Interactivity

Micro-interactions still matter

Little micro interactions and accessibility concerns make a big difference to showing your attention to detail. Key Links ...

Are you designing for the user’s values — or your own?

Are you designing for the user’s values — or your own?The future of design will be the negotiation between multiple moral worlds.Photo by Vince Fleming on UnsplashIt’s not a stretch to suggest that as technology becomes more omnipresent, the designer’s role will shift from “hands-on” making to shaping how humanity interacts with machines. We will evolve from designing screens to defining moral guardrails. And like any profession with the power to influence lives — doctors, lawyers, policymakers

Pragmatism vs. Rigor: The Researcher’s Balancing Act | Raymond Tiong (Dext)

Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.—Ray is a designer-turned-researcher. He grew up in New Zealand but moved to the UK last year.His career started in graphic design and advertising, but he’s also studied art history and worked as a brand strategist and innovation consultant before moving into UX. He was a product designer before officially pivoting to UX research.He is passionate about the craft of UX research, so is naturally drawn towards rigour and detail. But there’

Show HN: Pure – An interactive satire on the absurdity of 'Terms of Service'

Hi HN,I built this last week after an experience at a bank branch that stuck with me. The rep literally said, “Don’t bother reading it, just scroll to the bottom so the button unlocks.”It hit me how routine and meaningless “consent” has become, not a decision, just a UI step everyone knows they’re supposed to get through.So I made PURE. It looks like a minimal fintech onboarding flow, but the ToS never actually ends. As you scroll, the text starts reacting to you, poking at the whole idea of bli

Show HN: I built whatstype.org – a free personality test site

Hey HN,I recently built whatstype.org , a free personality test website that helps people explore their thinking, communication, and relationship patterns.Unlike most MBTI-style sites that only give you a short label, Whatstype digs deeper:The test adapts to your responses dynamicallyResults are structured around reasoning style, emotional pattern, and social interactionEach of the 16 personality types includes detailed analysis, strengths, challenges, and real-life adviceNo login, no tracking —

ChatGPT talks too much and it’s ruining learning

How the UX of AI chat can hijack our brains to compromise learning in schools and beyondUnsplash image by Luis Villasmil. Modified the text on stickies with Nano Banana.Ask any instructor what helps students learn, and it’s unlikely any of them will answer “a really big wall of text”. It’s incredible to me, as both a university instructor and a UX designer, that the army of people working at OpenAI are not imagining better tools for our students. I want to walk you through a design pattern in Ch

Amazon’s roach motel

How a dark pattern becomes a billion-dollar liabilityImage of a big ol’ roach motel manager, representing AmazonWith the holidays around the corner, I’ve been on an online shopping spree, and recently while on Amazon I stumbled upon a very disturbing trend. Right beside the item’s price, in bright red discount colours there’s a “–25%” discount text. Nothing particularly weird about that… except the “discounted” price was exactly the same as the price I’d seen a few days earlier. Using a price tr

The deeper intentions behind the TikTok deal and Musk’s EU feud

Algorithmic governmentality and the merging of government and corporationsGage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, CC BY-SA 2.0‘The EU should be abolished,’ is what Elon Musk claimed in a recent post on X. In relation to this, in September, some of Musk’s peers purchased TikTok's U.S. operations. Musk complains — I mean tweets — a lot, and tech acquisitions happen often, but these two examples illustrate how corporate interests and governments are connected. This text will show this corporate-govern

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

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

Should We Give Adobe Express a Second Chance?

Adobe Express used to be a joke — now it might be the smartest design tool you’re ignoring. After years of playing catch-up to Canva, it’s quietly evolved into a fast, AI-powered platform that actually feels good to use. If you wrote it off before, it might be time to open that tab again — you’ll be shocked how far it’s come.

Addressing the design-engineering gap with AI coding tools

How shadow repos and data layer helped me move from design handoffs to working prototypes that ship in hoursOver the past few months, I have noticed a quiet shift in how we build products. You start noticing design and engineering overlapping at scale much earlier, pretty much as soon as a feature moves from research into the ideation stage.I built this AI-powered prototype for a feature with Claude CodeThis is one of the recent features where I built the entire flow end-to-end with a different

Building systems that strengthen product discovery judgment

Moving from accidental learning to deliberate capability development.Diagram created by author using Google Gemini AI text-to-image creatorThe retrospective felt like a breakthrough. The team diagnosed exactly where their reasoning broke down, mapped the root causes, and committed to doing better. Three months later, they repeated the same mistakes.The diagnosis was accurate. What was missing was a system to turn awareness into development. Diagnosis alone doesn’t create change.Most improvement

Accessible UX Research, eBook Now Available For Download

This article is a sponsored by Accessible UX ResearchSmashing Library expands again! We’re so happy to announce our newest book, Accessible UX Research, is now available for download in eBook formats. Michele A. Williams takes us for a deep dive into the real world of UX testing, and provides a road map for including users with different abilities and needs in every phase of testing.But the truth is, you don’t need to be conducting UX testing or even be a UX professional to get a lot out of this

The business is the only stakeholder that matters

Why UX and Market Research should stop fighting and start working together.Photo by Mufid Majnun on UnsplashIt’s a debate I’ve been dragged into so many times, I've lost track: UX vs. Market Research? Qual vs. Quant? Who owns the insights? Who make the decisions? Who drives the strategy? Who makes the “real” impact?I've been a UX Researcher for over 20 years and my thinking is deeply rooted in building meaningful products and services that solve real human problems… (As opposed to fake p

How to approach creating design alternatives in a sustainable way

The rule of 3 in design isn’t feasible anymore, unless you do thisContinue reading on UX Collective »

State, Logic, And Native Power: CSS Wrapped 2025

If I were to divide CSS evolutions into categories, we have moved far beyond the days when we simply asked for border-radius to feel like we were living in the future. We are currently living in a moment where the platform is handing us tools that don’t just tweak the visual layer, but fundamentally redefine how we architect interfaces. I thought the number of features announced in 2024 couldn’t be topped. I’ve never been so happily wrong.The Chrome team’s “CSS Wrapped 2025” is not just a list o

Is there such a thing as mindful scrolling?

What happens when you apply mindfulness to a mindless experience?Continue reading on UX Collective »

TelUI 1.2: TelUI with fun alignments

# TelUITelUI is a Electron-based UI framework that packages a handful of reusable front-end primitives—color utilities, typography helpers, and basic structural styles—so you can prototype simple desktop UI ideas with minimal setup.## Features - Bundled Electron runner (`npm start`) that serves `index.html` for instant desktop previews. - Tokenized styling layers: `color.css`, `font.css`, `header.css`, and `align.css` keep presentation rules isolated and easy to remix. - Micro-interaction helper