Interactivity

You’re still designing for an architecture that no longer exists

Claude just showed us what replaced it.VISUAL 1: The Dissolved Interface. Generated with Gemini.Last Tuesday, I asked Claude to prepare a competitive analysis. Not in a chat window. Not through a prompt. I opened Cowork, pointed it to a folder on my desktop, and said what I needed. It read my files. It cross-referenced data from Slack through a connector. It pulled calendar context. It produced a document — formatted, structured, sourced — and saved it to my working folder. I didn’t open a singl

Prompt Hoarders: 7 Reasons Saving Prompts Won’t Make You Creative

We’re not getting smarter with AI — we’re just getting better at hoarding prompts and calling it “creativity.” The real danger isn’t AI replacing us. It’s us quietly forgetting how to think.

Product ethics have never mattered more

OpenAI just struck a deal with the Pentagon. Anthropic refused. And users noticed, which tells us something important about the future of values in product design.In the last week of February 2026, something unusual happened. A sitting US president took to social media to brand a private technology company a political threat. The Secretary of Defense designated that same company a supply chain risk, a classification previously reserved for foreign adversaries. And hours later, a rival AI lab swo

Show HN: Create an onboarding flow on Flutter in 5 min

Hey Flutter devsIf you've shipped apps before, you know how important it is to have an efficient and polished onboarding flow. It's the first thing users see and often the reason they leave.You've probably first focused on the core of your app, what makes it different. And now, you want to push it to the store, but you know you have to build an onboarding flow... and it's a little painful.Onboarding flows are deceptive. They are super easy to build technically, but very diffi

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

Show HN: Prompt optimizer for vibe-coding with LLMs

I’ve been working on a small tool aimed at reducing prompt friction in vibe-coding workflows.In practice, a lot of iteration comes from underspecified prompts: missing constraints, unclear scope, implicit assumptions, or mixed intent. This tool takes a rough, natural-language description of what you want to build and rewrites it into a more explicit, structured prompt with clearer requirements and context before it’s sent to the model.The focus is on:Making intent, constraints, and assumptions e

Rewriting and prioritizing user research questions

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

Things that don’t matter when you write

Extensive experience and “new” ideas are among them.Continue reading on UX Collective »

Accessibility testing takes more than a scan

Uncover accessibility issues that automated tools can’t catchWhen you evaluate a webpage for accessibility, it’s appealing to use automated scanners to quickly get an “accessibility score,” identify issues, and then move on. Browser-based accessibility extensions make this easy…in just a few minutes, you can generate a list of accessibility defects from missing labels to low color contrast.While these tools can catch accessibility issues early, they don’t provide a complete picture or reflect ho

The world’s cheapest compliment

Between the oracle that knows everything and the genius that does everything, AI design is creating a desert for human thought. And I almost got lost in it.“When you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” — Nietzsche (All conceptual images in this article were generated by AI and edited by the Author)Leia em portuguêsBefore publishing anything important, I show it to my personal critic. Before sending a difficult email, before pitching an idea to a client, before defend

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 »

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 »