Want people to pay for your stuff? Show the value like this
How to write benefits so that users can make an easy but well-informed choice — a Google Developer Program case study.Continue reading on UX Collective »
Interactivity
Now Shipping: Accessible UX Research, A New Smashing Book By Michele Williams
Good UX research is at the root of great products. It takes the guesswork out of our designs and helps us solve problems before they grow. One of the best ways to make our research effective is to keep it inclusive — testing with users with different needs and abilities, and using their feedback to build products that work for more people.Our newest book, Accessible UX Research, can help you plan and execute great user research. Dr. Michele Williams draws from years of experience to build a clea
Bonus video: Behind-the-scenes of using AI agents
With the recent updates on Open AI privacy, I want to highlight that you do not have to use ChatGPT to achieve this. I have showcased ChatGPT because that’s where all my agents currently live, but I will be migrating them to other LLMs.Subscribe nowI’ve received a ton of questions recently on how UXRs can use AI more in a day-to-day workflow so I recorded this quick to showcase how creating and using specific AI agents can help with:Offloading tedious/mundane tasks or starting with a
A farewell to Flash
Adobe Animate, Flash, was like an old friend. We didn’t keep in touch.A Farewell to Flash.Macromedia Flash, now Adobe Animate was my first introduction to both design for the web and web development. It was the first program I learned inside and out — after Adobe Photoshop.Knowing Flash (as I prefer to call it) was my entry point into the job market, my first few serious opportunities that I got — I only got because I knew Flash very well, as a designer, as a developer, and even as an animator.A
How being a strategic advisor helps grow design influence
How to gain influence when your org doesn’t prioritize designersContinue reading on UX Collective »
How Monotype turns selling fonts into daylight robbery
From small businesses to even the government, they may eat you up.Continue reading on UX Collective »
The justification tax
Why design decisions take 5x longer to approve — and what to do about itImage generated with MidjourneyEvery design decision carries a surcharge.When your engineering counterpart walks into a meeting and says “we need to refactor the authentication module,” the room nods. It’s technical. It sounds expensive to ignore. Nobody asks for a prototype.When you walk into the same meeting and say “we need to simplify the onboarding flow”, suddenly you need data. User research. A competitive analysis. A
When design teams get rid of writers, nobody wins
Products get worse. Users get stuck.Layoffs are happening everywhere.Talented people with decades of experience are being caught up in “restructurings.” In the process, many digital product design teams are parting ways with the people who focus on words.With every layoff, we’re losing something essential. Writing is core to the design process. Every design team needs writers to make interactions simple, to introduce new features, to add the right personality at the right time.So what happens wh
Integrating UX into capacity planning
How to balance Total Project Demand with Team Capacity to take control of your workload, avoid burn out, & set your team up for success.© 2026 Jeremy BirdOne of the problems I have seen UX teams and entire UX practices struggle with again and again is getting their capacity accounted for when creating roadmaps or committing to work.Often, UX is an afterthought or informed by how much time they have for deadlines. Usually, it’s calculated by looking at when engineering needs to start work to
What is teleoperation?
The invisible design layer that helps us reach large-scale robotics soonerContinue reading on UX Collective »
Designing at the edge of AI harm
A Call for UX and Design Practitioners to Reclaim the Practice as a Critical, Human-Centred SpaceContinue reading on UX Collective »
Micro-interactions still matter
It's the little UI/UX touches that make your app feel alive. Let's look at 4 simple lines of CSS that can transform a boring interaction ...
Micro-interactions still matter
Little micro interactions and accessibility concerns make a big difference to showing your attention to detail. Key Links ...
Product Thinking for UI Designers: Decisions Beyond the Pixels
Product thinking shifts your focus from "how it looks" to "why it matters," ensuring every design choice solves a real human problem and hits a business goal. It’s the secret to moving beyond pixel-pushing and becoming a strategic partner who builds products that actually work.
Getting Started With The Popover API
Tooltips feel like the smallest UI problem you can have. They’re tiny and usually hidden. When someone asks how to build one, the traditional answer almost always comes back using some JavaScript library. And for a long time, that was the sensible advice.I followed it, too.On the surface, a tooltip is simple. Hover or focus on an element, show a little box with some text, then hide it when the user moves away. But once you ship one to real users, the edges start to show. Keyboard users Tab into
Something big, surveillance by default, agentic UX principles
Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.“I’m a firm believer in Josef Müller-Brockmann’s principles of designing with intentionality. At the same time, I’ve watched the same demos Shumer has. I’ve felt that initial rush of adrenaline when viewing the insane capabilities of each AI model, with each release dropping my jaw to the floor.But after hundreds of hours of actual implementation, the reality looks a lot more like a shifting burden.We are mistaking the speed of generat
Made to create, learning to curate: the designer’s dilemma
Designers aren’t burning out because AI is hard to use. They’re burning out because nothing else changed around it.Continue reading on UX Collective »
Show HN: RotaFlow – A privacy-first shift calendar built with SwiftUI
I built RotaFlow to solve the UX disaster of current shift work apps. Most incumbents are web-wrappers laden with ads.The Stack:* Language: Swift 6 / SwiftUI. * Persistence: Core Data synced via CloudKit (NSPersistentCloudKitContainer). * Architecture: MVVM with a custom "LoopEngine" for O(1) shift calculation.The Interesting Part: I implemented a "Future Cliff" paywall. The app is fully functional for the next 30 days. Accessing dates beyond t+30d triggers a blurred UI
Show HN: Synesthetic Computation
"When perception shifts, and the feeling of control takes over")I wrote up a deep dive into a security issue in OpenClaw that escalates from a seemingly small UX/trust boundary problem into full remote code execution via a single malicious link.The article walks through the full exploit chain from a systems perspective rather than just a CVE summary. The key theme is what I call “synesthetic computation”: when subjective context, UI state, agent memory, and system permissions get
How Better Usability Reduces Risk
Reducing Friction in UI Design