesses manage bookings shared spaces and multi location operations in a simple modern wayWhat Skedular does - Manage rooms desks studios sports facilities meeting spaces and any kind of bookable asset - Handle multi location multi team scenarios - Provide public booking pages for venues - Offer a clean dashboard for operators to manage availability payments customers and sched

Well, thats a wrap…

Why designing for ongoing reflection mattersImage of a character unpleasantly gift wrappedIt’s that time of year again where apps confidently tell us who we are. This year, Spotify informed me that I’m 78 years old in Spotify years (I’m 33 in human ones). I personally thought my affinity for Chapel Roan would have shaved off a decade or two but I guess not! Strava had thoughts about my running habits. YouTube summarized my viewing habits and decided I was an Adventurer, whatever that means. Even

Show HN: Tikpal- Your AI Voice Partner – Focus, Flow, Forge

We’re building Tikpal, an AI voice productivity tool based on a simple principle: Human creativity should remain the core engine. AI should be an accelerator, not the protagonist.The goal is to reduce screen dependency and cognitive fragmentation, and let people work in a more natural “voice-first” flow. Instead of clicking through interfaces and context-switching between apps, you talk to Tikpal, and it helps you think, structure ideas, and execute tasks.Three layers we are focusing on:FOCUS —

TelUI 1.1: New TelUI version Complete with tools to develop good software

# TelUITelUI is a Electron-based UI framework that packages a handful of reusable front-end primitives—color utilities, typography helpers, and basic structural styles—so you can prototype simple desktop UI ideas with minimal setup.## Features - Bundled Electron runner (`npm start`) that serves `index.html` for instant desktop previews. - Tokenized styling layers: `color.css`, `font.css`, `header.css`, and `align.css` keep presentation rules isolated and easy to remix. - Micro-interaction helper

TelUI 1.2: TelUI with fun alignments

Reliability by design

Designing trustworthy AI for healthcare products.User holding a phone using an AI healthcare assistantAI is entering one of the most human domains: healthcare. It helps people track sleep, manage chronic conditions, monitor mental health, and navigate loneliness. It listens, advises, and sometimes comforts. Yet despite these advances, hesitation remains, not because the algorithms are weak, but because the experience does not always feel reliable.In this context, trust is not just an emotional r

The algorithmic atelier

Generative AI and the long history of artistic automationImage generated via Google Nano BananaThe discourse surrounding generative AI in the creative arts is frequently characterised by a sense of historical rupture, a seismic shift unlike any that has come before. Critics often frame the emergence of Large Language Models and diffusion-based image generators as an unprecedented existential threat to the ‘soul’ of human expression, a black swan event that may signal the end of human creative so

Design for the nose

Why do people pay for smells? Why is everything nowadays vanilla? How to indefinitely earn money on the same product?Continue reading on UX Collective »

7 Real Predictions for Web Design in 2026

Forget the buzzwords — 2026 isn’t about AI hype or flashy tools. It’s about designers reclaiming taste, calm, and authenticity in a web that’s lost its soul. The future of design is slower, smaller, and infinitely more human.

From HCD to HCD+: what I learned from Don Norman

Reflections on the 2025 DNDA Summit and Don Norman’s vision for the next era of design, community, and artificiality.Continue reading on UX Collective »

Junior designers have a perception problem-here’s how to fix it

The Future of Design is Tackling Uncertain or EvenAmbiguous ProblemsContinue reading on UX Collective »

How To Design For (And With) Deaf People

When we think about people who are deaf, we often assume stereotypes, such as “disabled” older adults with hearing aids. However, this perception is far from the truth and often leads to poor decisions and broken products.Let’s look at when and how deafness emerges, and how to design better experiences for people with hearing loss.Deafness Is A SpectrumDeafness spans a broad continuum, from minor to profound hearing loss. Around 90–95% of deaf people come from hearing families, and deafness ofte

Jobs to Be Done Without the Dogma | Wolfram Nagel (TeamViewer)

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.—Wolfram is a Senior UX Designer and Researcher and has been working at TeamViewer for eight years.He has been driving and advancing UX Research at the company for nearly two years, developing it further together with a young but highly talented and motivated team. He has been deeply involved with Jobs-to-Be-Done for over a decade and considers himself a pragmatic JTBD practitioner.Before joining TeamViewer, he spent almost ten years in the Enterpr