Interactivity

Show HN: I built a Finances app for Mac where you own the SQLite database

Hey HN,I feel like there is a gap in personal finance apps: local-first options typically have less polished UIs, while those with great design like Monarch Money are not local-first. This app fills the gap by providing a modern UI like Monarch/Monzo along with a database that you can hack around with outside of the app. File > app!- Local-first: transactions are stored in an encrypted SQLite database on your Mac, so you can read/write to it with Claude Code or your favourite DB cli

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

Show HN: LogiCart – Agentic shopping using Generative UI (A2UI pattern)

Hey HN, I’m the solo builder behind LogiCart.I recently refactored my frontend to use a Generative UI pattern (inspired by Google's new A2UI framework) because I realized a static chat interface fails for complex shopping intents.The Problem: A user buying a single item needs a completely different UX than a user planning a complex project. A standard "list of cards" doesn't work for both.The Solution: I built an Intent-to-UI engine where the LLM decides the interface structu

Cursor vs. antigravity after a week of real use

in the first week of 2026 i ended up using cursor and google antigravity back to back, not by plan but because i burned through two cursor ultra subscriptions faster than expected and decided to try antigravity on the free tier.my normal usage is ~$60–100/month. within a few days it jumped to $500+, with the dashboard projecting ~$1.6k/month. max mode was off, and the ui consistently showed a 200k context window.what i eventually pieced together is that cursor maintains a large hidden

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 (*.

Building technology products is easy, but we made it complicated

There are a thousand ways to fail in executing a digital product project. Regardless of the many variables, failure to deliver a project will always be due to foundational risk factors that compromise its successful completion.When you have people who are not suited for the job, the consequences might be catastrophic for everyone and everything involved.It’s been almost 20 years since I started my career in product design, and, as you might imagine, many things have changed dramatically since th

Usability heuristics and competition in games

Hi, my name is Oleksandr, I’m a Senior UX/UI Designer at Ubisoft, in my previous article, I talked about why every person on a team has an impact on UX. In this one, I want to dive deeper into usability and heuristics.UX Layers & Team. Source: Why is everyone on the team a UXer? Layers of player experienceUsabilityAccording to the Nielsen Norman Group, usability is about how easily and pleasantly users can achieve their goals when interacting with a product.It is an important factor for a pr

How UX directly impacts P&L

UX isn’t decoration; it is the mechanism that converts product value into business revenue.As a C-level executive at two consecutive VC-backed startups (ARxVision, AdInMo) and Senior Manager at major players like Ubisoft and the BBC, I’ve utilized design to solve critical P&L issues. The hardest part has often been building the business case to convince decision-makers to invest in user experience. Here are two distinct examples where UX was directly tied to business success.In some cases, e

Why Designers Are the New Bureaucrats

Modern designers aren’t creating anymore—they’re managing frameworks, meetings, and Figma files like corporate clerks. Creativity’s been replaced by process, and originality has drowned under layers of “alignment.” It’s time to admit it: designers have become the new bureaucrats—and the real rebellion is making something weird again.

Presenting the research no one wants to hear

Hi, I’m Nikki. I run Drop In Research, where I help teams stop launching “meh” and start shipping what customers really need. I write about the conversations that change a roadmap, the questions that shake loose real insight, and the moves that get leadership leaning in. Bring me to your team.Paid subscribers get the power tools: the UXR Tools Bundle with a full year of four top platforms free, plus all my Substack content, and a bangin’ Slack community where you can ask

How reading patterns have changed

And it’s impact on UX and UI designContinue reading on UX Collective »

Smashing Animations Part 8: Theming Animations Using CSS Relative Colour

I’ve recently refreshed the animated graphics on my website with a new theme and a group of pioneering characters, putting into practice plenty of the techniques I shared in this series. A few of my animations change appearance when someone interacts with them or at different times of day.The colours in the graphic atop my blog pages change from morning until night every day. Then, there’s the snow mode, which adds chilly colours and a wintery theme, courtesy of an overlay layer and a blending m

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

The WCAG problem

WCAGs may not be the simplest way to start the conversationContinue reading on UX Collective »

The dilemma of agency in design

What it takes to overcome obstacles and drive positive impact inside systems that resist change.Illustration by Sh8peshifters / Source: designingtomorrowbook.comOver the past years, I’ve spoken with many design students about life-centred design, responsible innovation, and bringing non-human perspectives into the design process. These ideas tend to resonate deeply. Many students are drawn to design precisely because they want to create positive social and environmental change.What design progra

How can you ensure paying customers don’t worsen the new user experience?

The eternal challenge of B2B Design, and how reframes can helpContinue reading on UX Collective »

Designers as agent orchestrators: what I learnt shipping with AI in 2025

Designers hold the best qualities to get refine AI outputs that’s needed for building successful productsTraditionally we’ve shied away from building because the chasm to go from designing to shipping requires learning to code, test, and bug fix. All of it required massive time investment to learn syntax, that changes every few years while core principles stay the same. Most of us are designers because we’re visual thinkers in a way.In 2025, AI-assisted building closed this chasm. Translating ho

Your product is a theme park

A practical way to evaluate what to fix next.A ‘Dufan’ Theme Park Illustration (by Jumping Space Studio)Disclaimer: Some visuals in this article are AI-generated. I’m using them only to help explain the ideas more clearly. These visuals are not intended for commercial use, and I’m not monetizing this article. If any visual resembles an existing work, it’s unintentional , please reach out and I will credit or remove it.It’s Saturday afternoon.The park is packed, but something feels… off.The entra

From playwright to stage manager

MINDFUL AI DESIGNThe improv theater guide to AI designThe show that went off scriptThis summer, Google released a fascinating research prototype — a demo of a “neural” operating system that generates itself on the fly.It looks comfortably familiar: an old-school desktop with windows, icons, menus, a mouse pointer.Google Gemini Flash-Lite “Neural OS”But start clicking, and dream logic takes over.Every click triggers the AI model to rebuild the interface in milliseconds. The OS continuously reinve