Interactivity

Show HN: Sushidata – automating the painful parts of competitor and VoC research

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

Lower the surprise: Applying The free energy principle to UX

Our brain is a prediction machine that can’t be stopped. No matter how hard we try, it will still build expectations.If you’re reading this, you’ve probably asked yourself the same question I always have: What exactly makes users subconsciously follow Color Psychology, Gestalt principles, and behavioral patterns like Hick’s law? Why does all of this work? Is there a way to understand the true nature of our brain and not just how it reacts, but why it predicts, expects, and perceives the world th

Facebook has made it impossible to delete Pages – dark patterns everywhere

I'm honestly shocked at how bad the current Facebook interface has become. I’m trying to delete a Page I own, and the platform basically makes it impossible. The options have moved or disappeared, the Page Settings menu leads to the wrong profile, Business Suite doesn’t show the Page, and the “Access and Control” section doesn’t list it at all.Facebook keeps bouncing me between: – personal profile settings – business portfolio settings – Meta Business Suite – classic Page UINone of them giv

Show HN: Free Z-Image – A Fast, High-Quality AI Image Generator for Creators

I built Z-Image, a free, fast, and creator-focused AI image generator designed for artists, game developers, designers, and anyone who needs high-quality visuals without the usual friction or cost.Try it here (free): https://aiocmaker.com/z-imageWhy I built itMost AI image tools fall into two categories:Great quality but expensive, slow, or require subscriptions.Free tools but low quality, restrictive, or overloaded.As a builder working in the game/anime space, I needed a gen

Framework-agnostic Select and Toast components built with Web Components

Hi HN,I’ve been working across multiple frontend stacks over the past few years (React, Vue, Angular, etc.), and one recurring frustration kept coming up:Core UI components like selects and toast notifications get rewritten every time the framework changes.Even when the behavior and UX are essentially the same, the implementation is tightly coupled to the framework, which makes long-lived UI logic surprisingly fragile.So I decided to experiment with a different approach: building UI primitives a

Perplexity and NotebookLM don’t use better AI—they use better intelligence flow architecture

What product designers can learn from how they design intelligence flows.Everyone thinks Perplexity and NotebookLM succeed because they use “better AI.”They don’t. They use the same models as everyone else.I spent three months deconstructing both — not just as a user, but as an architect. I mapped where intelligence lives, traced where humans direct and where AI executes.Here’s what they actually did differently.The answer isn’t in the AI models. It’s in how they architect the flow of work betwe

So your AI wants a personality

Emerging personality patterns that drive differentiation in AI productsContinue reading on UX Collective »

Developers aren’t the enemy

Don’t demonize those that can help you provide more accessible content.Continue reading on UX Collective »

Why feature roadmaps don’t work for early-stage startups

The comfort and the cost of knowing what’s next.An example of a feature-based roadmapImagine this scenario:You are working with a passionate founder. They want to build a product which they are super sure of; they have their pitch deck ready, investors are lined up, and they want to hit market in six months. All they need is a working product: an embodiment of their mission. As a product manager, you do the usual. In a short duration, you conjure up enough details to come up with a roadmap. A pl

New navigation paradigms, ChatGPT talks too much, AI coding tools

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.“To navigate is to read the world in order to move through it, whether it means scanning a crowd to find a familiar face, deciphering the logic of a bookstore’s layout, or following the stars at sea. This ability has always been mediated by tools (many of them disruptive and transformative). Still, the rise of artificial intelligence presents us with a radical promise: a world where we no longer need maps, because the information or th

Exciting New Tools for Designers, December 2025

As you can see from our roundup of new tools for designers this month, almost everything is based in artificial intelligence. Most of the tools in development and launch right now are designed to supercharge workflows and make you more efficient. Nearly all of these tools live up to that billing. Here’s what’s new for […]

Innovation vs. Incremental Improvement

Not all teams build products in highly uncertain environments or try to create cutting-edge new features. Many incrementally improve existing products and try to do so in a way that doesn’t alienate large existing user bases. Neither of these tasks is particularly easy, and they often require very different approaches to research and design. Let’s take a look at how things differ depending on a team’s goals. Often, product teams, regardless of how agile they are, don’t have a very good dist

MatchDog Build Your Portfolio Project: Flow

The most important tasks found in the upper-left quadrant of your prioritization matrix are those which most users will spend the majority of their time performing. At a minimum, these are the ones that need a full flow design to show how (and with what logic) the user will transition from screen to screen. Which objects are on a given page should be a decision you previously made via the combination of your UX architecture and screen archetype selections. While your prioritization matrix may

Why is real-world ASR still ~85% when lab models claim >95%?

Curious to hear what approaches people are taking, what the bottlenecks are, and whether anyone here is pushing toward the goal of "AI that understands you, the first time."I've been diving into the gap between benchmark ASR performance and real-world speech. Models like Whisper and Deepgram show impressive >95% accuracy in ideal conditions. But in the wild — accents, noisy environments, emotional speech, code-switching, overlapping speakers — accuracy often drops sharply, ofte

Sustainable growth flowchart

The intersection of business strategy and UX.The Intersection of Business Strategy and User Experience — By Lismayasari AnnisyahSustainable growth = strategy × UX: ‘Build fast’ doesn’t mean rushing the final product, it’s about rapidly testing ideas with cheap prototypes and experiments. But don’t confuse this agility with a lack of strength, focus, or clear objectives; true growth demands disciplined alignment to build lasting foundations.This article is suited for UX growth-focused professiona

What is design when you barely have time to do it?

A brief reminder and a hard reset during existential times.Continue reading on UX Collective »

MatchDog Build Your Portfolio Project: Screen Visualization & Content

Congratulations! You have finished the longest chapter in the book, which describes the full hierarchy of design pattern layers from simple components up to the master diagrams of UX Architecture alternatives. As noted in the book, the multi-level pattern framework is best taught from the bottom up but on a new design project typically is practiced from the top down. We’ll take the top-down approach in our outline for how to proceed. Project Brief Review the full project brief for MatchD

Will AI turn us into spectators of our own stories?

How humanity is transitioning from making stories to co-piloting them with technology.Continue reading on UX Collective »

MatchDog Build Your Portfolio Project: Grids and Grammar

Project Brief Review the full project brief for MatchDog again. You may draw ideas during this step from the examples in the book regarding MatchDog conceptual model options. The book intentionally scaffolds this project step with examples and discussion of various options. Two finished possibilities are captured in figure 17. However, you are the designer, and the CM should reflect your desired and optimized grammar and the supporting Information Architecture you choose to hold it. The sema

The Ultimate Guide to UI Design in 2026

UI design in 2026 isn’t about prettier screens — it’s about reducing friction users can’t explain but instantly feel. As AI, accessibility, and system complexity collide, the best interfaces are the ones that think **less**, not more. This guide breaks down what actually matters now — and why most “modern” UIs are quietly getting it wrong.