How to keep design strategic when you’re suddenly in a startup environment
When your company shrinks back to startup size, how can you adapt?Continue reading on UX Collective »
Interactivity
It’s not you, it’s hierarchy
How I demoted my tree diagrams.Image AI Generated (Midjourney)It’s 9:03 a.m. I join a Zoom meeting titled “Team Structure Alignment — Attendance Required,” the type of meeting title commonly reserved for nightmares. As soon as I join HR appears in one tile, smiling like this is definitely covered in their onboarding. It isn’t. We’re here today to demote a sentient diagram.Long story short: afew years ago a lightning bolt totally hit a Texas data center while someone had Lucidchart open, and a In
The AI Avalanche: Are We Drowning in Our Own Creation?
AI isn’t making life easier—it’s burying us in tools we can’t keep up with. Every new app promises magic, but all we feel is burnout. This isn’t progress—it’s overload disguised as innovation.
Butterfly effect, nostalgia in UX, a framework for emotions, privacy with smart glasses
Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.“As designers, we constantly make decisions. Whether we design objects, devices, websites, apps, or policies, we choose one option over another, setting parameters for subsequent actions to unfold.The law of unintended consequences observes that every decision made can have both positive and negative outcomes that were not foreseen by the person making the decision.”The UX butterfly effect →By Martin Tomitsch and Steve 'Doc' Ba
Visual design’s future is the scenic route
How design will evolve from solving functional problems to creating depth, connection, and significance in the age of AI.Image source: dreamstime.comI recently stumbled across a LinkedIn post by Rafael T. making a bold prediction—by 2030, 90% of interfaces will be invisible. According to him, voice, chat, and autonomous agents will replace screens and buttons as the primary ways we interact with technology.Designers, he argued, will no longer focus on crafting pixels but on choreographing conver
The Grayscale Problem
Last year, a study found that cars are steadily getting less colourful. In the US, around 80% of cars are now black, white, gray, or silver, up from 60% in 2004. This trend has been attributed to cost savings and consumer preferences. Whatever the reasons, the result is hard to deny: a big part of daily life isn’t as colourful as it used to be.The colourfulness of mass consumer products is hardly the bellwether for how vibrant life is as a whole, but the study captures a trend a lot of us recogn
AI interfaces and the role of good writing
Why clear, strategic writing is more critical than ever.If you’ve used an AI product recently, you probably know that the technology is incredible. The UX? Not so much.Maybe you’ve gotten comfortable writing prompts or using simple one-click tools. But as AI interfaces start to take different forms, many of them are still kinda hard to figure out. Navigating them can be overwhelming. It doesn’t feel like you’re using these products so much as deciphering them. The engineering is powerful, but th
What Perplexity’s AI browser reveals about UX’s future
A systematic analysis of the first truly AI-native browser and what it teaches us about designing for intention rather than navigationOn day 3 of testing Perplexity’s Comet browser, something remarkable happened: I stopped typing URLs entirely. My brain had completely rewired from “where do I go?” to “what do I want?” — and this cognitive shift happened before the AI could reliably deliver on that promise. This gap between mental transformation and technical reality defines the next decade of UX
A Deep Dive into the Anatomy of a Micro-Interaction
Every effective micro-interaction is composed of four fundamental parts: the trigger, the rules, the feedback, and the loops and modes. The…
How I approach micro-interactions. Let’s dive in!
Hey everyone! It’s been a long break since I’ve written about my micro-interactions or tutorials on how to create them. I promise to make…
UX Trend 2026 #5: Micro-Interactions 2.0 & Emotion-Responsive Interfaces
“Good design isn’t just seen — it’s felt.”
The Secret Language of Micro-Interactions
The smallest design details often speak the loudest, silently shaping our emotional connection to the digital world.
Next Gen App Clips and Micro Interactions: Building Delightful iOS Experiences
User behavior regarding mobile applications have undergone great metamorphoses within the last few years. During the era of vanishing…
User Testing Micro-Interactions for Maximum Delight
Image by: Google Imagen 3 — Author: Niamh — My: Patreon
Micro-Interactions In The Age of Proactive Systems
The machines are reading our minds now, or at least pretending to, and the whole digital interface landscape has turned into a kaleidoscope…
Designing for the 1%: Why Edge Cases Aren’t Optional
Most designers build for the "happy path"—but real users live in the chaos. From screen readers to emoji-only usernames, edge cases expose where your UX actually fails. If you’re ignoring the 1%, you’re not just missing users—you’re building exclusion into your product.
The “£532,000” dot job: Why small design changes cost big
Why did a tiny logo change cost GOV.UK so much?Continue reading on UX Collective »
Show HN: Roundtable MCP Server to Use Claude, Cursor, Codex, Gemini from One UI
Hey HN, Last week, I spent 40 minutes debugging a production issue that should have taken 5. Not because the bug was complex, but because I kept switching between Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Gemini - copying context, losing thread, starting over. The workflow was painful: 1. Claude Code couldn't reproduce a React rendering bug 2. Copy-pasted 200 lines to Cursor - different answer, still wrong 3. Tried Codex - needed to re-explain the database schema 4. Finally Gemini spot
The 12 emotional journeys of color psychology
Journey mapping is one of the most widely used tools in interactive design, helping us create products and campaigns that connect with users on a deeper emotional level. This is key to building long-term loyalty, where users and customers feel an irrational sense of trust and gratitude toward your brand.In this article, I’ll explain what an emotional journey is to give you a strategic perspective on how we use emotional design to shape user experiences. Then we’ll explore the 12 major emotional
The User Research Round-Up: CW41
Every researcher has that one tool they swear they’ll try “next project.”And then next project turns into six months of juggling spreadsheets, chasing no-shows, and trying to make sense of messy transcripts at 2am.That’s exactly why I built this bundle. Paid subscribers get all Substack content and you get handed the tools that cut out half the stress:User Interviews → 5 participants without the ghosting circusAskable → a full month of Industry Stream (recruit