Interactivity - Crafting Better Web Experiences

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

TelUI 1.1: New TelUI version Complete with tools to develop good software

Show HN: Tikpal- Your AI Voice Partner – Focus, Flow, Forge

We’re building Tikpal, an AI voice productivity tool based on a simple principle: Human creativity should remain the core engine. AI should be an accelerator, not the protagonist.The goal is to reduce screen dependency and cognitive fragmentation, and let people work in a more natural “voice-first” flow. Instead of clicking through interfaces and context-switching between apps, you talk to Tikpal, and it helps you think, structure ideas, and execute tasks.Three layers we are focusing on:FOCUS —

Blogging Is Dead. Long Live the Blog.

Blogging isn’t dead—it just got weird, broke up with Google, and joined a Substack cult. From SEO zombie posts to AI-written filler, we’ve lost the soul of writing—but the rebellion has already started. If you’ve got something real to say, now’s the time to blog like it’s 2004 (but with better fonts).

Thought-shaped UI, sigma (Σ) shaped designers, Figma’s new DS features

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.“We have a big choice to make: we’re about to jump into a new era of technology — meaning different values, expectations, and powers — and we need to choose what it looks like.*1 The transition itself is unavoidable, but the details are up to us.Today we must choose between a) a future where our software environment has a thought-shaped interface on top of all the old kludge, or b) a future where software is built from the ground up to

How UX Professionals Can Lead AI Strategy

Your senior management is excited about AI. They’ve read the articles, attended the webinars, and seen the demos. They’re convinced that AI will transform your organization, boost productivity, and give you a competitive edge.Meanwhile, you’re sitting in your UX role wondering what this means for your team, your workflow, and your users. You might even be worried about your job security.The problem is that the conversation about how AI gets implemented is happening right now, and if you’re not p

Pixels of the Week – December 7, 2025

👉🏻 Curated weekly UX Research, Design & Tech resources: you can't make something accessible for everyone, the need for accessible ads, UX research workshops with stakeholders, the design fundamentals problem, deceptive patterns and forced continuity, fran sans monospaced display font, retro futurist UI components, flags dataviz, virtual zine library, book recommendation tool. How to create 3D images in CSS with layered pattern.

Show HN: Skedular, a Smart Booking and Workspace Management Platform

Hi HNI have been working on Skedular a platform that helps organizations councils co working spaces and local businesses manage bookings shared spaces and multi location operations in a simple modern wayWhat Skedular does - Manage rooms desks studios sports facilities meeting spaces and any kind of bookable asset - Handle multi location multi team scenarios - Provide public booking pages for venues - Offer a clean dashboard for operators to manage availability payments customers and sched