Forget your “lovable” products; the real leverage point was always learning.
Creating the products and services we always wanted to build was never about changing the definition.Continue reading on UX Collective »
Interactivity
No further questions… please.
Daniel Kahneman and the feeling of being caughtDaniel KahnemanI like a good reframe. Don’t you?It used to be that saying “I don’t know” felt like honesty. Why does it now feel like it means something else?Why do follow up questions feel like predetermined resentments? (a phrase I used on my first date with my wife of now 13 years about having expectations)I’m Nate Sowder, and this is unquoted, installment 17. Knowing something and understanding it are two different things. Today, we’re looking a
How werewolves killed my Pinterest
This is what happens when your attention is being actively hijacked — the best “inspo pics” app is now unusable.Continue reading on UX Collective »
How accepting “just build this thing” can hurt your design career
Designers are being asked to build fast. Here’s why you need to push backContinue reading on UX Collective »
Anime vs. Marvel/DC: Designing Digital Products With Emotion In Flow
Design isn’t only pixels and patterns. It’s pacing and feelings, too. Some products feel cinematic as they guide us through uncertainty, relief, confidence, and calm without yanking us around. That’s Emotion in Flow. Others undercut their own moments with a joke in the wrong place, a surprise pop-up, or a jumpy transition. That’s Emotion in Conflict.These aren’t UX-only ideas. You can see them everywhere in entertainment. And the clearest way to feel the difference is to compare how anime handle
The art of conversational flow
Conversational Design based on effective communication.Conversational Flow seen between human and AI | Image credit: AI-generated with Google GeminiA lot is changingLike many other Product Designers in our field, I’ve been in the throes of rapid change on a number of levels due to the advent of AI. Roles are changing and adapting. Innovation and experimentation are rampant. Likely, you’re using AI in a variety of ways, daily even. As designers, our typical mediums of yesterday and how we interac
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
Context engineering: A repeatable AI workflow for product designers
A step-by-step method to feed AI the right inputs in the right order, without prompt gymnastics.Continue reading on UX Collective »
A designer’s field report on the Iconic blind spot in AI world models
The Baron Munchausen trap.Baron Munchausen pulling himself and his horse from the swamp by his own hair — the original self-referential escape attempt. Image generated by Google Gemini. Image concept by the author.In my last post, I shared a surprisingly moving moment with my AI collaborator, Gemi (Google’s Gemini). By shifting into a designer’s mode of strategic empathy, I uncovered a structural truth about its architecture when Gemi confessed: “They gave me the word ‘Mass’ and trillions of con
How Aspect Ratios Define Perception, Rhythm, and Flow
A deep exploration of how aspect ratios shape perception, visual rhythm, and usability in modern interfaces. From grids to galleries to video players, this article dissects how proportion silently governs how users see, feel, and interact with content.
The last interface, sycophancy in AI, design is how it wins
Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.“At the end of February, a report by Citrini Research caused major shockwaves through the software industry, sending the stock prices of heavyweight SaaS organisations like Atlassian and Slack to nosedive. The Citrini Report follows AI’s current trajectory and projects that 2028 will bring a self-inflicted corporate doom loop: AI makes software so cheap to build that SaaS companies will cannibalise themselves out of business.”The last
Your phone isn’t eavesdropping. The reality is stranger.
The “phones are listening” conspiracy theory is only half the story. What’s actually happening raises harder questions.You’re having a conversation with a friend. Out loud, over coffee, nowhere near a keyboard. You mention a brand, a holiday destination, a product you’ve been vaguely thinking about. You don’t search for it. You don’t type it. And then, a few hours later, there it is. An ad. Sitting in your feed like it was waiting for you.Image by author.Most people have had this experience. And
Show HN: RotaFlow – A privacy-first shift calendar built with SwiftUI
I built RotaFlow to solve the UX disaster of current shift work apps. Most incumbents are web-wrappers laden with ads.The Stack:* Language: Swift 6 / SwiftUI. * Persistence: Core Data synced via CloudKit (NSPersistentCloudKitContainer). * Architecture: MVVM with a custom "LoopEngine" for O(1) shift calculation.The Interesting Part: I implemented a "Future Cliff" paywall. The app is fully functional for the next 30 days. Accessing dates beyond t+30d triggers a blurred UI
Show HN: Synesthetic Computation
"When perception shifts, and the feeling of control takes over")I wrote up a deep dive into a security issue in OpenClaw that escalates from a seemingly small UX/trust boundary problem into full remote code execution via a single malicious link.The article walks through the full exploit chain from a systems perspective rather than just a CVE summary. The key theme is what I call “synesthetic computation”: when subjective context, UI state, agent memory, and system permissions get
Show HN: Aperture Core – a human attention control plane for agent systems
I just released the first public version of Aperture Core, an SDK for deciding which agent events deserve human attention now, which should wait, and which should stay in the background.The core loop is simple: - publish an event - get back a frame if it should enter the human attention surface - render that frame in your UI/workflow - submit the human response back into the engineAs agents get more capable and one human starts supervising more of them, the bottleneck shifts toward human at
Show HN: I built an AI comic generator from scratch using only natural language
I spent ~4 hours building AIComicBuilder [1], a full-stack AI comic/drama generation platform, without writing a single line of code manually. This is a writeup of my "vibe coding" workflow using Claude Code. The app lets you: input a script → AI generates screenplay → character analysis → storyboard generation (with first/last frame images) → video generation. Supports OpenAI-compatible, Gemini, and Bytedance Seedance APIs for text/image/video models, conf
Pixels of the Week – March 15, 2026
This week covers the age verification privacy trap, the design of toggle button states in Material design and the cost of AI tools and their military usage. We also explore women's sizing exclusion chaos, beautiful fonts and some cute clay art.
Are games really “dumbing down”?
From Redguard to Skyrim, the Elder Scrolls games became easier to play. What if that’s actually a better design?Continue reading on UX Collective »
Stop the Generic Portfolio Trap! Design a Stand-Out Portfolio for Your UX/UI Niche
Your UX/UI portfolio is your ticket to your dream job, brief or client. It’s your opportunity to show off your expertise, creativity, and the tangible impact of your work. No matter your niche, your portfolio should be as innovative and polished as the projects it represents.Think of your portfolio as your personal design project—it needs a clear strategy, attention to detail, and a focus on user experience to make an impact.In UX design, every mistake is a learning opportunity. Watch this video