Weekly curated resources for designersthinkers andmakers.Another year, another opportunity to step back and look at the patterns around what the design community is thinking about, publishing, and discussing. Heres a glimpse into some of our favorite (and most shared) pieces from 2024. Thanks for being part of the conversationcatch you in the newyear.On creativity and the human differentiatorCreativity is the only thing An open letter to my fellow creatives in a dark hour.By JoeAlterioIf you want to be creative, you cant be certain Embracing ambiguity as a superpower.By IdaPerssonHow not to lose yourself to the AI storm Exploring how AI lives in the past and dreams of the future.By YunaShinA minimalistic app to track what to read, listen and watch [Sponsored] Save UX articles, design books, podcasts, interviews, and must-watch shows all in one app. Track your progress, see whats next, and organize your work/life library with minimal effort. A clean and minimalist app to help you stay organized. Only today exclusive 50% off lifetime: $29 $12.On big transformations in ourindustryUX design isnt dead, youre just confused Where has all the delight gone within UX?By MeghanLoganThe problem with growth: why everything is failing now Agile is where the trouble started.By JoannaWeberLife after Spotify: what no one tells you about life after layoffs The turmoil caused by losing my job.By SophiaOmarjiOn our tools and processesThe story of Figma Living long enough as a hero to become a villain?By JanTakacsComplicated sticks The rise of tools for everything and nothing in particular.By StephenFarrugiaTechs obsession with speed AI + Hermes (speed) worship.By Chris RBeckerOn findingmeaningIts time for design to think less and feel more How designers can reconnect to us being humans.By DarrenYeoDesigners: you need to read science fiction To anticipate future needs, you need to imagine the future.By DaleyWilhelmBeautiful, boring, and without soul Something more than merely a green space.By SteynViljoenOn the role of designersThe features investors want are not the ones your users need Why UX should care about the business but not too much.By Lindsey M. WestWallaceNever skip research day Its a powerful tool for organizational influence.By TripCarrollWhy designers need to be more like gardeners And how it would benefit both people and the planet.By KellySmithThe UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about theirwork.Support the newsletterIf you find our content helpful, heres how you can supportus:Check out this weeks sponsor to support their worktooForward this email to a friend and invite them to subscribeSponsor aneditionOur top UX stories this year was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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How different definitions of experience shape product perspectives.Photo by Lucas Gallone onUnsplashThinking about UX philosophyI think weve all been through this: there I was, an innocent user browsing through internet pagesa netizen, some might saywhen I landed on a site and found myself hopelessly bogged down by messages, pop-ups, and ads that appeared on my screen in a Kafkaesque way: to close one, I had to close another, and vice versa. And, of course, irritated, I complained to my two kittens about how terrible that experience was (without swearing because theyre justbabies).But then, something Ive been thinking about for a long time came back to my mind. Those of us working in UX talk about user experience all the time, but what does that really mean? Or, to be even bolder, what does it mean to have an experience in the first place? To make things worse, as I started asking around, I realized there wasnt really a consensus onthis.So, I decided to do some academic research and found definitions of all sorts: from persona-driven cases to a semantic reductionism that turns UX into scores (having a good UX means getting a good score on UX metrics, for example). Well, as someone with a bit of a background in philosophy, I wondered if I shouldnt investigate this more thoroughly. The idea here isnt to present you with The Definitive Definition of User Experience, but to talk about different points of view that can emerge and how they can shape different perspectives on UX, leading us to some specific paths in our projects.Pocket definition: UX for pragmatistsThe first definition is probably the one that many of you may already follow, at least indirectly. In 1998, Don Norman and Jakob Nielsen defined UX as follows: User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-users interaction with the company, its services, and its products. In the continuation of the text, the authors highlight that an exemplary experience meets customer needs, discuss the simplicity and elegance of design, and even dive into the utilitarian pleasures of interaction.Notice that the central word here is interaction; the experience doesnt exist in the user or in the system but at the point of interconnection between themits a point-of-contact-definition. But if it is so focused on interaction, does that mean that when I fall for online trolls and spend hours angry at someone who insulted me, this ceases to be part of my experience when I put down my phone? If there are more serious legal consequences, does the courtroom become part of the user experience? If UX lies in the interaction only, it includes the feelings I have during that interaction, but it cannot extend to continuous, lasting effects caused by that experience.Its a good definition. But can we see UX from other perspectives? After all, it may not seem like it, but Norman and Nielsen didnt found a churchand now Im slightly afraid I might be living in sin without realizing it.Illustration representing the concept of Pocket Definition, created using Excalidraw.Experience as a fusion ofhorizonsThe truth of experience always implies an orientation toward new experience GadamerI think its interesting to start with less obvious points of departure in the alternative definitions. Hans-Georg Gadamer, a major name in contemporary hermeneutics, argued that experiencing life isnt something we do in isolation but a constant process of dialogue between the individual and theworld.You are a person shaped by contexts and stories that taught you how to make sense of the world, and you always carry this baggage with you. So, when you use an app, you dont just absorb that contentyou interpret it based on your own experiences and values. This fusion of horizons, where past and present meet, is what defines the experience. And as the user lives in this horizon, all consequences generated from this fusion continue to be part of the experience. Here, your present experience becomes a constitutive part of the users futureself.In this sense, a professional following Gadamers interpretivism would see UX as a constant dialogue between the designer and the user, a conversation of mutual interpretation of actions, symbols, and signs. The extent of this experience is not limited to the interaction; it persists according to the impact it has on the users life. The products we work on can have significant impacts, for better or worse, on the lives of those who usethem.The infamous case of the Tinder Swindler, which became both a Netflix documentary and a book, serves as a striking example. It all started with simple user interactions on the popular dating app. A man, using a false identity, approached multiple women through luxurious dates, posing as a millionaire under threat. Through skillful manipulation, he managed to extort money from them. The result? Women left burdened with debt and a fraudster wanted in multiple countries. This is a clear case of users living with the consequences of their online experiences.Photo by Mika Baumeister onUnsplashIm not arguing that Tinders designers are to blame for the consequences. Users want to meet new people, and Tinder provides that with an experience designed to encourage quick initial decisions. Users are individuals responsible for their own actions. However, everything they lived still remains part of their experience.All UX analyses that start from common premises for identifying icons, texts, and functionalities through mental shortcuts apply Gadamers philosophy in some way. But its more than that. The impact of social networks on users mental health has effects that extend beyond the point of interaction between the user and the machine. Cybercrimes, investments through apps, economic decisions, scheduling a medical appointment onlineall these can have consequences that impact a persons life in a lasting way. Its not just about closing your eyes and turning off your phone screen. An average user lives with the consequences of the actions performed with yourproduct.As Sjors Timmer argues, this philosophy does not need to be limited to users, as it holds important lessons for designers themselves. It teaches the dialectical process of looking at the part and trying to understand what it means for the whole, or looking at the whole and understanding what it means for the part. From this, one understands that any future design will always be a consequence of the experiences established in past projects. Engaging in dialogue with this past is the best way to let go of the preconceptions that have beencreated.Illustration of the philosophical concept of Fusion of Horizons, created using Excalidraw.The experience of the body: a phenomenological perspective.the body expresses total existence, not because it is an external accompaniment to that existence, but because existence realizes itself in the body- Merleau-PontyMerleau-Ponty, a critic of behaviorism, sees experience as something not just mental or cognitiveit is embodied. You experience the world through your body, through your physical sensations; you feel theworld.Moreover, experience is never passive. The user is never an individual passively receiving information from the designer of that product: they act upon the world. The human body interacts with its surroundings, and this interaction defines how we see and understand the world. I think weve all seen the famous meme of how UX was made vs. how the user uses it. This would explain why that happens. The user isnt a passive pole in the equation. Theyll look at your product and poke, prod, turn it upside down, and, next thing you know, theyre wearing socks on their handsbecause, in some way, that makes more sense tothem.To be a body, is to be tied to a certain world, as we have seen; our body is not primarily in space: it is of it.- Merleau-PontyIt is up to the designer of the experience to understand this activity of the user and connect with their body; if you want to guide them, do it not just through their eyes and earsdo it through their whole body. Make the experience complete. The digital world, if thats the kind of product youre designing, doesnt create experiences that are extinguished digitally; it creates real experiences that reflect in the users body and generate lasting embodied impacts. Some philosophers would even question whether these digital systems today not only act upon our bodies but actually become a part of them. But thats a discussion for anothertime.https://medium.com/media/0482e002bb1c86ac892a8f50f9d17ca9/hrefThere are some areas that can greatly benefit from a UX philosophy focused on the body: products involving ergonomics, virtual reality, and augmented reality are among the most common. Much of the PlayStation 5 advertising focused on the haptic feedback of the DualSense. But the same happens with products that make you jump in fright, cry with emotion, have scatological reactions, and visceral responsesand, if we think about it, every pornographic website too. Its not just about eyes and fingers; even in the digital world, we are experiencing things in a completeway.Illustration explaining UX Phenomenology, created using Excalidraw.PostmodernismA plateau is always in the middle, not at the beginning or the end. A rhizome is made of plateaus. Deleuze andGuattariThere are many postmodernisms. But something we can trace in common is the view that the world has abandoned grand narratives (all-encompassing visions of things) in favor of a world closed off in micronarratives. In this way, if we follow Lyotard, experience is a mosaic of fragmented micro-events, each with its own meanings.Think about how fragmented a users experience of your app is. They are quickly transitioning between messaging apps, social media, e-commerce, and games. Sometimes all of this happens in just a few minutes. All of this together forms a mosaic of that users digital presence, and the experience you designed for them is part of a larger whole of a greater experience they are having in the digitalworld.Your design is just one of many experiences your user encounters in each moment. Photo by Hugh Han on Unsplash.As a UX philosophy, this means recognizing your product as only a fraction of the users overall experience, and that a good experience might arise precisely from the efficiency in communicating and being understood within a fraction of a persons attentionmaking oneself understood amidst fragmented shards. To complement with Deleuze and Guattari, it is a rhizomatic experience, without a center, where each point is connected to others in a horizontal and non-hierarchical way. There are no predefined routes, and each user will have their own way and time to deal with the experience created.Each product can interpret this differently. Movie streaming apps, for instance, rely more heavily on sustained attention from users. But what if thats not the case for you? Might it be better to have a postmodern perspective on UX and be ready to develop an experience suited to fragmented consumption? Perhaps users want what youre designing, but just a little bit now, a bit more later, consuming bits of a thousand other things inbetween.Illustration depicting the key elements of UX postmodernism, created using Excalidraw. And thats an exaggerationyour product probably represents a much smaller fraction of the users experience.Your vision of experience is also a worldview (and a productview)Im not here positioning myself to present you with a definitive view of what is experience, or more specifically, user experience. My aim was not to exhaust all possible definitions, but to show how different philosophies can shape the way we see UX andproduct.The act of thinking more deeply about these definitions can help us, each approach in its own way, to interpret and understand the actions of the users we study, how they deal with our products, and what the scope and consequences of the experience we design for themare.In most usability tests I see, the focus is more precisely on interaction, as in the pragmatic definition of UX. But cant we also design these experiences with the long-term effects they might have on users in mind? Or starting from the premise that your product is just a fragment of the experience they are having at that moment and that you should take this into account in someactions?Philosophizing about UX is not just an exercise in curiosity. When we are working with user experience, its important to be clear about what we understand as experience. This has an impact on test metrics, interface, and, above all, on strategic business decisions. And this does not depend on a unified definition of UX. Sometimes, having a project with professionals holding different perspectives on the aforementioned definitionsand otherscan generate even more innovative viewpoints. Like in that joke, you know? A pragmatist, a phenomenologist, and a postmodernist walk into a workshop[1] Norman, D., & Nielsen, J. (1998, August 8). The Definition of User Experience (UX). Nielsen Norman Group. Retrieved from https:/www.nngroup.com/articles/definition-user-experience/.[2] Gadamer, H.-G. (2004). Truth and method (2nd ed., J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.). Bloomsbury Publishing. (Original work published 1960, p.350).[3] Timmer, S. (2014). Conversations with the past: Hermeneutics for designers. Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/next-iteration/conversations-with-the-past-hermeneutics-for-designers-103a9151a07a[4] Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1945, p. 192).[5] Idem, p.171.[6] Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (p.23).What does it really mean to have an experience? was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why (and how) to craft product experiences that feel inevitablePhoto by Dev Asangbam onUnsplashEver use a product where everything just clicked? Where functionality felt so intuitive it was almost invisible? Where every interaction felt natural, as if the product were reading yourmind?Its a magical feeling, isnt it? Like the product was designed specifically for you, anticipating your every need. No hunting through menus, no awkward workarounds, no puzzling over how to accomplish whatever it is that youre trying to accomplisheverything justflows.Now think about the last time you had to learn a new tool. Recall that overwhelming feeling of staring at the endless navigation, the seemingly infinite buttons on every page, the dashboard that seems like its trying to tell you an answer, if only you knew how to speak its language.The difference between these experiences isnt about having more or fewer capabilities. Its about how naturally those capabilities fit into the way youwork.Thats the power of experience-driven design, and it hinges on a simple but profoundconcept:Features shouldnt feel like features.This isnt just wordplay. This is a fundamental shift in how you should think about building productsone that separates truly great products from the endless parade of feature-rich but painful-to-use tools that dominate mostmarkets.Think about it this way: When you build features, youre asking users to learn your product. When you craft experiences, youre adapting your product to how users already work. The best products dont feel like collections of features to be learnedthey feel like natural extensions of each users workflow. By shifting from feature-centric to experience-driven design, you stop adding complexity to your product and start removing friction from your userslives.Features thatarentWe often think of features as distinct, self-contained units of functionality. Theyre the bullet points on a product roadmap, the items in a changelog, the callouts in a monthly newsletter.And they are indeed all thosethings.Experiences can also be all those things, of course. But what makes them different is the way we think aboutthem.When you just list out the things youre building (in those aforementioned roadmaps, changelogs, and newsletters), its easy for it all to become a jumbled mess disconnected from the most important part of the product-building equation: theuser.But when you start from the perspective of the user, its not about the lists of things youre doing anymore. It becomes not just about the problems being solved, but how the pain points are being addressed and the feeling of how it all comes together into a cohesiveproduct.A feature is something usersuse.An experience is something users seamlessly engage with as they accomplish theirgoals.Both solve the problem. But one does it on the usersterms.An exampleLet me illustrate by way of example. (Im sure youve seen the below competing concepts in various tools youve usedyou tell me which isbetter.)Imagine youre writing a comment in your task management tool, and you want to add an image for context. You drag from your desktop into the description area, and its addedin-line.Lets go to the other end of spectrum. You try to drag & drop, but you get a little you cant drop that here icon. You realize theres an upload media button, which you click, and a select-your-file modal pops open. You navigate through your computers file hierarchy, double click, and your image is loaded as an attachment to the task, available at the bottom of the description with no context whatsoever as to what it relates to or why itsthere.Both of these are features, of coursea product manager prioritized solving a pain point, a designer conceptualized the idea, an engineer built the functionality into thetool.And both solve the need (to add images to atask).But one is a feature that very much feels like afeature.Whereas the other? The other is a feature you barely feel because its an experience. It just feels right like a natural extension of the context youre already in exactly what youd expect to happen if you performed thataction.That difference is features vs. experiences in a nutshell.Feature factoriesbadGo pull up your product roadmap. I imagine it has a pretty specific list of things you plan on building, something likethis:Calendar integrationCustom databasefieldsAlerts systemExport toolDashboardDark modeEtc.Each item is a feature that someone asked for, or that a competitor already has, or that seemed like a good idea during that one meeting where everyone was hopped up on caffeine and enthusiasm.The problem isnt that these are bad ideasIm sure theyre great! The problem is that youre thinking about them as features to be shipped rather than experiences to becrafted.Go back to that listdoes any of that really tell you whatsneeded?What does the calendar integration need todo?Do you need a custom fields features, or do you just need to add a few common fields that were left out of the initialscope?What are those alerts going to alert about? Will users actually see them in your tool, or should they end up in Slack (or wherever else your usersare)?Do people need to export their data, or just get it into their BItool?What questions are going to be answered by the dashboard? Is a dashboard the right place to answer those questions?Are your users the highly technical kind that expect dark mode in all their tools, or is it just that your CEO wants dark mode because they heard its all therage?Youre creating a product that feels like it was assembled from a box of random parts rather than designed as a cohesivewhole.And as such, you keep ending upwithFeature bloat: Every piece of functionality that a single person ever wanted (and yet somehow, paradoxically, nobody can do what they need todo)Inconsistency: Each feature feels different than the last, because each one was built to function in a way perfectly ideal for itself on its own, without consideration for how it fits into the biggerpictureDecreased usability & horrible UX: A cluttered interface with too many options, and nobody can find the functionality theyneedIf you think about features in terms of raw functionalityjust adding more buttons, pages, capabilitiesyou end up with a feature factory. This is where products become bloated, complex, unusablemesses.Experience-driven designgoodThe best features are the ones which users dont even realize theyre using as they use them. Theyre the ones that feel so natural, so obvious, that users would be surprised to learn they werent alwaysthere.Think about your smartphones keyboard. Remember when it didnt have swipe-to-text or speech-to-text? When it didnt autosuggest the perfect emoji? When it didnt automatically correct your typos? Ducking right youdo!Those arent feature anymoretheyre just how keyboards work.Emoji keyboardfeature. Emoji autosuggestexperience.Old school autocorrect (replace specific sets of characters with specific other sets of characters)feature. Current autocorrect (just do it)experience.Individually press every single individual letter like a plebeianfeature. Swipe- or speech-to-textexperience.Technically possiblefeature.Just worksexperience.Thats what you need to aim for. Not features that users have to seek out and learn to use, but experiences that just work the way users expect them towork.Some more examples foryou:Documents that save automatically, instead of requiring a save button (remember when youd lose your 20-page essay if you forgot to hit ctrl-s? Pepperidge Farm remembers)Search results that update as you type, instead of requiring you to hit enter (minimize thoseclicks)Copying on your phone and pasting on your laptop (i.e., universal clipboard), instead of texting yourself or sending yourself anemailForms that remember what you entered even if you accidentally navigate away, instead of losing your work and having to start over (or just give up and neversubmit)Code editors that format your code as you type, instead of wasting time debating the entire engineering team on the virtues of tabs vs.spacesDashboards that adjust their time range to automatically include today, instead of having to press in the last month every single damn time you open the dashboardAgile task management tooling that reminds you about upcoming holidays during Sprint Planning, instead of starting the sprint and realizing immediately after that youre destined to fail to hit your goals(sigh)Notice the pattern? None of these feel like features because theyre not adding new things for users to dotheyre removing friction from things users are alreadydoing.If you think about features in terms of experiences, you focus on providing value in the most natural and intuitive way possible. You find the best way to help users help themselves, as opposed to just adding yet another button amidst a sea ofbuttons.How to make features disappearOkay, so features bad / experiences good. How do you turn a feature factory into an experience studio?1. Understand the story behind theneedStop asking what features do our customers want?thats like asking what tools to buy before you know what youre building.Instead, digdeeper:What is the user actually trying to accomplish? Not just the immediate task, but the broadergoal.Why is this particular need so important to the user? This goes beyond the what do they say they want and into the but seriously, why do they actually wantit.What is it about the user that makes them them? What is their role? How does that impact what they need or what they know or how theythink?How does this need fit into the users broader workflow? What are they trying to do right before and after this particular task? This can easily influence the understanding of the why and the solution that becomes thehow.[If youre astute, you may have noticed really this all comes down to understanding the jobstory.]The best product experiences come from understanding the complete context of user needs, not just the specificrequest.2. Look for frictionpointsThis is your treasure mapX marks the bad-user-experience-that-could-be-better. While users might not be great at telling you whats wrong, their behavior leaves clues everywhere. Your job is to be a product detective, hunting down these moments of frustration before users have to complain aboutthem.Flow disruptions: Every time a user has to stop what theyre doing and think about a next step that needs taking (especially seemingly unnecessary ones), youve found a friction point. Why should they have to remember to save? Why should they need to manuallysync?Cognitive overhead: What are users forced to remember or track? Those task ids they keep copying and pasting everywhere? The three difference places they need to update every time something changes?Repetitive actions: If users are doing the same thing over, and over, and over againthats a red flag. These are ripe opportunities for behavior that could at least be simplified, if not fully automated.I wish it just moments: These are pure gold. This is users telling you exactly where your product is falling short, where potentially even a slight tweak or tiny improvement could turn the unnatural into magic. (Though, be sure to pay attention to not just what theyre wishing for, but also why they wish forit.)Every point of friction is an opportunity to transform a clunky feature into an invisible experience.3. Remove before youaddThis may be counterintuitive for most product teams, but its absolutely crucial. Before you add anything, think:Can we eliminate (or hide) a feature without causing any heartache? Are there features which are used by effectively 0% of your user base (or low enough that youre not worried about it)? Other features will automatically be easier to discover/locate and use simply by getting rid of features that are in theway.Can we automate what users are doing manually? Look for patterns in behavior that could theoretically be handled by the system, automatically. If users always the same three actions in sequence, maybe that should be one automated flowwhether requiring one button press somewhere, orevenCan we make this happen in the background? Features that require user intervention feel like features. Things that just happen feel likemagic.Can we combine multiple features into one seamless experience? Instead of having a whole feature for each related item, can we create one intuitive flow that handles everything? (In its simplest form, this can come down to solutions like putting like functionality into a single overflowmenu.)The most elegant solutions often involve removing complexity rather than adding features.4. Make it feelnaturalThis is where we get more into art than science. You want your product to feel it couldnt possibly work any otherway.Think in terms of magic: If you had a magic wand, how would a given feature work? That idea you have in your head is probably closer to what users actually want than whatever specific feature they may be requesting. And then, the toughest part: how can you close the gap between magic andreality?Maintain context: Features that pull users out of their flow feel like features. Can the-thing-theyre-trying-to-do happen right where they alreadyare?Embrace progressive disclosure: Not everything needs to be visible all the time. Yes, creating a single page with a button for every possible user need means that every possible user need is only a single click awaybut that doesnt sound like a good experience, now doesit?Design as if documentation doesnt exist: Users shouldnt need a manual to figure out how to use your product. The right action should feel obvious at the righttime.Natural experiences feel like they were designed specifically for each users uniqueneeds.5. Test the invisibilityHeres how to know if youve succeeded, or if you still have more work to do (but note you always have more work todo):Watch new users: If they have to ask how to do something, it probably still feels too much like afeature.Listen for silence: The best features often generate the least feedback because they justwork.Track feature discovery: How are users finding particular functionality? Through documentation (bad), or through exploration (good)?Look for natural adoption: Are existing users organically discovering and using the feature without prompting? (I.e., get rid of those look over here, new feature alert banners and callouts andmodals.)Monitor feature mentions: In user interviews, do they talk about a capability as a feature, or just as part of how they work? This comes down to the specific wording they useand then I check our progress on the home screen is indicative of an experience, whereas and then I open up the dashboard, change the time range to include today, and click on the revenue metric icon sounds like afeature.The truest sign of success is when users cant imagine how they worked without a feature, yet also cant remember specifically when they started usingit.Break freeYour product doesnt need more features. It needs more moments where users, instead of asking how do I do that?, say of course it works that way (or ideally, never say anything atall).The next time youre running through your roadmap of features, try this exercise: Take each item, and ask how can we make the need for this disappear? Not by ignoring it, of course, but by so seamlessly integrating it into the user experience that nobody even notices itsthere.This is going to require a mindset shift, but youll be able to get there if youtry.Dig into why your users need certain functionality in the first place (its often not what theyre explicitly askingfor)Figure out where theyre struggling or frustrated (even if they dont tell you with theirwords)Get out of their way by removing stuff they dont need (you dont have to solve every problem for everyuser)Make everything that remains feel natural (akamagic)Prove to yourself that the changes are working (and then go back to step1)All this might mean shipping slower. It might mean saying no more often. It might mean completely rethinking parts of yourproduct.But the payoff? A product that users love without knowing why. Tools that feel like they were built just for them. Experiences so natural that users cant imagine any other solution.Because the best features arent features at alltheyre just the way things shouldwork.Speaking of seamless experiences (and the opposite) Are you tired of fighting with Jiras UI? I get it. Thats why were building Momentumits Jira on the backend, but with a UX that actually helps you do agile. No migration necessary. Curious? Join the waitlist.Features shouldnt feel like features was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

From impostor syndrome to cognitive overloadmastering the invisible forces that prevent projectsuccessSourceProgrammerHumor subredditRemember this sensation: in your mind, a new brilliant project idea sparks, youre burning with excitement and 200% engaged into work, until another project/framework/technology beckons. And I totally get itits always greener on the other side. Notebooks are filled with half-finished concepts, Github repos multiply with ambitious beginnings that wont ever reach their final stage. What starts as passionate creativity often transforms into a stockpile of unfinished potential, an accumulation of partially constructed projects. Sounds familiar, doesnt it? Well, its not just you. In fact, its quitecommon.Our relationship with incomplete work is far more nuanced than simple procrastination. Its a complex relationship of creativity, neurological reward systems, and the profound psychology of potential. When we understand how it works, we can transform seemingly scattered efforts into a powerful attribute of self-improvement.Look at this from a different angle: those arent graveyards of failed projects, but the living laboratories. Each unfinished activity represents a moment of intellectual curiosity frozen in time. Curious? Great! Lets dive into the complex psychological and neurological mechanisms driving technological exploration.Short track:Jump right to this chapterStrategies for Meaningful Project Development.The Neurological Roots of Project IncompletionTo try and reveal the roots of the new-projects-problem, well explore some ideas, backed up by psychological and neuroscientific works.Dopamine-Driven Novelty Seeking: The Neural Reward CircuitryOur brain is evolutionarily wired to seek novelty as a survival mechanism. Dr. Andrew Huberman explains in his neuroscience study that this novelty-seeking behavior stems from our brains dopamine reward system, which creates a powerful neurochemical response to new experiences.Dopamine is a neurotransmitter. It is involved in many brain functions and well-known for its role in movement, motivation, and addiction.Each new technological discovery triggers a dopamine release, creating a neurochemical reward that far exceeds the more mundane satisfaction of completing existing work. Our neural circuits are designed to anticipate and seek out potential rewards, constantly pushing us towards new and exciting possibilities.Dopamine reward pathway in a simple form. Sourceknowingneurons.comNaturally chasing neural circuits satisfaction, we tendto:alternate projects/technologies/frameworks/etc, driven by the brains reward prediction mechanismpursue bleeding-edge and freshly emerging libraries and languagesstart greenfield projects instead of maintaining existingreposimmediately hop on to the new technique after a workshop/conference/articleThis naturally applies beyond the hobby or side projects. Remember when half-way through refactoring of some legacy codebase you discover a new tech that supposedly speeds up your work and potentially grants your project 50% performance kick?Dr. David Eagleman and his bestseller book Incognito: The Secret Lives of TheBrainIn his book, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, Dr. David Eagleman describes a neural plasticity effect of activation of our brains novelty circuits. From developers perspective the new technology seems then more exciting and potentially more valuable than the current mundanework.Complexity Overwhelm and Cognitive LoadWhile novelty seeking tends to propagate positive experiences, their amount can become a challenge. Especially when work is paralleled and/or task-switching engaged. Our brain has limited working memory capacity, a concept extensively explored quite a while ago by John Sweller in his Cognitive Load Theory. Relatively recent famous work by Dr. Daniel KahnemanThinking, Fast and Slowfurther elaborates on how our cognitive resources become depleted when faced with complex problem-solving tasks.Dr. Daniel Kahneman and his bestseller Thinking Fast andSlowFor developers, this can be simply demonstrated as a progressive mental exhaustion. The brains working memory acts like a small workspace that becomes quickly overwhelmed by intricate technical challenges. As project complexity increases, cognitive load creates a psychological defense mechanism of avoidance and task-switching. And, unfortunately, weve often beenthere:initial excitement is replaced with cognitive exhaustionsome complex architectural decisions become paralyzingtechnical debt creates increasing mentalfrictionproject scope tends to become overestimatedThe prefrontal cortex, responsible for executive function, becomes progressively taxed. Stress and complexity directly impact our brains ability to maintain focus and execute complex tasks. While some of these statements look obvious, there are probably even more deeply rooted brain mechanisms worth exploring. Well touch them in the nextsection.Fear-Based Project Avoidance and Psychological BarriersFear is a primal emotion that shapes our most intimate professional decisions. Applied to our realm, fear transforms from a basic survival mechanism into a psychological barrier that can paralyze even the most talented developers. Here are just a couple of the most common patterns that we can experience.Perfectionism ParalysisDr. Pauline Rose Clances groundbreaking research on the Impostor Phenomenon provides insight into this challenge. The fear of imperfect implementation stems from a deep-seated psychological mechanism where developers:doubt their technical capabilitiesengage in constant reevaluation or refactoring without meaningful progresscompare potential output to an idealized mentalmodelImpostor SyndromeGoing further with the impostor syndrome, Mike Cannon-Brookes, in his influential TED Talk, describes it as a universal experience among high-achieving professionals. Often met between writers, artists, various creators, and of course developers this resultsin:persistent doubt about technical abilitiesfear of external judgment and following blockerspreventing project completion to avoid potential criticismMike Cannon-Brookes on the TED Talk Imposter SyndromeTechnology Obsolescence AnxietyDr. Cal Newports work on deep work and technological anxiety suggests that this fear is rooted in our rapidly changing technological landscape. Cobol, Perl and to the very recent time React.js developers are probably on the safe side in this regard. Nevertheless, jokes (?) aside, some of you can remember:constant worry about implementation becomingoutdatedperpetual desire to incorporate latest best practicesendless loop of one more optimizationThe Incompleteness AddictionThe quagmire of perpetual technological improvements goes arm-in-arm with another concept, hinted on previously. Unfinished projects represent infinite potential. Completion on the other hand means confronting actual versus imagined capabilities, which can be psychologically threatening.James Clear and his book Atomic Habits. Sourcepenguinrandomhouse.comJames Clear touches that aspect of human behaviour in the popular book Atomic Habits. He explores how our brains are wired to find comfort in potential rather than finality. This mechanism protects the developers self-image by maintaining the project in a state of perpetual promise, avoiding the potential disappointment of real-world constraints and limitations.If you find yourself in the place of endless proof-of-concept development or exploring theories over practical implementations or initializing multiple project versions without finalization you definitely know whats this is about. These neurological and psychological mechanisms arent weaknesses but sophisticated cognitive strategies.And you know what else? You are not alone struggling with fear of accomplishment, collecting numerous incomplete projects or hopping styles, genres and technologies. You are, in fact, in a legendary company.Great Minds and Unfinished SymphoniesConsider Leonardo da Vinci, whose notebooks were living documents of boundless intellectual exploration. He is known primarily as painter; but as a draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect he recorded 13000 pages of studies. Needless to say, majority of those works was unfinished. His approach reveals a critical insight: transformative developers are not those who persistently complete every project, but those who remain curious and adaptable.Franz Kafka was the writer and an existential experimenter. Kafka didnt write storieshe conducted psychological experiments. His fragmented manuscripts werent incompletethey were deliberate explorations of human uncertainty. The Dante and one of the greatest writers of the 20th century finished none of his full-length novels and burned around 90 percent of his work, leaving his dear friend Max Brod thousands of drafts after hisdeathIf you arent familiar with Sir Alfred Hitchcockthe film director and the technological innovator, you would certainly recognize his movie by the iconicscene.Shower killer scene from the movie Psycho (1960) by Alfred HitchcockFor Hitchcock, each film was an experimental ground. He didnt just create movies; he continuously reimagined the language and shape of modern cinema as we know it. And this next quote is particularly curious, Im sure it resonates in some ofyou:Once the screenplay is finished, Id just as soon not make the film at all. All the fun is over. <> When you finish the script, the film is perfect. But in shooting it you lose perhaps 40 per cent of your original conception.For Frida Kahlo, the personal technologist, art was a constant negotiation between personal narrative and technical exploration. She is famous for autobiographical paintings, where each painting was a technological and emotional experiment. Kahlos work has been celebrated internationally as emblematic of Mexican national and Indigenous traditions and by feminists for what is seen as its uncompromising depiction of the female experience andform.Some self-portraits of Frida Kahlo in a chronological orderIn every creative domain, in every country there are famous figures, known for their works and, incidentally, working methodology. We only met a fracture of a percent of them in this article and I invite you to study more for the unbelievable insights.While dopamine-driven novelty seeking and cognitive challenges are not obstacles, but intricate neural mechanisms that have driven human innovation, what if they really pose a problem of self-rumination cycles and blocking you from progression to the next level? Well now explore several critical strategies that can help you to channel your creative energy into meaningful outcomes.Strategies for Meaningful Project DevelopmentProgressive RenderingInspired by artistic techniques and incorporated in JPEG technology, progressive rendering is a methodological approach to project development that prioritizes incremental progress over perfection from the getgo.1. Draw the circles. 2. Draw the rest of theowlConsider the two practical phasessketch and layering.In the sketch phase you create the most viable version of the project, focusing on the core functionality and basic structure. You simply dont need anything else beyond fundamental architecture and primary usability. If its a UI library, forget rounding and line height alignmentfocus on API, build process and delivery. If its a landing page, dont mind the parallax effect and concentrate your efforts on the scalable accessible mobile-first layout.In the layering phase you progressively (layer by layer, iteration by iteration) add complexity and refinement, implementing features in order of priority and impact. At the end of each iteration you need to validate it against the final project vision to understand the scope of the next layer. This stage is crucial, as taking a larger scope into the next iteration (adding several features or underestimated chunk of work) can result in unexpected blockers following by scattered effort, losing focus, momentum, flow and satisfaction from the previously completed steps.The benefits of this technique are tremendous:it reduces cognitive overloadit provides early validation of the coreconceptit creates tangible progress that motivates toward further developmentit allows for flexible adaptation as project understanding hardensI foresee the silent questiondid you just reinvent Scrum?! interrobang, interrobang. Well, fair enough, its one of the key aspects. However, in practice working by Scrum doesnt always mean actually understanding it. Let alone personal projects management when you are working alone constantly changing hats of angel ventures, stakeholders, product owners, scrum masters AND developers. But if you master or at least exercise that, your personal workflow improvements will be mirrored and rewarded as you grow professionally.Intentional PruningContinuing with the efficient practices for project management, intentional pruning is a disciplined approach that involves deliberately limiting project scope to ensure meaningful completion. In simpletermsCut down everything enticing and shiny in favor of functional and achievable!In order to apply this practice, stick to the following:evaluate features based on the core objectivesprioritize functionalities with the highest uservalueruthlessly eliminate nice-to-have-sThe latter is probably the hardest, at least from a personal experienceHowever, once you push through this once or twice (practice makes perfect!), youll see immense benefit. Not only you will be able to finish current projects, but your planning and architecture skills will be honed again and again, creating a great working habit. Eventually, feature elimination will be recognized as strategic optimization, notfailure.Sometimes you need to let go to see the wood for thetrees.Graceful ProjectClosureLike not every story ends happily ever after, not every project is meant to reach full completion, and acknowledging this is a mark of personal and professional maturity. This is essentially letting go on a BIGGERscale.To employ this practice you should most probably find yourself in a place of supporting multiple projects in parallel and finding hard time to either complete them or switch to the newones.Tempered by the feature-culling experience you should be prepared to take the nextsteps:be honest with yourself, and conduct an objective project assessmentidentify and extract the learning opportunities from unfinished workdocument findings and salvage resources for the future applicationsIn order to drop the guilt and transform disappointment intro strategic insight, you will need to separate personal worth from project outcomes and view unfinished work as learning experience. Each proper project closure will be identified as another instrument in a toolbox of a professional, who values exploration and iteration.In ConclusionHaving multiple unfinished projects is way more nuanced than simple procrastination. It often seems as a professional shortcoming and understandably is self-joked upon. But as weve explored together this is both personal challenge and a fundamental aspect of human creative cognition.Source - ProgrammerHumor subredditThis sometimes poses a real issue for developers and creative minds, leading to professional stagnation, reduced productivity and personal frustration. However, by understanding the underlying psychological and neurological mechanisms, we can transform this pattern from a potential limitation into a strategic instrument of self development.Engage careful analysis, self-awareness and several targeted techniques, and it will help you to channel your creative impulses more effectively, balancing with meaningful execution. The goal is not about a perfect completion, but meaningful progress. Stay curious and systematic and you willsucceed!Thank you for reading! If you find article useful please support by share and (yes, you can do multiple). This significantly helps with the inspiration for new articles.Stay tuned formore!Beyond procrastination: the cognitive reasons behind unfinished projects was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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And why you shouldnt trust themblindlySource: Anthropics Claude 3.5 Sonnet blogpostDisclaimer: The opinions stated here are my own, not necessarily those of my employer.Every once in a while, theres an announcement about a new model. Its always better than its predecessor and its also better than all of the other frontier models in the market. The announcement comes with a table that looks likethis:The high-level message delivered here is we are better than everyone else at almost everything.But how exactly is this claim made? What do these numbers mean? Can you take them at face value? Lets break itdown.Why BenchmarksImagine youre selling a car and you want to claim that its the best car on the market. However, potential buyers look for different featuressome want the safest car, while others want the fastest. To convince the broadest audience to choose your car, you compare it against competitors using universally understood data: Safety rating, Fuel efficiency, 0-to-60 time,etc.LLM Benchmarks serve a similar purpose. They are standardized tests and datasets designed to evaluate the performance of models across various tasks. They provide metrics and criteria to compare different models, ensuring consistency and objectivity in assessments.How Benchmarks WorkEach Benchmark evaluates a capability that the LLM might be used for. HumanEval, for example, tests the models ability to write code. It consists of a set of 164 programming challenges (ex: finding a substring within a large string) and uses unit tests to check the functional correctness of generated code.Another example is Reasoning, which can be defined in different ways. For the purposes of benchmarking, its defined as the ability to answer hard, complex questions that require step-by-step deduction and analyzing data. Heres an example: Two quantum states with energies E1 and E2 have a lifetime of 10^-9 sec and 10^-8 sec, respectively. We want to clearly distinguish these two energy levels. Which one of the following options could be their energy difference so that they be clearly resolved? This question will sound hard unless youre a physicist (or if you enjoy devouring books about quantum mechanics for some reason). It was from the GPQA benchmark, which has 448 such questions across different fields. Models receive a score based on how many questions they answer correctly.Other tests include Language understanding (MMLU) and Math problem solving (MATH). They are similar tests with other types of questions. But within each test, its the same set of questions that every model is evaluated against. This is how consistency is maintained (not unlike the idea of humans taking standardized tests).CoT &Few-shotZooming into the same ClaudetableFew-shot (like 3-shot) refers to the amount of examples that were given to the model to better understand the task. 0-shot means no examples were given. CoT refers to Chain-of-Thought, where the model is asked to explain its reasoning process. CoT and examples can help improve response quality for certain tasks, which is why they are separately highlighted in benchmark results. Heres an example I got from ChatGPT to explainCoT:The problem with these BenchmarksLack of transparencyWe dont know how a model was trained. We dont know how the benchmark tests were run. Then how can we say for sure that the model was not trained on the testing data? This issue is called contamination, which is a common problem in Machine Learning.The sheer amount of data that LLMs are trained on has made it impossibly hard to detect or avoid this problem. Its the human equivalent of finding out all the questions before the day of theexam.Do these exams really measure ability or intelligence?Its likely that a significant portion of benchmark results can be explained by the ability of LLMs to memorize vast amounts of data. Then, are they really more capable than humans just because they got a better score? Heres another exampleThere was news last year of ChatGPT acing the LSAT. Its a pretty impressive feat, except when you think about (a) The fact that the LSAT usually contains questions from previous years and (b) How LSAT questions from previous years are freely available all over the internet. If ChatGPT aced the LSAT after seeing the questions before the test, would you still replace your lawyer withit?How to choose foryourselfIf youre a developer or a team trying to use AI in your product, you need to construct your own evaluation. This evaluation needs to be focused on the use cases that matter to you. The dataset needs to be customized based on your requirements.An exampleIf you want to automate customer service for your business, build a dataset of questions that your customers might ask. Then, build a system to prompt any LLM with these questions and score the answers they give you. Run this activity between the models you are considering and then make yourchoice.If youre an individual user looking to decide if you need to switch between Claude and ChatGPT, you can build a set of your most commonly used prompts (write a cover letter, generate an image of, etc) and compare the different responses before making your decision. Even if the results arent statistically significant (unless you ask a lot of questions and repeat this process multiple times), its a controllable system that can explain your decision making. IMO, its much better than opaque benchmarking processes run by companies that are selling models toyou.Further reading on running evaluations can be found here. Better writing on the problems with benchmarks can be found here andhere.Disclaimer: The opinions stated here are my own, not necessarily those of my employer.Please consider subscribing to my substack if you liked this article. Thankyou!How to read LLM benchmarks was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Weekly curated resources for designersthinkers andmakers.Since Spotify Wrapped dropped almost a decade ago, theres been a growing demand for data-driven year-in-review features. These summaries have evolved into cultural touchstones, offering more than just statisticsthey provide moments of self-reflection and shareable pride.While Spotify celebrates music, other platforms have embraced the concept for their niches, and Duolingos Year in Review is no exception. By turning language learning into a gamified, sharable experience, Duolingo has created its own version of Wrapped thats fun, whilst highlighting the joy of progress and the power of celebrating educational milestones.Has Duolingos Year in Review outshone Spotify Wrapped? By SophiaOmarjiMake user research a core driver of organizational success [Sponsored] Written by UX leaders for UX leaders, Mazes new playbook explores key shifts in user research and how to elevate the practice from a support function to a strategic partner. Learn how to lead your team through change and unlock new opportunities.Editor picksWhy do people criticize Jaguars rebranding? Cultural convergence and the shift to minimalism.By ElvisHsiaoThe next era of design is intent-driven How adaptive UIs are transforming design.By VamsiBatchuAnother year, another Figma pricing update Figma is changing its pricing strategy again.By AlliePaschalThe UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about theirwork.State of UX in 2025: a love letter about changeMake methinkThe most surprising tech champions of 2024 Lesser-known tech companies were rewarded by changing headwinds outside the West this year. Indias homegrown EV industry, a Chinese video game that became a soft power success, and a U.S.-based walkie-talkie app that proved unexpectedly popular in Kenya are some of Rest of Worlds most surprising winners in global tech in2024.Power of metaphors in human-AI interaction Digital companions are currently the dominant metaphor for understanding AI systems. However, as the field of generative AI continues to evolve, its crucial to examine how we frame and comprehend these technologies. This isnt merely an academic exerciseit will influence how we develop, interact with, and regulateAI.A linkless internet We are at a moment in the history of the web in which the link itselfthe countless connections made by website creators, the endless tapestry of ideas woven together throughout the webis in danger of going extinct. So its pertinent to ask: how did links come to represent information in the first place? And whats at stake in the movement away from links toward AI chat interfaces?Little gems thisweekGoodbye, immortal design By Rita Kind-EnvyThe phone to save us from our phones By TomSeipleYes, I would buy a Jaguar Type 00 By NeelDozomeTools and resourcesHow Ladder onboards and keeps users engaged Quick onboarding, progressive disclosure, and more.By Daniel deMelloHow to explore a product like Sherlock? A diamond in the crown of all testing techniques: exploratory testing.By JuliaKocbekUnderstanding priority Or the next step to go from UX to Product Design.By KaiWongSupport the newsletterIf you find our content helpful, heres how you can supportus:Check out this weeks sponsor to support their worktooForward this email to a friend and invite them to subscribeSponsor aneditionDuolingo wrapped, intent-driven UX, Figma pricing update was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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How can you craft color palettes that balance accessibility, brand identity, andscale?Light and dark mode color palettes for my personal website set against an abstract backdrop.Why another color paletteguide?At first glance, color palette generation might be spretty straightforward. Why not just use a fancy generator likeCoolors?The reality for enterprise design is more complex. While consumer-facing design tools prioritize aesthetic appeal, enterprise applications require color palettesthat:Align with brand guidelinesMeet accessibility standardsSupport whitelabelingScale for designsystemsMost color generators and even designers fall short of these demanding requirements. Theyre great for personal projects or quick mockups, but enterprise design requires a more methodical approach.ObjectivesScreenshots of my personal website in light and darkmode.Ill walk you through how I created two color palettes for my personal website; one for light mode and one for dark mode. Each set includes:Canvas colorDefault accentcolorSubdued accentcolorDefault neutralcolorSubdued neutralcolorThis limited set works for my personal website and excludes semantic, usage, or interaction state colors. Ill explain each colors role as we proceed. Lets dive rightin.Theres almost always a startingcolorContrary to some advice, designers rarely create palettes from scratch. Most often, we build on established brand guidelines. If thats your situation, youre inluck.Color swatch of my personal brand color and its HEXcode.In my case, I used #BA7542, a warm earthy tone that has been integral to my personal brand from the start. Whether your brand has one signature color like Spotifys green or multiple like McDonalds red and yellow, this approach works with a single seed color for universal compatibility.The tool I recommend for finding colors is TPGis free Colour Contrast Analyser. However, any color contrast tool with input manipulation willsuffice.Screenshot of TPGis free Colour Contrast Analyser forMac.Establishing light modecolorsBaseline colorUsing the seed color directly isnt always feasible because it may fail accessibility requirements. Consider these popular brand colors that dont meet WCAG 2.1s AA standards for regulartext:Color swatches of popular brands and their respective HEX codes, showing their failure to meet WCAG 2.1s AA standards for regulartext.To ensure compliance, establish a baseline color by adjusting the seed colors lightness in a contrast tool until it meets WCAG 2.1s minimum requirement for regular text against a white background. This baseline color will serve as the foundation for all othercolors.Canvas colorTo find this color, use the baseline color as the foreground and white as the background in your contrast tool. Increase the foregrounds lightness until the two colors have a 1.1:1 contrast ratiojust enough to hint atcolor.Default and subdued accentcolorsAccent colors draw attention to actionable elements like buttons and links. Two levels of contrastdefault and subduedhelp create visual hierarchy:Default accent: Reduce the baselines lightness until it has a 1.7:1 contrast ratio against the canvascolor.Subdued accent: Lower the alpha (opacity) of the default accent until it meets WCAG 2.1s AA minimum contrast ratio for text against the canvascolor.I have a habit of using opacity as a future-proofing strategy. I briefly get into that in my post Designing Hazels Accessible ColorSystem.Default and subuded neutralcolorsNeutral colors serve as the default for most content, much like text printed onpaper.Default neutral: Reduce the default accents lightness until it achieves a 1.3:1 contrast ratio againstblack.Subdued neutral: Lower the alpha of the default neutral until it meets WCAG 2.1s AA contrast ratio against the canvascolor.Establishing dark modecolorsBaseline colorDark mode generally requires less saturation to prevent eye strain and improve accessibility. Start by reducing the light mode baselines saturation by 33%. Then adjust its lightness until it meets WCAG 2.1s minimum contrast requirement for regular text against a black background.Canvas colorFor simplicy, reuse the light modes default neutralcolor.Default and subdued accentcolorsIn dark mode, invert the light mode formulas:Default accent: Increase the dark mode baselines lightness until it achieves a 1.7:1 contrast ratio against the canvascolor.Subdued accent: Reduce the alpha of the default accent until it meets WCAG 2.1s AA minimum contrast ratio against the canvascolor.Default and subdued neutralcolorsAgain, invert the light mode formulas:Default neutral: Increase the default accents lightness until it has a 1.3:1 contrast ratio againstwhite.Subdued neutral: Lower the alpha of the default neutral until it meets WCAG 2.1s AA contrast ratio against the canvascolor.Quick recapBy following this systematic process, youll end up with a set of light and dark mode palettes.Light and dark mode color palettes for my personalwebsite.Admittedly, that was a lot to go through. So lets do a quick recap. First, lets establish that:The seed color is#BA7543.W2AA-CRTC is short for WCAG 2.1s AA minimum contrast ratio for text content.CR is short for contrast ratio.Here are the key steps in a singleview.Table outlining a step-by-step process for creating light and dark mode UI color palettes.For good measure, here are color palettes for the aforementioned brands, using the sameprocess.Light and dark mode color palettes for HomeDepot.Light and dark mode color palettes forSpotify.Light and dark mode color palettes forYouTube.Beyond thebasicsYou can extend this approach to meet the demands of complex enterprise applications, where the requirements go beyond basic color palettes. Enterprise needs ofteninvolve:Generating semantic colors: Expanding the palette to include semantic colors, such as those used for success, warning, or error states, ensuring clarity and consistency across the interface.Addressing WCAG standards for text and non-text elements: Meeting accessibility requirements for a wide variety of UI components, including icons, charts, and complex data visualizations, not justtext.Incorporating interaction states: Defining colors for hover, focus, active, and disabled states, which are essential for creating intuitive and responsive user interactions.Parting thoughtsKey takeawayWhen it comes to enterprise UI, creating a color palette isnt about aesthetics alone. Its about solving UX challenges methodically and for scale, often starting with a seed color from which you can derive all other colors to ensure accessibility and uniformity. You can and should tweak the rules to your liking so long as you apply them consistently.Automation potentialWhile the process involves careful manual tinkering with a color contrast tool, theres exciting potential for automation. Not only can this be useful for generating colors beyond the basics, but the approach has obvious applications for white-label contexts.Problematic colorsSome seed colors require alternative approaches. For one, theres the dark yellow problem. Another issue is that a seed color like red or green may conflict with semantic colors, such as error or success indicators.APCA changesthingsThese colors were calculated using WCAG 2s flawed contrast formula, which WCAG 3 aims to improve with the introduction of APCA. This new method will address the contrast formula flaws while also considering font size and weight to ensure sufficient readability. While Im unsure how this will impact my approach, Im eager to explore the changes when we cross thatbridge.Closing noteI hope this guide has provided you with a clear framework for creating UI color palettes for enterprise contexts. Whether youre working on a personal project or tackling a large-scale system, I trust these strategies will serve you well, if only as a source of inspiration for establishing your own strategy.Thanks for reading, Id love to hear how you apply these ideas in your ownwork!A systematic approach to generating enterprise UI color palettes was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Quick onboarding, progressive disclosure and innovative engagement features.Consumer mobile is a hard industry: high customer acquisition costs due to competition, retention challenges, niche addressable markets and many more obstacles.Growing sometimes involves hand to hand combat: Evan was willing to try anything to get users. When he was home in Pacific Palisades, he would go to the shopping mall and hand out flyers advertising Snapchat, said a former Snapchat executive about the initial growth of thecompany.But once in a while, an app crack thecode.They figure out a distribution channel, partner up with the right influencers, ship an amazing product and make itwork.Todays post is about one ofthose.Ladder is a coach-driven strength training app that was launched in 2019. During the last 5 years, it has become one of the best rated App Store apps in its category, grew 500% last year alone and raised a $12mm SeriesA.Patrick Murphy of Tapestry VC, a fund that participated in their latest round, summarizes the apps edgewell:Ladder has built engagement levers similar to social apps, but instead of selling your attention to advertisers, theyre genuinely helping you by keeping you excited to work out. We think its only a matter of time before Ladder is a household name in consumerfitnessFrom a UX perspective, lets see how they pull thatoff:By the end of this article youll notice theyve got a great product. But before sticking around, users need to experience it.For fitness apps, the Aha! Moment happens once they complete one workout (or more)thats when the apps dynamics become clearer. Ladders goal with their initial flow is to have users go through that experience as soon as possible.In growth speech, we want to shorten time-to-value, have users go through a fun workout and show them all the app has to tooffer.How Ladder gets usersinTo get you started, theres a quick 3-step video-driven sequence. What stands out here is how they do a very good job making onboarding easy and attractive:Explanations with videos are less boring than justtext.1 click and 3 screens between the splash screen and the next section of the app is a very easy set ofsteps.They present the concept of an influencer being the coach and that youll become part of a team. This is novel and creates a curiosity gaptheres something beyond just building a workoutplan.Great, but until now theyve only quickly introduced theapp.To highlight what I find interesting next, well need contrast.You see, most fitness apps ask tens of questions on the name of building your workout. Things like what are your goals?, have you worked out before? are common place. Frequently theres also a bothersome sequence asking for your weight, height, equipment andmore.Because of these unnecessary questions, onboarding becomes ashore.I registered to Ladders 4 main competitors and counted the amount of steps between download and beginning aworkout.The difference is startling:Ladders onboarding is much easier. The next screen after the 3-step introduction is a list with huge cards where you decide which goal resonates with you themost.One step, one clear decision.Its OK for Ladder to offer less customization because their value proposition is exactly around workout programs that fit a specificgoal.Through copy, they also reduce the perception of commitment needed to take each step. They let users know you can go back on your decision later on so its psychologically easier to moveforward.All that puts you in the right mental space to keep flowing through each onboarding step.I picked Coach Coreys Forged because becoming a part-time bodybuilder is every designers dream.Great, were insidenow.Getting people to do their firstworkoutWeve moved forward fast, but remember: theyre still trying to get us to do a couple of workouts. I didnt get any value from ityet.The Aha moment is when the user realizes the value in a product.- WesBushAfter picking my favorite program, the first thing I notice is that regardless of the team, every Welcome Workout is30.That makes the barrier to finish a workout very lowits reasonable for most people to fit that into their schedules and get started. Its a great way to shorten time-to-value.Another detail here is that many features are locked until you get your first workoutdone.This progressive disclosure approach creates curiosity. It makes users think what else is there to see about the app while also putting the main next action in focus (starting a workout).Multiple mentions about the notion that Im part of a team contributes to making me feel curious. I can see through the main section that I have teammates and wonder what that is as it is a novel concept from what Ive seen in multiple fitness apps homescreens.First workout and making people stickaroundOnce you get started, in-workout experience is overall good but not much different than others. Its a permission to play in the industry afterall.Now, there are some details that make it standout.First, the app further introduces us the idea of teammates through a reaction featurea way other users can cheer you on mid-workout, triggering a lively emoji explosion on yourscreen.When youre done, youre given a tally of all the support you received. It serves as a visible reminder that your teammates digitally have yourback.Theres also a shared image board where you can post a post-workout picture.Lots of teammates share and it looks like a virtual celebration wall, creating sense of bond. Being part of this tribe feels engaging and motivating, theres a sense that youre on a team that is in a similarjourney.Ladder also does a great job reinforcing your progress: streaks are a popular gamification feature but they can backfire you missit.As UX consultant Peter Ramsey putsit:As the value of a streak increases, you want the cost of losing that streak to increase too. Thats why they work. But as a result, if they do lose their streak, the user now has to incur or suffer the thing that they were trying toavoid.To solve for that, Ladder highlights different types of progress, not juststreaks.Whether you hit a new milestone, spent >100 calories or simply showed up, they make it clear that a win is awin.After acknowledging all you gained, youre back on the homepage.With the first workout done users get access to more features. That allows us to see how big of an importance they put on engagement, community and social features.Out of their 4 main tabs, 2 are related to the notion of teams and being social (chat tab and teamtab).And thats likely a big part of theirsuccess.I spent time going through Reddit, Social Media comments and App Store reviews, and most of users mention Teams and Coaches as part of the reason they lovedLadder.It makes sense. Fitness journeys can be lonely: you, the gym, the treadmill, headphones and thats it. Their well executed social features makes us feel were on a path and have others by ourside.Premium Pricing for a PremiumProductAfter youve gone through the Welcome workout, they prompt you to pay for the subscriptiontheres a free trial option but no freeplan.It stood out to me how much more it costs when compared to its competitors.Growing fast while being the most expensive option in your category is quite an accomplishment, but to me it is not surprising atall.When you compare it to the more generic, faceless apps in the space, its clear why Ladder can thrive while charging$180.From the moment you hit the splash screen, the design quality of the app stands out. The UI is clean, intuitive, easy to use. They also leverage the charismatic, high-energy coaches well and add new layer of appeal, giving users the sense theyre part of something more exclusive and exciting. Its a high-value signalthis isnt just another fitnessapp.In the end, Ladders success shows how investing in design and UX can pay off. Theres a market for quality and some users are willing to pay a premium when an app goes beyond and deliver a truly engaging experience.I write frequently on products UX, design and growth. Sign up uxbreakdowns.com if you want to keep up todate!Lets connect on X aswell!How Ladder onboards and keeps users engaged was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Surprise! Figma is changing its pricing strategyagain.But this time, theyre forcing you to buy products you probably dont need. In 2024, we saw Figma enact its new seat structure to accommodate the launch of Dev Mode, which allowed Figma to begin charging for developers accessing design specs. But going into 2025, we have a new seat structure and pricing strategy to re-learn.Figmas December 10th announcement was a mixed bag of bummers and small victories for users. Although the price increase for the full seat is a huge disappointment, Figma actually listened to some feedback and is making changes to unintentional billing as well as a new workflow for external collaboration.Figma Slides user interface, image via FigmaLearnLets get into the Figma changes to expect in 2025 by reviewing the new seat structure and pricing, why there even is a price increase, and updates to billing for admins and freelancers.New Figma seat structure &pricingIf you havent seen the new Figma prices and seat terminology, I got you. But dont freak out yet; these prices wont take effect until March 11, 2025. So if you want to search for an alternative design tool, you have several months to find the right fit for you. And of course, if you have a free plan, the price increases wont affect you (hey, they didnt take thataway!).Before we get into the new prices, lets review the new seat structure. Earlier this year, Figma announced the 4 seats: full, dev mode, viewer, and viewer-restricted. Now the seats have changed to: full, dev, collab, and view. In summary, theyve added the collab seat, and merged viewer and viewer-restricted seats (the only difference was that viewers could self-upgrade to full; more on that in the Admin must approve seat upgrades section).Figmas new pricing strategy taking effect in March 2025, image viaFigmaBut heres the kickerthe price increasesthere are as follows for each Figma plan permonth:Full seatEnterprise: $75 to $90 (20% increase)Organization: $45 to $55 (22.2% increase)*Professional: $15 to $20 (33.3% increase)Dev seatEnterprise: $35 (no increase)Organization: $25 (no increase)*Professional: $15 (Dev seats were not included in this plan in2024)Collab seat (new seat type in2025)Enterprise: $5Organization: $5*Professional: $5View seatEnterprise: FreeOrganization: FreeProfessional: Free*Note: Professional plan prices vary depending on if you pay monthly or annually. I took the prices for paying monthly for the above values and percentages.If youre just NOT ok with the new prices, youre not the only one. The design community is pissed to say the least. The company I work for pays for my Figma account, but Im still shocked. And I truly feel for those who freelance and pay for their own tools; theyre the ones taking the biggest hit with a 33% price jump (I hope you get that tax deduction).You may be wondering, WHYYY?! Well, Figma has their reason and you probably wont likeit.Mandatory upgrade to Figma products you dontneedFigmas full seat will include access to Figma Design, Dev Mode, Figma Slides, and FigJam starting in March 2025, which is how theyre validating the significant price increase. As of today, Figma Slides has been free (since its in beta), and FigJam has been an add-on product. In 2025, youll have no choice but to pay extra for these secondary products. But will you actually use all these bells and whistles included?Personally, I have never used Figma Slides (Flides) or FigJam. For slide decks, I must use a company-branded template in Microsoft Powerpoint (not ideal, but it gets the job done). And for brainstorming workspaces, my company uses Miro (I love Miroits very intuitive).Example of a FigJam board, image viaFigmaMaybe you are like me or maybe you do use Figma Slides and/or FigJam. Regardless, most companies already have tools to cover these communication and collaboration needs. Most of us dont need a second solution forcefully thrown in ourlaps.Not only will this surge your monthly Figma bill, it will disrupt team collaboration. For instance, if a designer with a full seat decides to use FigJam (since theyll be able to), their project manager with a view seat will not be able to edit the FigJam board. So, theyll have to be upgraded to a collabseat.This all sounds pretty intentional to me. Im guessing Figma Slides and FigJam arent performing as expected, so theyre bundling all the products into one subscription (kind of like Adobes subscription model). As said before, there are many other tools already embedded in product teams processes that theyre trying to override. Figma Design is fantastic, but I just dont need these other products.Do you think Figma will build another product? Maybe Figma Project Management? Might I suggest, Figma Kanban or FigBan for thename.Admins will have to approve seatupgradesOver the last couple years, Figma received backlash from users who received higher bills than anticipatedcaused by users with a view seat unintentionally upgrading their accounts to full seats. One great thing that came from Figmas December 10th announcement was that they are allowing admins to approve or reject all user attempts toupgrade.Previously, admins could only prevent users from self-upgrading by giving users a viewer-restricted seat. But users with a view seat could still upgrade their account by simply making an edit to a file they were given Can edit permissions to or by clicking an Edit file button. To make matters worse, admins wouldnt be notified of the upgrades (no wonder they were surprised by their Figmabill).Users could have viewer or viewer-restricted seats, images via FigmaForumSoon, instead of upgrades being controlled by user actions, admins will have to approve every upgrade request before a user receives a paid seat (and it shows up on the bill). Even better, the user who requests the upgrade will be given temporary access to the seat they requested for 3days.This was a frustrating and deceptive UX pattern, so this is a huge win for admins of organization and enterprise plans, and will prevent errors and bills from skyrocketing.Connected Projects for freelancers &agenciesThough this was initially announced at the 2024 Config, Figma also mentioned the Connected Projects in the December 10th update. Figma has been a horrible experience for freelancers and agencies because they havent been able to collaborate without paying extra. If a freelancer, with their own Figma license, needed to access an agencys Figma file, the agency would have to add the freelancer as a full seat to their plan (multiplying licenses and burning money). So, Connected Projects is a means to alleviate this duplication and annoyance.Agencies have to add freelancers to their license in order to share Figma files, image via FigmaLearnConnected Projects will create a shared workspace between freelancers and agencies so they can collaborate with each other without requiring one freelancer to be added to multiple plans (like if they work with several agencies). Figma hasnt mentioned much else about this new feature, but they have allowed projects to be transferred across enterprise, organization, and professional plans.Though there isnt a set date for this to roll out other than coming later in 2025, we can be optimistic that Figma is at least addressing this major userneed.I know, a Figma price increase is not what anyone wanted going into 2025. On top of that, Figma is adopting a subscription model very similar to Adobes (the merger fell through, but the inspiration is strong). And though the new prices and reason for doing so suck, Figma has taken feedback to make change for thebetter.Dont get me wrong; I LOVE Figma Design. It will be my go-to UX/UI tool for years to come (or until another tool disrupts the UX industry). But the annual revision of its pricing strategy is getting a little out of hand. It changes every year, and its clearly taking advantage of product teams by making them pay for products they probably dontneed.Who knows? Maybe if enough people give their feedback and constructive criticism on the new subscription model (via the Figma Community Forum), well see another change nextyear.Another year, another Figma pricing update was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The daunting discussion around automated vs human-driven testing pushed me to arm myself with a pen again and write more about a diamond in the crown of all testing techniquesexploratory testingDo you remember Sherlocks hat? The legendary detective Sherlock Holmes (a character created by Arthur Conan Doyle) is best remembered for solving mysteries in the London fog, puffing on his pipe and a hat. It has become stereotypical headgear for detectives who investigate the most complicated cases.In our work routine, we wear multiple hats daily. Product Owners, Developers, Designers, and QA Engineers might juggle the various roles in line with the new challenges. However, the QA Engineers are often the ones in the team who try the imaginary detectives hat. And I must say, if you are a good QA, it will fityou.I started my career in software testing as a manual or (better to say) human QA Engineer. In a few years, I also learned the basics of automation in the Gherkin syntax, helped the Developers select the tests for automation, and regularly monitored the status of automated tests in CI/CD pipelines. Yet my primary focus was on applying human-driven testing techniques and improving the general teams testing strategy, which included manual and automated tests on multiple productlayers.Now, my eyes widen once I hear from some community voices that manual testers are obsolete. I dont take it as a personal offence. However, it is still hard to understand: are we ready to allow tools (machinery) to evaluate usability, UX, and accessibility, detect edge cases and UI glitches, and play with the product ashumans?Industry experts note that human-driven testing techniques are still essential for the products development. However, I observe that some well-known companies over-rely on automated tests ignoring human-driven testing techniques, which might be unhealthy for the overall products quality. Ive already touched on the danger of over-relying on automation in one of the recent stories. After some conversations on LinkedIn, Ive got a push to write more about one of the most exciting manual testing techniquesexploratory testing.Manual testing? Is it stillalive?First, lets clarify: does manual testing still rock? If yes, then why? Before some sceptics grab the raw tomato to throw in the author, Id like to clarify: yes, human-driven testing techniques matter. Without skills in human-driven techniques such as exploratory testing, the QA professionals would be redundant and could be easily replaced by AI. But it has not happened(yet).The aha! moment struck me after listening to the great talk In Praise of Manual Testing given by Sue Atkins at TestBustersNight (arranged by Rudolf Groetz). Sue stressed that we are still not at the point of delegating all the human-driven testing activities to AI-driven tools. That talk also sparked a discussion about whether the label manual is appropriate for testing activities humans perform. Other namings such as in person testing (originally suggested by Julian Harty) could workbetter.Dont get me wrong, I stand for the balanced approach in QA. An agile tester should be able to apply human-driven techniques and automate certain tests or collaborate on automation with developers. However, there are features that tools (machines) are bad at: they lack creativity, empathy and intuition.Automated tests will hardly detect edge cases that Developers or Designers did not think of (unhappy paths). They will not be able to assess UX from a deeper perspective and according to the product quality attributes (see ISO 25010: Systems and software engineering). Instead, human QA will excel in those areas. Consequently, the existing tools could hardly explore the product at the same level ashumans.As James Lyndsaynotes:An automated test wont tell you that the systems slow, unless you tell it to look in advance. It wont tell you that the window leaves a persistent shadow, that every other record in the database has been trashed, that even the false are returning true, unless it knows where to look, and what to look for. Sure, you may notice a problem as you dig through the reams of data youve asked it to gather, but then were back to exploratory techniques again.So lets come closer to exploratory testing and detectives hat.Exploratory testing in anutshellExploratory tests are purely based on human creativity and curiosity. These are tests performed without a prepared written script, where the testers are supposed to find issues on the fly. The exploratory tests allow us to investigate the system behaviours missed by scripted tests (e.g. end-to-end tests). As a result, the edge cases, UX discrepancies, and glitches will be detected:An exploratory test needs no script, no chosen set of actions. Choice of actions is up to the tester, at the point of testing. Choice of information, of observation, is limited not by pre-existing design, but by opportunity and resource. Moment to moment, the tester chooses what to do, what to do it with, how to check whats happened. Interesting things will be examined in more detail, weaknesses tried, doorknobs jiggled. The tester chooses to try two things together that between them open the system to a world of pain. The tester chooses to use this information, with that action, not to just to see whats desirable, but whats possible. The exploratory tester focuses onrisk.Exploratory testing is more spontaneous and informal than scripted testing, but it still requires discipline to be done properly. Normally, exploratory tests are guided by a defined goal (e.g. to test a new feature) and usually are executed in a session-based (time-boxed) manner. Testers might use a charter (task card) in which they note their observations.To make an impact, exploratory testing should be applied regularly. As Martin Fowler observes, it is not a good sign if the team does not perform exploratory testing: Even the best automated testing is inherently scripted testingand that alone is not good enough. From my experience, I suggest devoting time to exploratory testing sessionsweekly.QA Engineers, Developers, Product Owners, or Designers might perform the exploratory tests individually. In agile teams, each member can contribute to the quality by exploring the product and informing the team about their findings.Exploratory testing can also be applied in pairs using peer programming principles. As Mariia Hutsuk and Sivamoorthy Bose write, the paired exploratory testing assumes two roles. One person is a driver, another is a navigator:Driver is a person at the wheel, this person should focus on the application while he/she is performing actions and ask questions if they occur. The navigator is in an observer position and tells direction of further checks and makes notes of steps or findings. Those roles can be changed from time totime.From my experience, you will reach the multiplier effect by arranging a teams exploratory testing sessiona so-called bug bash. To detect potential bugs as soon as possible, the team might perform exploratory testing once new features are coded in the developers environments.Here is an example of a charter template for an imaginary teams exploratory testingsession.Hey! Todays goal is to step into the users shoes and test the Amazing Portal customer flows. Use your skills and intuition to find as many visual or functional issues in the product as possible. Once you run into a bug or UX discrepancy, note it in the test charter. Below are just loose guidelines. Anyhow, you will need to invent your scenarios on thefly.Task 1As a Customer, browse the products listed on AmazingPortal.Task 2As a Customer, make an order of the products A, B, C,D.Task 3As a Customer, update the data in the Customers Profile.Task 4As a Customer, explore other areas of AmazingPortal.Once the exploratory session is completed, the detected issues should be reported and discussed within the team. Sometimes, the feature must be completely reworked due to the findings revealed in the session. This might be painful for the team, yet it is still a win-win situation because there will be less rework in the later stages of development for Designers and Developers, and less pain and frustration for the customers.I believe no AI-driven tools can replace human creativity, empathy and intuition in testing. Thus human-driven techniques such as exploratory testing are still in demand and should be applied actively by the team members, whether they are Developers, Designers, Product Owners or QA Engineers (in case your team is lucky enough to have one;)) If used at the earliest stages of development, the exploratory testing will guide you through the potential edge cases and product issues, both visible for the users (UI level) and hidden ones (API level, backend behaviours). This might truly impact the quality of the product, reduce the costs of rework in the long run and shift the whole teams testing strategy to the left. To achieve that, keep exploring and wear your Sherlocks hatproudly.You may check my LinkedIn page if you feel like connecting with me or are curious about my background. As a QA Engineer with over 7 years of commercial experience in the industry, Im ready to communicate with teams looking for guidance and help in enhancing product quality and testing. At this very moment, Im looking for a new role as a QA Analyst, QA Engineer or QALead.Illustrations: by me (Apple Pencil, iPad, and no AI:))Resources:Sue Atkings, Playing with softwarelearning like a tester: https://medium.com/@TestSprite/playing-with-software-learning-like-a-tester-ca7412537d6bJames Lyndsay, Why Exploration has a Place in any Strategy: https://www.workroom-productions.com/why-exploration-has-a-place-in-any-strategy/Mike Chang, Running an Effective Bug Bash: https://medium.com/@changbot/running-an-effective-bug-bash-317fafa9d963Mariia Hutsuk and Sivamoorthy Bose, Importance of Exploratory Testing: https://medium.com/quality-matters/importance-of-exploratory-testing-3f02e34dc0c3Martin Fowler, Exploratory Testing: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ExploratoryTesting.htmlTest smart: how to explore a product like Sherlock? was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Without a coherent hypothesis for both user outcomes & business impact, a product teams outputs are waste rather thanvalueWhen thinking about product development, I perpetually return to two powerfulideas:Design works through abstracting and adapting systems (including from one domain toanother)A product is a system for delivering value, which means that a design practice is a kind of product that can bedesignedCombined, these ideas form a thesis: through studying other systems of value delivery, we can design not only products that are more valuable to our users, but also a practice that is more valuable to our organizations.And one of the most important aspects of a value-generating system is how that system transforms resources and effort intowaste.Getting nothing for somethingIf you are asking me to do work for exposure, you have to explain to me why its not the kind of exposure people die of.KJCharlesValue is a matter of perspective; when we say we are creating value the next question should always be forwhom?No domain better illustrates this principle than writing. In pure economic terms, the value of a writers writing is not the text itself, but in the ability to sell it to someone (such as a publisher who, in turn, derives value from putting the writing next to some ads). In theory, both the buyer and the seller of the writing gain value from the exchange.However, many writers are offered a much more dubious exchange: for exposure. In other words: if you give me free stuff, others will see what a great job youvedone.Writers who follow up to understand exactly what kind of bump in commissions or book sales others have actually seen as a result of this exposure are usually met with abstract promises and few if any figures. They are just being asked to work for free, but with extrasteps.Writers who end up working for exposure are still creating valuefor their customer. But for themselves, this work has novalue.Time & resources spent on outputs without value have another name:waste.Which brings us back to software.One mans waste is another mansvelocity[Many designers] think that user centricity is self-evidently desirable. As a result, they cant make convincing business arguments for their role.JorgeArangoUnlike freelance writers, product teams typically work for a salary. And yet, they do a tremendous amount of work for exposure. Its just that the pitch looks slightly different: instead of write me this article so that people can read it we can observe add this feature to the app so that users can use it across every product backlog in thenation.Animal Man#25From the perspective of the organization, its exactly the same situation as working for exposure, and just about as effective. The resources expended towards these features are converted directly into waste at 100% efficiency.Who will see it? What will the impact of them seeing it be? How have previous features performed? How will this work actually fit into the business strategy?Unless you can answer all of these questions, youre building features for exposure.Build-measure-learn optimizes forwastePeople get obsessed with change as a substitution for leadership so they interpret little change as evidence that leadership is missing.JoshuaFoustOne of the most common arguments used when building features for exposure is we cant answer those questions until we ship andsee.Sometimes, this will be true. For those true zero-to-one products, with nothing at all in production, theres no replacement for real data from real users (although, once again, you really should be studying analogous domains).But somehow the same argument ends up dragging past that first release: we still cant know, we have to ship more. The absence of measurable impact is interpreted not as a lack of value, but as a lack ofoutputs.And until the system is interrupted, the cycle of waste continues.Greenberg the Vampire, Bizarre Adventures #29Just like the author must ask how exposure will convert into book sales, we must ask how shipping will actually turn into seeing. What will make this release different from every previous release, so that we may at last begin to measure andlearn?Or, when the feature is done, will we begin working on the next assumption-informed feature in the roadmap, until someone realizes that all of this velocity amounts to waste and starts pointingfingers?Stop building features for exposure was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why your UX suggestions might be getting ignoredContinue reading on UX Collective

Duolingos Year in Review may have just outshone Spotify Wrapped thisyear.Since Spotify Wrapped dropped almost a decade ago, theres been a growing demand for data-driven year-in-review features. These summaries have evolved into cultural touchstones, offering more than just statisticsthey provide moments of self-reflection and shareable pride. While Spotify celebrates music, other platforms have embraced the concept for their niches, and Duolingos Year in Review is no exception. By turning language learning into a gamified, sharable experience, Duolingo has created its own version of Wrapped thats fun, whilst highlighting the joy of progress and the power of celebrating educational milestones.From streaks to shareable momentsDuolingos Year in Review feature, started as an email in 2019, has evolved since 2020 into a fun and engaging celebration of users learning journeys. The summary celebrates users progress with a focus on tangible learning milestones. Unlike the usual badges earned through daily use of the app, the Year in Review offers a more reflective overview of the years achievements, showcasing progress in a personalised and shareable way. Key highlights typically include:Streaks and XP: Users can see how long theyve maintained streaks and the total XP accumulated over the year, allowing them to celebrate consistency.Most practised words: This feature highlights the top words users have practised throughout the year, providing an interesting look at what areas theyve focused on or mastered.Mistakes made: This adds a fun twist by highlighting common errors throughout the year, or simply the number of mistakes made, encouraging users to learn from them and even celebrate them with a playful and reflective approach.Language milestones: Duolingo might spotlight users who have explored new languages or reached new milestones within their chosencourses.This year specifically, we got insightson:Number of lessons completedAmount of XPearntRanking amongst all DuolingousersMinutes spentlearningLongest streakLeague spent the most timeinYour bestie of the year and friendstreakNumber of mistakesmadeAre you safe fromDuo?Gen Z humour: playful insights boostingviralityOne of the standout features of Duolingos Year in Review is the inclusion of playful, Gen Z-inspired comments that accompany the various insights users receive. These comments are designed to not only make users smile but humanise the data, making the learning journey feel less like a cold, analytical experience and more like a playful conversation with a friend. Its a stark contrast to the dry statistics of most other year-in-reviews, tapping into the playful, meme-inspired language popular among younger generationswhich aligns with Duolingos brand imageoverall.Some of my favourite insights from my review that really made me laugh, and consequently want toshare.These comments do more than just entertain, they enhance the social and shareable aspect of the feature. The Gen Z-style humour makes it easy for users to relate to and want to share such moments with friends. I know I did. The playful tone ensures that even the most mundane insights are elevated, making them both engaging and memorable. In a world where learning can sometimes feel like a solitary or tedious task, Duolingos fun, lighthearted comments help foster a sense of community and joy amongusers.Are you safe fromDuo?One of the quirkiest and most viral aspects of this year is the Are You Safe from Duo? element. This quirky element plays on the running joke that Duolingos owl mascot, Duo, will relentlessly remind users to complete their lessons if they fall behind. In the Year in Review, users are asked if they are safe from Duo before the big reveal, encouraging reflection on their consistency and progress throughout theyear.Luckily, I was safe from Duo.Phew.This fun, suspenseful addition enhances the overall experience by making it more engaging and shareable. By capitalising on the meme culture, it encourages users to share their results on social media for comparison, boosting virality and making the Year in Review even more memorable. The feature also ties into Duolingos strategy of gamifying learning, with users curious about whether theyve managed to escape Duos watchful eye, thus deepening their engagement with the apps quirky brand personality.Entertaining content on Duolingos official Instagram page which reinforces the meme image of Duo as an ever-watchful owl we should all be terrified of upsetting.Duolingos personality insightsSimilar to how Spotify Wrapped has defined listening personalities in the past, Duolingos learner styles feature brought a personalised touch to the apps 2021 Year in Review, setting it apart from the usual data breakdowns. The learner styles categorised users based on their learning habits and achievements and reflected how individuals interacted with the appwhether they were streak-focused, XP-driven, or more likely to dabble in multiple languages. It was continued through to 2023, but we didnt see it on our screens this year.Bummer.The learner styles were designed to offer a fun and engaging way to reflect on progress while providing deeper insights into how users were engaging with the app. This also encouraged a sense of community, as learners compared their styles with others, spurring friendly competition or companionship. These insights reinforced Duolingos goal of making language learning both personalised and social, turning an otherwise routine review of progress into an interactive experience that celebrated individual learningpaths.The lack of the feature this year has left users questioning its absence. This shift mirrors a broader trend seen with other platforms, like Spotify, which has also scaled back some of its personalised insights in recent years. Spotifys Wrapped, for example, used to offer more nuanced breakdowns of listening habits, such as detailed listening personalities or genres, but these have been pared down in recent iterations. Similarly, Duolingo seems to have opted for a more streamlined Year in Review in 2024, with an emphasis on fun, shareable comments and new gamified features, rather than the deeper, personalised insights that had become a signature of pastrecaps.Streamlining sharing throughCTAsOne of the standout features of Duolingos 2024 Year in Review is the emphasis on shareabilitydesigned to encourage users to not only reflect on their learning journey but also to share it with others. Each insight page comes equipped with a share button, making it easy for users to post their achievements on social media directly from the app. This simple yet effective feature capitalises on the power of social proof, encouraging users to display their progress, engage their networks, and inspire others to start their own language-learning journey. This also eliminates the need for screenshots and manual posting, instead encouraging users to share via a seamless call-to-action, streamlining the process and making sharing a built-in part of the experience.A summary of my Year in Review, ready forsharing!Adding an extra layer of gamification, Duolingo incorporates a share for a reward incentive at the end of the review. The idea behind this is to create a positive feedback loop where the act of sharing not only encourages social interaction but also rewards users for spreading the word about their learning journey. Its a simple yet effective method of incentivising users to share while enhancing their own experience.Duolingo also offers users not one, but two distinct designs for sharing their achievements on social media. The first design provides an all-encompassing overview, and the second design narrows its focus to highlight the streak count and the playful Are You Safe from Duo?insight.Duolingo offering two designs for users to share, catering with different preferences and audiences.These options give users flexibility in how they share their achievements, catering to different preferences and audiences. Some may want to showcase their entire learning journey, while others might prefer to share a lighter, more humorous snippet. This dual approach not only enhances user experience but also broadens the contents appeal on social media platforms, making it more likely to resonate and go viral. By incorporating these tailored designs, Duolingo acknowledges the diverse ways users engage with content online, setting an example for other platforms in the art of blending personalisation with shareability.Transparency about data collectionOne thing I felt was worth mentioning, is the fine print below the final summary and share page. Your Duolingo stats as of Nov. 30, 2024. This clarity stands out, especially when compared to platforms like Spotify, where the exact cut-off date for Wrapped data has never been made entirely clear. Over the years, users have had to rely on internal information or external articles to piece together when the data counts towards their Wrapped summary, with no official statement fromSpotify.This lack of transparency has caused some confusion, especially when users expect their year-in-review stats to reflect their activity over the full calendar year. By explicitly stating the cut-off date, Duolingos approach is a refreshing move towards clarity and honesty. It sets a good example for others to follow, as transparency about data collection periods helps avoid misunderstandings and enhances user trust. This small yet significant change aligns with broader trends in the tech industry, where clearer communication about data usage is being increasingly valued byusers.Expanding beyondlanguageDuolingos 2024 Year in Review took a cue from Spotify Wrapped by expanding the scope of insights beyond just language learning, moving into territory thats traditionally not been associated with the app. In past years, Duolingos Year in Review focused primarily on a users language achievements, such as the number of words learned or streaks maintained. However, this year, the platform has broadened its focus, introducing insights related to learning habits in areas like music and math, aligning with its growing suite of educational tools.I guess I should study math and music more. Sorry,Duo.This expansion mirrors Spotifys shift in recent years, where it began branching into podcasts, audiobook recommendations, and even exclusive content, all while maintaining its roots in music streaming. Similarly, Duolingo, known for its language courses, has gradually incorporated additional subjects such as math and music. By including insights about these new domains in the Year in Reviewand including them as the first insight of the bunchDuolingo could inspire users to explore other subjects and, ultimately, to stay more engaged with the app, which is the ultimate goal of any year in reviewfeature.The takeawaysDuolingo has reimagined how we celebrate progress, learning, and creativity in the digital age. Through its 2024 Year in Review, Duolingo continues to push the boundaries of what it means to learn by making the experience fun, shareable, and socially engaging. Gone are the days when year-in-review features were purely about statistics. Duolingo embraces playful commentary, quirky memes, and gamified moments that turn personal growth into an interactive experience. With features like Are You Safe from Duo? and personalised insights across language, math, and even music, Duolingo shows how far its come in building an inclusive, multidimensional educational platform. Plus, through its emphasis on shareability through seamless call-to-action buttons and incentivisation with rewards, it encourages users to display their achievements and make language learning a truly social activity.So, were you safe from Duo thisyear?Sources: How we built a personalized Year-in-Review for millions oflearners Get excited: its time for Year inReview!Duolingo wrapped: your year in languages, streaks, and progress was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Weekly curated resources for designersthinkers andmakers.The change were discussing here is not a revolution, just an evolution. Its simply a change in how many roles will be needed and what they will entail. Jorge Arango recently wrote that Digital systems, not people, will do much of the craft of (screen-level) interaction design.Every time such shifts happen, the industry rearranges itself to fit the newmold.The State of UX in 2025: a love letter about changeEditor picksShe and He arent the only ones buying clothes Challenging binary norms in ecomm UX.By YouvnaSalianThe world doesnt need more managers It needs people who care enough to lead.By Himanshu BharadwajThe digital soul of tomorrows cars Learning from leading Chinese brands.By Ruoyong (Eli)HongThe UX Collective is an independent design publication that elevates unheard design voices and helps designers think more critically about theirwork.CourseHero: a character by HervMake methinkStrategy is not war; its gardening When most people think of strategy, they think of war. And its no wonderour history books, leadership courses, and even popular business books are filled with military metaphors.15 lessons from 15 years of indie app development Obviously, as I got older and left university, my expenses went up and I needed to make more money, but still, the way I see it is this: I make money so that I can do what I love for work, not the other wayaround.Inside design at Carl Friedrik From here we conduct early concept sketches digitally and by hand. We would then have a group meeting to align on the direction before moving into digital renders using Keyshot for hard goods and Clo3D for softgoods.Little gems thisweekStop wireframing (but still start low-fidelity) By JasonBarronsI was laid off from Spotify one year ago: heres what Ive learnt By SophiaOmarjiData is good. Data with a story is better. By RyanRevillaTools and resourcesPrototyping with data Advanced string formulas and dynamic customization.By Nicols DelRealGenAI suggestions for analogous data color schemes Can AI help in data color scheme design?By Theresa-Marie RhyneThe importance of hover states Exploring UI details with technical-academic rigor.By FilipeNzongoSupport the newsletterIf you find our content helpful, heres how you can supportus:Check out this weeks sponsor to support their worktooForward this email to a friend and invite them to subscribeSponsor aneditionState of UX, we dont need more managers, prototyping with data was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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The algorithm has become the retina of the mindseye.George Tooker, The Subway,1950So much went wrong over the election plenty of blame to go aroundbut today, my focus is on one culprit: algorithms.The 2024 election wasnt just a political event; it was an algorithmic disaster.Democrats were stunned as red swept across the map, with Trump retaking the presidency. By the next day, pundits pivoted into told-you-so mode. But we, the viewers of Americas final season, remember their pre-election thinkpieces. Its like they were living in a parallel reality. And they were. We allare.Though the world feels bigger than ever, our experiences are more atomized. Weve all got our own unique information dietsand like all diets, theyre tailored to taste. Algorithms are the special sauce that keeps everything palatable, just spicy and varied enough. They dominate our perceptions, shaping everything we see across the platforms we usedaily.Neil Postman warned us decades ago in Amusing Ourselves to Death that entertainment media would distort public discourse. More recently, Kyle Chayka, in Filterworld, described how algorithms flatten culture, reducing it to simplest, most engaging partsturning everything into a personalized feed. Both dynamics worked at once to radicalize disconnected groups and blindelites.The result is a a fragmented, myopic electorate where everyone sees only what they want to seeor what an algorithm decides they shouldsee.Forget filter bubbles. Were soaking in filter bubble baths now. The waterswarm.Filter bubble bath courtesyDALL-ETikTok, propaganda, and the ManosphereLets talk about the Manosphere, which WIRED defines as the amorphous assortment of influencers who are mostly young, exclusively male, and increasingly the drivers of the remaining online monoculture.One key post-election is narrative is how menyoung, uneducated men, in particularhave been pushed to the right through misinformation and propaganda filtered to them via Joe Rogan and the like. On The Media did a great deep dive into this ecosystem. In it, they lament our new media environment:The news monoculture of old is dead the new administration has shown us that it will learn on a new generation of personalities and media networks to spread its lies and shape hearts andminds.Its a persuasive argument. Max Reads great piece on The TikTok Electorate adds a critical nuance: TikTok and other social media arent solely toblame.When you rely too much on the idea that propaganda works homogeneously and omni-directionally, its very easy to misdiagnose the problem. Is Andrew Tate really turning innocent, smooth-brained young morons into misogynists all on his own? It seems much more likely that some young men bring a set of misogynist assumptions and masculinist entitlements to TikTok and YouTube, and have those self-flattering ideas reinforced and strengthened into hardenedbeliefs.Algorithms amplify whats already there. The solution, then, isnt to launch a liberal version of Joe Rogan, but to address misogyny at its roots. As Jia Tolentino points out, young men have long been fighting for relevance in a gender war. Their sense of loss could help explain why men aged 1829 have shifted 30 points rightward since2020.The fact remains that a large swath of young men isnt participating in the same information ecosystem as the rest of us. They have their own channels, their own realities, nearly independent from ours. Our tweets wont save themor swaythem.The la carte electorateAOCs election-night Instagram polls provide another interesting case study of how algorithmic-inflected behavior might result in ticket-splitting. As it turns out, she has a growing group in her district of people who voted for Trump and her. She asked themwhy:via AOCs InstagramBoth AOC and Trump are seen as real and anti-establishment. Both care about the working class. Both promise change. Crucially, neither was tied to the current administration. In a filtered world, these politicians dont feel opposed; they feel like two sides of the samecoin.This kind of ticket-splitting defies conventional political logic, but in the algorithmic age, it makes perfectsense.Younger voters, conditioned to an algorithmic existence, maybe approach elections like their social media feeds: fragmented and hyper-personalized. They curate ballots, selecting candidates based on personal resonance rather than party loyalty. Its a choose-your-own-adventure style of politics, where down-the-line voting isnt thedefault.The algorithmic medium is themessageI want to push this idea bit further. I believe were living in a broad social experiment whose consequences we wont understand for sometime.Media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously posited that the medium is the message. He meant that the medium itselfTV, video, a social feedshapes human thought more than the content it delivers. Neil Postman expanded upon this idea, arguing that in a TV-dominated society, serious topics are simplified into entertainment. Public discourse shifts from logic-driven to spectacle-driven. (Is it any surprise that TV-star Trump is a repeat president?)What is the message of the algorithmic feed? What does it do to itsusers?Heres how I seeit:Information must be entertaining: Users expect even run-of-the-mill information to be engaging.Successful messages have successful messengers: Parasocial relationships are highly effective.Simple ideas fly far: Algorithms prioritize emotionally resonant, easy-to-digest content.Content is participatory: Likes, swipes, and other signals shape what users see. The content feels co-created by viewers, giving them ownership ofit.Trump and AOC win feeds. Both exude authenticity, a currency that platformsand votersreward. Both have simple ideas told in engaging ways (with Trumps obviously leaning hard into fear, sexism, and xenophobia). Both offer a way for their viewers to participate. AOC sparked this great discussion via Instagram poll.Meanwhile, establishment figures falter. Their campaigns feel stiff, lecture-like, and their complex ideas struggle to break out of theirbubbles.Max Read argues that these platforms change users in a deeper way: they condition users to embrace volatility. TikToks feed is a chaotic blend of hits and misses, encouraging a speculative, gamified mindset. The result is a generation of voters who approach politics like a gamble, chasing high-stakes wins with little regard for long-term coalition-building.Whose race is it, anyway? via ReductressThe algorithm has become the retina of mindseyeIn Cronenbergs Videodrome (1983), Marshall McLuhans ideas reach an eschatological extreme. The film shows a world addicted to television, where media rewires viewers minds, leading to hallucinatory ultraviolence. Its atrip.One of my favorite quotes comes from the films Professor Brian OBlivion, a media prophet, who declares that television is the retina of the mindseye.In 2024, that retina is algorithmic. Algorithms dont just shape what we see; they shape how we see, what we imagine, and how we empathize withothers.This election showed us what happens when millions of individual, algorithm-curated realities collide. The result isnt just political polarization; its the erosion of a shared cultural and political context. Rebuilding that context will require more than just better messaging. It demands a reckoning with the structuresboth digital and socialthat shape our perceptions. Until then, well remain stuck in our own personalized feeds, wondering why everyone and everything feels so incomprehensible.XMLFROM MYFEEDNeal Postmans Amusing Ourselves to Death and Kyle Chaykas Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened CultureMax Read on The TikTok Electorate (via his substack); Jia Tolentino on How America Embraced Gender War (The New Yorker); Brian Barrett on The Manosphere Won(WIRED).On The Media looks at the Manosphere (listen)Medium Cruel: Reflections on Videodrome (Criterion)Han Kangs The Vegetarian, trippy ecofeminist fable and recent Booker recipientThe Algo election: how 2024 revealed a fragmented reality was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How adaptive UIs are transforming user-centered design.Arcs browse for me functionality with custom page built from thesearchThis morning, Google gave me the weather, Manchester Uniteds stats, and stock performanceeach in a dynamic, interactive format. No clicks, just answers. As a designer, this made me wonder: How did we evolve from basic 10 blue links to these intelligent, context-aware interfaces?Imagine trying to explain to someone from 2005 that you could ask your phone, Hows United doing? and instantly see not just the score, but a dynamic visualization of the games key moments, player statistics, and tactical analysisall without visiting a single sports website. Theyd probably think you were describing science fiction. Yet here we are, in an era where interfaces adapt and breathe with ourneeds.This question led me down a fascinating journey exploring how user behavior and technological advancement have fundamentally transformed the way we design search experiences. What I discovered was a story of continuous evolution, driven not just by technical capabilities, but by our deepening understanding of how humans seek and consume information.The evolution through theagesChapter 1The computing age: Storage and processingIn the early days of computing (1950s-1980s), interfaces were simply windows into digital filing cabinets. The focus was purely functional: store data, retrieve data. User experience wasnt even a consideration yet.Chapter 2The internet age: Distribution andlinksIn the 1990s, everything changed. The web became a vast network of interconnected pages, and Googles ten blue links emerged as the card catalog of the digitalage.10 blue links of GooglesearchI remember writing essays on topics such as World War II during 2005: type a query, click a link, read, return, repeat. Multiple windows cluttered my desktop, and I had to piece together fragmented information manually. This process worked back then, but as the web expanded, users needed faster, more contextual information.Today, that same research takes seconds, with key events, timelines, and facts delivered instantly in interactive formats.Chapter 3The knowledge graph era: Understanding andcontextIn 2012, Google revolutionized search with the Knowledge Graph. For instance, searching Marie Curie no longer just returned blue links; a panel on the right displayed a concise biography, key achievements, and related scientists. This wasnt just visualit reflected a key insight: users want to understand information in context, not just findlinks.Redesigned Google search with knowledge graph panel on therightThe Knowledge Graph was born from observing how people actually use search. Users werent just looking for links; they were looking for answers and understanding.- Jack Menzel, former Product Management Director atGoogle.This shift influenced interface design by introducing:Information-rich panels for immediate context.Structured data highlighting keyfacts.Visual hierarchies matching inquiry patterns.Related suggestions anticipating userneeds.Before Knowledge Graph: Searching chicken parmesan recipe meant clicking through sites, comparing ingredients, and checking reviews manually.After Knowledge Graph: Instantly see ratings, ingredients, cooking time, and caloriesall without clicking alink.The Knowledge Graph was just the start. As AI evolved, so did interfaces, raising a new question: What if they could adapt to user intent in real-time? This led to todays contextual UI era, where each query shapes the perfect information experience.Chapter 4 (Now)The contextual UI era: Adaptive and intelligentFast forward to today, and were witnessing another transformation in search interface design. Search results now adapt their entire presentation based on the nature of yourquery:Search for a restaurant, and youll see photos, reviews, peak hours, and popular dishes in a card-based layoutDynamic views for hotels, restaurants and attractions onGoogleLook up a sports match, and youll get a specialized interface showing scores, player statistics, and keymomentsDifferent result cards shown contextual to a game when searched onGoogleResearch a stock price, and youll find a detailed analysis with trends, earning calls, income statement reports, news that are relevant to thestock.Stock related informational cards onGoogleInterfaces today dont just show informationthey tell a story. This evolution in search interfaces isnt just a technical feat; its reshaping how users expect to interact with all digital products. When people experience contextual, intelligent interfaces in search, they begin to expect the same adaptiveness everywhere. This is the spillover effect of search interface evolution.Why navigate through multiple screens in a banking app when search gives you instant, contextually relevant weather, sports scores, or stock data? Why cant project management tools adapt their interface based on your currenttask?Were witnessing a fundamental shift in user expectations. Users who experience intelligent, context-aware interfaces in search are increasingly frustrated with static, one-size-fits-all designs in other applications. This is pushing us to rethink how we approach product design across theboard.Sophia Chen, Head of Product atStripe.This shift is clear in how users nowexpect:Immediate access to relevant information without navigation.Interfaces that adapt to context andneeds.Information in the right format for thetask.Predictive features that anticipate needs.AI technologies like GPT-4 and Claude are accelerating these expectations. As these capabilities ripple across the digital landscape, we face a crucial question: How do we design products that deliver on thispromise?The next wave: BeyondsearchThe evolution of search interfacesfrom ten blue links to rich, contextual experiencesdid more than improve search; it created a blueprint for future software interfaces. Googles ability to tailor layouts for weather or sports scores sparked a fundamental shift in interface design.Whats fascinating is how this revealed a deeper truth: interfaces dont have to be static structures users must learn. Instead, they can be fluid, contextual experiences that adapt to userintent.This insight is now reshaping the software landscape. The same principles that let Google show weather differently from stock data are inspiring interfaces that transform based on user needs. Its not just about convenience; its about changing how we interact with information.Were entering an era of truly context-aware interfacesfrom data analysis to creative tools and learning platformsthat adapt to our intent, rather than the other way around. Lets explore how modern products are already embracing thisshift.Usecase 1Amplitude smart analytics through smartqueriesThe shift from traditional dashboards to conversational interfaces in Amplitude illustrates how searchs evolution is reshaping professional tools. Amplitude transforms data analysis from complex navigation to natural conversation, aligning interface design with humanintent.The Traditional WayA Maze of Clicks: Imagine youre a product manager trying to understand user behavior. You want to know how many UK Android users completed the first three onboarding stages between August 7 and 24. In a traditional interface, this seemingly simple question requires multiplesteps:Navigate to the funnel analysissectionSelect events for each funnelstageOpen the device filter dropdown and selectAndroidOpen the location filter and select theUKSet the daterangeWait for processing and adjust the visualizationEach step disrupts your flow, forcing you to translate your question into the systemslogic.The New WayJust Ask: Now, you simply type: How many UK Android users completed the first three onboarding stages between August 7 and 24? Within seconds, you see the data and visualization you need. This isnt just about saving clicksits about maintaining your analytical flow. Natural language lets you focus on insights, not interface navigation.Ask Amplitudes AI interface surfacing live graphs based on questionsDesign Decisions, UX Principles, and Human Behavior: Amplitudes design decisions reflect key UX principles focused on reducing cognitive load and enhancing user efficiency. By adopting natural language input, the interface supports the way people naturally think and ask questions, removing the friction of translating intent into rigid system commands. This approach respects the users mental model, keeping them in a state offlow.The shift to conversational analytics is a response to human behavior patternsusers want immediacy, simplicity, and context-awareness. Instead of navigating complex menus, users can engage in a dialogue with data, making insights more accessible and reducing the frustration of context switching. This design choice ultimately empowers users to make faster, more informed decisions, aligning the interface with real-world tasks andgoals.Usecase 2Arc Searchs browse formeJust as Amplitude transformed data analysis from navigation to conversation, Arcs Browse For Me feature is reinventing how we consume web content. It takes the scattered nature of web information and transforms it into a coherent, organized experience.The traditional wayInformation fragmentation: Imagine you want to learn about football legend Andrs Iniesta. The traditional approach would look likethis:Open Wikipedia for basic career informationVisit sports websites for detailed statisticsSearch news sites for his post-Barcelona careerLook up separate pages about his achievementsFind dedicated articles about his playingstyleOpen multiple tabs for different careerphasesEach tab switch breaks your reading flow, and youre forced to mentally stitch together a complete picture from disparate sources.The new wayIntelligent organization:With Arcs Browse For Me, you simply express your interest in learning about Iniesta. The interface automatically:Creates a clean, organized page about his career & Structures information logically (early life, club success, achievements)Presents European statistics in a clear format & details his post-Barcelona careerProvides relevant sources for deeper explorationArcs browse for me functionality with custom page built from thesearchInstead of jumping between tabs, you get a coherent narrative that maintains the depth of multiple sources without the fragmentation.Design Decisions, UX Principles, and Human Behavior: Arcs Browse For Me embodies key UX principles: reducing cognitive load, maintaining flow, and enhancing comprehension. By automatically structuring information, it respects how users naturally process complex topicsthrough organized, contextual learning.This approach acknowledges that users seek coherent stories, not disconnected facts. The design minimizes the friction of context switching and supports a more fluid reading experience. By aligning with human behaviorour preference for integrated, narrative-driven learningArc turns web exploration into a focused, intuitive journey. This design decision ultimately helps users achieve deeper understanding with lesseffort.Usecase 3Gongs real-time adaptive sales intelligenceGongs conversational sales assistant giving liveinsightsIn the world of enterprise sales, where each call can make or break a deal, the ability to process information in real-time is crucial. Traditionally, sales reps relied on memory, note-taking, and post-call analysis to identify objections, track client needs, and make follow-up decisions. This process was manual, reactive, and prone to human error. But what if the interface could dynamically adapt during the call, surfacing the right information at the right time? This is where Gong revolutionizes the salesprocess.The traditional wayJuggling between interfaces: Imagine youre a sales rep on a call with a potential client discussing a new SaaS product. As the conversation flows, the client raises questions about pricing, mentions a competitor, and shares concerns about implementation timelines. To address these points effectively, you needto:Switch between multiple tabs in your CRM to pull up pricingdetails.Search through meeting notes for past conversations with theclient.Dig into competitor analysis documents to counter objections.Navigate to internal resources to find relevant casestudies.Each switch disrupts your flow, and the pressure to keep the conversation smooth while searching for the right information can be overwhelming. By the time you find what you need, the moment may have passed, and the clients confidence mightwaver.The new wayDynamic, context-Aware UI: Gongs AI-powered interface listens, transcribes, and analyzes sales calls in real-time, providing relevant information at the exact moment you need it. Instead of scrambling for answers, insights appear seamlessly:Competitor Mentions: If the client mentions Acme Corp, Gong surfaces a competitor comparison chart.Pricing Queries: When pricing comes up, a dynamic pricing module shows packages and past discounts.Implementation Concerns: For timeline concerns, Gong displays industry-relevant casestudies.Risk Alerts: If risky phrases like Were evaluating other vendors arise, real-time prompts help you address objections immediately.Gong eliminates the need to juggle multiple tools, turning sales calls into fluid, focused conversations that prioritize understanding and serving theclient.Design Decisions, UX Principles, and Human Behavior: Gongs adaptive interface is grounded in key UX principles: contextual awareness, real-time assistance, and cognitive load reduction. By delivering insights in the moment, Gong supports the way sales reps naturally process informationthrough seamless, uninterrupted interaction.This design reflects a deep understanding of human behavior: people struggle with multitasking under pressure. By proactively surfacing information, Gong helps reps maintain focus and flow, reducing stress and enabling better decision-making. The interface adapts to the conversations context, mirroring how humans think and respond in real-time, ultimately enhancing both the efficiency and effectiveness of sales interactions.Usecase 4AI-Powered development: The end of context switchingWhile Gong shows us how AI can transform real-time interactions in sales, another domain ripe for transformation is software development. Long plagued by context switching and tool fragmentation, development workflows are being reimagined through AI-powered interfaces that collapse multiple specialized environments into a single, fluid experience.The traditional wayTool juggling: A simple coding task often requires developers to navigate a maze of toolswriting code in an editor, debugging in a browser, running commands in a terminal, searching for documentation, managing version control, and referencing multiple tabs. Each switch between these tools disrupts focus, forcing developers to juggle multiple mental models and break their workflow. This fragmented process interrupts productivity, making it difficult to maintain a state of creativeflow.The new wayIntent-driven development: Modern AI-powered tools like Cursor.so unify coding tasks into a seamless interface. Instead of juggling multiple tools, you express your intentAdd a dark mode toggleand the interface generates code, shows live previews, highlights changes, and applies updates. AI assistants like Claude in VS Code and ChatGPTs Code Interpreter enhance this with real-time suggestions and explanations, eliminating context switching.These tools excel in their contextual awareness of development workflows. Platforms like Replit Ghost integrate debugging, surface relevant documentation, and adapt testing and deployment dynamically. Vercel provides live deploy previews within the coding environment. This shift transforms coding into a fluid, creative process, letting developers focus on problem-solving instead of managingtools.Design Decisions, UX Principles, and Human Behavior: These AI-powered tools reflect critical UX principles like reducing cognitive load and preserving flow state. By unifying environments and minimizing context switching, they align with how developers naturally think and work. The focus on intent-driven interaction helps developers stay engaged, turning coding from a fragmented task into a fluid, creative process. This shift empowers developers to focus on problem-solving rather than tool management, enhancing productivity and satisfaction.Key design themes: Connecting to humanbehaviorModern adaptive interfaces are deeply rooted in human psychology and behavioral patterns. By understanding how users think, learn, and interact, these design themes ensure products are more intuitive, efficient, and satisfying. Heres a deeper look at each theme and how it connects to human behavior:1. Intent-first interactionConcept: Users express their goals naturally, and the interface interprets and fulfills those goals without rigid structures.Human behavior connection: People prefer to articulate what they want directly, rather than adapting to predefined workflows. Traditional interfaces force users to break down tasks into system-specific commands, which increases cognitive load and friction. By supporting natural goal expression, intent-first interaction aligns with how the human brain worksfocusing on outcomes rather than processes. This approach reduces frustration and helps users maintain focus, making digital interactions feel more intuitive and human-centered.2. Contextual intelligenceConcept: Interfaces adapt to the users journey by preserving context and anticipating needs.Human behavior connection: Humans rely heavily on context to make decisions and retain information. When interfaces maintain contextremembering previous actions, queries, or stepsthey reduce the mental effort required to retrace paths or rebuild context. This mirrors how humans think, helping users stay oriented and avoid the cognitive drain of recalling information manually. Context-aware interfaces make interactions seamless, reducing the need for repetitive inputs and enhancing efficiency.3. Unified experience spacesConcept: Consolidating multiple tasks within a single interface to minimize context switching.Human behavior connection: Maintaining a state of flow is essential for productivity. Each time a user switches between tools or tabs, their flow state is disrupted, leading to mental fatigue and reduced efficiency. Unified experience spaces minimize these disruptions, allowing users to remain deeply engaged with their tasks. This reflects the human preference for continuous, uninterrupted work, reducing cognitive load and enhancing overall satisfaction.4. Progressive intelligenceConcept: Interfaces reveal advanced capabilities gradually, aligning with the users experience and learningpace.Human behavior connection: Humans learn best when information is delivered in manageable increments. Overloading users with features can lead to frustration and overwhelm. By progressively revealing capabilities, interfaces cater to the users natural learning curve, building confidence over time. This supports a sense of mastery and encourages exploration, fostering a more engaging and satisfying user experience.5. Fluid information architectureConcept: Information dynamically reorganizes itself based on the users needs andcontext.Human behavior connection:Humans are adaptable and process information best when it aligns with their immediate goals. Static, rigid hierarchies force users to adjust their thinking to the interface. In contrast, dynamic information structures support how people naturally absorb, filter, and act on new data. This flexibility reduces cognitive strain and makes interactions feel intuitive, as the interface morphs to support changingneeds.Bringing it alltogetherThese design themes are more than technical innovationsthey embody a human-centered approach to digital interactions. By aligning interfaces with natural human behavior, they reduce cognitive friction, preserve focus, and empower users to achieve goals effortlessly. The future of design lies in creating adaptive experiences that understand and anticipate user needs, making technology a seamless extension of humanintent.The opportunity of adaptivedesignWe are at a pivotal moment where AI capabilities intersect with human needs, offering unprecedented opportunities for designers. The patterns exploredfrom intent-driven interaction to fluid information architecturesignal a fundamental shift in how we interact with digital tools. The challenge now is to imagine beyond the obvious. What if a medical interface adapted in real-time to support both doctor and patient? How might educational tools evolve to dynamically adjust to each students learningjourney?This is just the beginning. In my next article, Ill explore how adaptive interfaces could revolutionize various industries and reshape the future ofdesign.The era of static, one-size-fits-all interfaces is ending. As designers, we have the opportunityand the responsibilityto shape this shift by creating adaptive interfaces that align with real user behaviors and needs. The future of design is adaptive, contextual, and profoundly human. Are you ready to lead theway?The next era of design is intent-driven was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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Wireframes miss the plot on nearly every perceived benefit. Heres how to stop wasting your time and produce better designsfaster.Wireframing definitely doesnt double the amount of work for little perceived benefit and this caption certainly isnt being sarcastic.Wireframing has existed since the beginning of UX, and on the surface, designers assume it is a critical part of the process. Everyone in UX does it and insists its critical, so it must beright?But as time has passed, Ive seen more and more justification piled on top of wireframes, to the point where UX folk insist its an abdication of your responsibility if you skip the step. If you dont do wireframes, then you must be a bad designer, and you should feel bad! Or at least thats what people on Linkedin tellme.While specific benefits can come from wireframing, we must ask ourselves if the amount of effort invested is worth those benefits and if those benefits can be gained from othermethods.I used to be a huge proponent of wireframing. Still, as someone who converted to product design from UX and has never looked back, the justifications for wireframes are mostly smoke and mirrors, with nobody looking behind the curtain and asking why were doing something performative and wasteful.I swear to heaven, if I ever have a PM or BA tell me to update wireframes to match a visual design again, I will throw them out a metaphorical window.What wireframes originally were goodforThe world where wireframes came about is critical in understanding why they exist. At the time, design disciplines were still nascent, and the tooling for our craft needed to be improved. Even when I started in the mid-2000s, you were lucky to get access to Visiohell, I literally started in Microsoft Paint!This meant that the only place to really design an interface was in tools *not* intended for the taskphoto editing tools like Photoshop or publishing tools like InDesign, but change management was a total nightmare. Need to update a navigation across 100 views? Buckle up and get some coffee, its going to be a longnight.Because of this, an intermediate step where an interface could have the basics all figured out was needed. The layout would be approximate, typography abstract, and content FPO, and it needed to be cheaper and easier to make changes. Wed worry less about the specifics and focus more on the information architecture and interactions.And thus wireframes willed themselves into existence.What people claim Wireframes are goodforOver time, the UX discipline has added more and more justifications for why wireframes are an essential step in the process. This happened primarily because stakeholders and purse-holders didnt understand why so much time needed to be invested in some shitty greyscale impression of an interface, and in their defense its perfectly understandable. Wireframes *were* important because we still didnt have better tools to handle the things that we needed to solve iteratively:Hierarchy of content and features.Information architecture, verbiage, and copy definition.Process and interaction flow/sequences.Rapidly test new ideas and validate them withusers.Keeps stakeholders from focusing on visuals at the expense of other UX considerations.Photo by Jason Goodman onUnsplashWeve made wireframes synonymous with low-fidelity, but all they are is a low-fidelity option.But then more toxic reasons started to bubble upthat visual design was merely aesthetics, and making anything that looks like a final design would do nothing more than confuse stakeholders and users, and would take away from the vital work of defining interactions, content, and IA. A myth around back-end engineers being incapable of understanding a final design and can only comprehend wireframes emerged. I have even heard UX designers claim that users and stakeholders dont understand visual design and should only see wireframes.For what its worth, I have only seen users need clarification on wireframes, never by visual design. As for stakeholders, UXers could learn how to speak to them without saying, Ignore the layout/colors and just focus on the content.We dont do pretty! UX designers would proclaim! I do the real interface work, not the foo-fooUI.Why wireframes dont savetimeFast forward to the modern daythe times of using Photoshop for visual design have long since gone, and UX & product design has exploded in terms of growth. We have products and services up the wazoo and more interface design tools that I can count on. Figma, the behemoth nobody likes anymore, is worth a few billionbucks.This means that the tools we use to wireframe are *the exact tools we visually design with.* It is no different in terms of speed to select Arial as the typeface as it is to select the branded one. Selecting a brand color for interactive patterns is no faster or slower as it is the default blue. You are just as fast at laying out a greyscale option as you are a detailedone.And we have yet to mention design systemsthe advantage that wireframes had of deferring visual design choices is obliterated if your company has already invested millions into a design system that has already thought of all that for you. There is zero difference in using a wireframe UI kit and just using your existing design system. None. Stop wastingtime.Serhii Khyzniak, Wireframes vs Visual Design, is a great example of how the two deliverables have crept closer and closer to oneanother.Dirty Secret: UX is never final, even if youve moved into visualdesignTheres this myth that wireframes will get signoff by stakeholders, and only then well focus on visual design and aesthetic choices. But ask yourself thiswhen was the last time an interaction, content block, or feature set wasnt changed or modified during the visual design phase? Every project that I have done UX on with a distinct visual design phase ALWAYS had modifications to the work I had already done. I swear to heaven, if I ever have a PM or BA tell me to update wireframes to match a visual design again, I will throw them out a metaphorical window.Do you like low fidelity because it makes things easier for people to understand and give input on? Or is the truth that it makes things _harder_ for others to understand and that we _like_ that because it allows us to lord our expertise over others and avoid criticism? If a stakeholder isnt interested in commenting on the IA and cares more about other things closer to their expertise, then why are you trying to fight that?Sean Dexter, Wireframes are becoming less relevant, and thats a goodthingSo, we dont save time by wireframing anymore. However, we still need to focus on lower-level decisions before worrying about the presentation layer of an application (i.e., visual design, what I call the interactive design for your eyes). Weve made wireframes synonymous with low-fidelity, but all they are is a low-fidelity option.Fidelity is a spectrum, not a deliverableWe need to get it out of our heads that there is this binary in fidelity, and instead, we should think about fidelity as something that increases until the design goes into the backlog. Fidelity isnt a distinct step or an artifact you produce, but a constantly updated prioritization of what you need to work onnext.Dont have an image for a masthead? Sure, greyblock it. But maybe you should instead go and find an image until you can find a better one. Designing with placeholder content is never a good idea, even if that content is going to be iteratedon.So why do wireframes stillpersist?For many designers, its simply how to do design a UX interface. In the book, Wireframing is For Everyone, theres something telling:Wireframing is a language for communicating user interface ideas which helps developers, designers, product managers, and stakeholders think about and understand the big picture structure of a website or app without being distracted by the detailsAngeles, Barnard, & Carlson, Wireframing is For EveryoneWhy do wireframes endure? Partially in part because they retain the appearance of something technical and precise. They have the air of a blueprint or technical specification, ruthless in their disdain for anything but the most critical of elements.But given how much a design can change from a wireframe to a final design ready for production, that precision is imaginary.Photo by Jason Goodman onUnsplashWireframes are just shitty visual design because visual design is intrinsic, not optional.Heres the problemwireframes, whether UX designers want to pretend otherwise or not, are still a visual design. You are still designing an interface with visual language, and youre just punting on decisions still critical to the experience.You are still choosing typographical styling, just a wireframe one.You are still designing the layout, just not with realistic consideration.You are still blocking out elements in a concrete fashion, despite insisting a wireframe canchange.You are still choosing colors, even if 80% of them are grey and 20% of them are the wireframe blue.Many UX designers still light up like a Christmas tree if a visual designer moves an element. If wireframes were just about interactions and content, why are we getting in a tizzy if they move a textlink?Visual design is not avoidable or optionalit is as critical to usability, learnability, and cognitive load as any interaction or IA choice you make. And how do I knowthis?Fidelity isnt a distinct step or an artifact you produce, but a constantly updated prioritization of what you need to work onnext.Because wireframes are still a visual design, just a lazy one. And that means double thework.(I have an article on why visual design should be distinguished from aesthetic design, but thatscoming.)Do these Lofi activities instead of wireframingBy abstracting low fidelity away from wireframing, I have become 10x more productive as a designer. I have fed a backlog developed by 12+ engineers with months of roadmap by making low fidelity lower effort, but faster in defining my interface needs.With these options, you are focusing *exclusively* on the things we find essential about wireframes without using visuals to represent them. The speed savings are significant, and the work quality ishigher.Here are some things to consider doing instead of wireframing:UX State OutlinesThis is one of the most rudimentary, and I still use it regularly when I need to move fast. What are the needs of the interface state I am designing, and what is their priority?I then put all of that into a basic outline. I move things around. I delete things. I can also quickly use them to link a flow together without worrying about designing a dropdown or abutton.These are crazy fast to generate and iterate on, and Im not worried about what interface particulars.Grey BlockingSometimes, I need to get a WAG (wild-ass guess) on how much space I can / should allocate to patterns. But instead of wireframing, I greyblock.Grey blocking is nothing more than roughly out a layout with grey blocks. Think of everything you put into it as FPOits just there to give you a feel for how much space might beneeded.I often use these with a state outline if I really need to figure out if I can single-state a feature or if it needs to be designed across multiplestates.Think of grey blocking as a designers WAG (Wild AssGuess)Design systemI mentioned this before, but why cant you wireframe with a design system if your team is already usingone?Designs can be final once theyre ready for the backlog, and that doesnt change if the primary interactive color is already defined or if layout standards are established.If youre worried about pixel perfection, dont be concerned about pixel perfection! You can tighten a design and mature it as you work on it. Again, fidelity is a spectrum, not a step. The process is sped up significantly because youre not wireframing and ONLY THEN transitioning it to your established system, which just doubles up thework.If your team has an established design system, then grey-scale wireframing is even more of a time waster. The visual language is already established foryou.Whiteboarding / Napkin sketchingThis is a practice that many of you already do, but the problem is that youre doing it *before* wireframing rather than in lieu of it. Get your design to vomit onto a board or piece of paper quickly; dont be precious about it, and then get to designing.Note: Do *not* confuse these for the only other design practice I find more useless than wireframingpaper prototyping. Avoid that design theatre at all costs. Its a seductive distraction that burnseffort.Its hard finding images of whiteboarding that Im legally allowed toshare.UX Grammar / Conceptual GrammarsThe following two are effectively an evolution of page state outlines. While more formal than PSOs, they produce fantastic work in spaces where the problems or workflows are detailed or complex. Daniel Rosenberg speaks at length about UX grammar in his book UX Magic (https://www.amazon.com/UX-Magic-Daniel-Rosenberg/dp/1708061614)," which I strongly recommend.Javier Aragones also has a fantastic article on this new tool and why its so valuable:https://uxdesign.cc/have-conceptual-grammars-finally-arrived-to-ux-design-26c088edc5d9Object-Oriented UXOOUXI wont lie, this is my new favorite, and Ive strongly advocated it over the past few years. Sophia Prater is onto something extraordinary here, and I thoroughly recommend her training courses on the subject. OOUX is related to conceptual grammars, but far more codified and cross-beneficial.OOX does a fantastic job of breaking down all the needs for individual patterns in an interface and, more importantly, the relationships between them. Its a distinct visual thats very easy to grasp for non-designers. If your stakeholders need help staying on task with wireframes or visual designs, OOUX is surprisingly effective as it strips out anything confusing about an interface. They can focus exclusively on priority, hierarchy, and relationships between objects..ORCA mapping also helps you simplify the number of patterns you develop for the same information/content, making your project more scalable and sustainable for engineers (who, in my experience, love a good ORCAmap).Object Oriented UX | OOUXTimothe Goguely has a great ORCA Map for figjam thats a fantastic starter artifact: https://www.figma.com/community/file/1120705007006600427/oouxIn conclusionWireframing had its place and time, and I dont mean to say that the process doesnt have some value. But as designers living in a world where weve failed to justify our value to stakeholders, we MUST be mindful of how we spend our time and how we can be more effective and productive.This isnt 2004 where we needed final_final_really-final_designs.psd. We arent stuck using Omnigraffle or other tools that are not purpose-built. Question the orthodoxy around wireframes, and you might be a better designer. I certainly am.Stop wireframing (but still start low-fidelity) was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Designing fashion and apparel e-retail experiences that challenge binary norms and embrace gender-inclusive UXInclusivity shouldnt be an afterthought | Designed by author onCanvaAlthough were designers, we learn a lot to incorporate in a design that we pick up in our experiences as consumers. Somewhere around that, we put ourselves in different shoes of the users, the consumers, the people. Its where empathy begins. So let me start with a scenario where you and I will step into newshoes.Where Empathy Begins | Designed by Author onCanvaPicture yourself on a solo shopping date. You step into your favourite clothing storeZara, Zudio, Westside, The Souled Store, or any other. You take your pick. You walk in, the salesperson greets you, and you ask them for a shirt for yourself. What happensnext?They probably ask you what style, colour, fabric, or size youre looking for and whether it is for work or casual wear. What happensnext?If I were you, I would most likely be led to the womens section, where they would show me whats available.Lets pause for a moment here. What was inadvertently assumed in this interaction? Probably that Im a woman, an assumption based on their perception of my gender presentation, which means- how one perceives my gender based on how I express myself, what I wear, my behaviour, hair, body characteristics, or even voice, and how these align with socially accepted understandings of a givengender.CategorisationSuch commonly made assumptions often also translate into digital experiences. We see them on e-retail platforms for fashion and apparel when platforms use binary gender options in sign-up forms and feedback surveys, use gendered language, and offer gender-specific product recommendations. Lets look at some ofthese.Here, I have a few screengrabs of commonly known clothing websites. Look at the categories put up by these clothing brands on their e-commerce platforms Screenshots of hero sections of clothing websites showing gender-based categories | Visual byAuthorThink of itbefore a user, a potential customer, has even scrolled any further than the hero section of the website or app, which is the first thing, the first banner you see, it is already assumed that they will fit into either pronoun; options such as For him and For her are associated with or rather assumed for men and women, respectively.In doing so, not only is the pronoun presumed for the user browsing, but it is also arguably an unintentional misgendering that can taint the experience of non-binary and gender-diverse customers from theget-go.The idea that there are only two genders is called gender binary because binary means having two parts (in this context, male and female). Therefore, non-binary is a term used to describe genders that dont fall into one of these two categories neatly (transequality.org, n.d). In this piece, I will use the terms non-binary and gender diverse as umbrellaterms.Uninclusive Language andOptionsBefore you get to browsing, shopping, orwindow shopping on a clothing website, think of the onboarding forms you go over; like login, sign up, and sign in forms. Have you noticed the use of uninclusive language and options in them? The information you fill in the forms is also shown in your profiledetails.Gender options in the profile section |MyntraGender options in the profile section |MyntraFor instance, in the profile details above, we see the term gender has been used. Not only does it stand limited to two optionsmale and female, they are also sex characteristics and not gender identities.Given these options, I came to some questions-How inclusive arethey?Why do we needthem?And do we really needthem?The first question is rhetorical, so Ill skip to thesecond.While there are cases, such as medical forms, where its necessary to ask for sensitive demographic data, there are many cases where such questions are frivolous. In the fashion industry, asking for gender identity may be needed for a couple ofthings:Personalization: Understanding gender identity can help tailor product recommendations and create a more customized/personalised shopping experience. For example, knowing a users preferred gender identity can help suggest styles, fits, and sizes that align with their preferences.Inclusive Marketing: It can also aid in inclusive marketing- allowing brands to communicate more effectively and respectfully with their customers by using appropriate language and imagery in marketing materials.Product Development: Besides, it can also be helpful in product development; brands can get insights into the diverse identities of their customer base guiding them to develop more inclusive product lines, such as gender-neutral clothing or designs that cater to a wider range of body types andsizes.So yes, collecting this info may be put to good use, but how much of this data goes towards any of these is often not specified. If were going to go about asking for sensitive and personal information, lets ensure that collecting such data is handled with sensitivity and transparency, clearly explaining why the data is needed and how it will be used to enhance the user experience. Moreover, it is good practice to offer the option to skip or opt out of providing this information to respect user privacy and individual comfortlevels.And do we really needthem?If you answered yes to this, lets look at the next few examples that could help challenge that notion. (In the interest of challenging ideas over changingminds).First things first, if it isnt needed, lets simply avoidasking.Inclusive form | MxApparelHeres an example of a clothing brand- Mx Apparel. Above is the form I saw when I first visited the website. The form doesnt ask for any info on my gender. This is a good example to show that if you dont need it, sometimes, simply eliminating an ask for unnecessary information can be, in a way, an inclusive practice; especially if personalisation is not a priority. Heres more on designing gender-inclusive forms (WTTJ Tech,2022).Product-based categories | MxApparelI also liked how their navbar exhibits product-based categories, instead of gender-based ones. Like in some examples earlier we saw options that read Shop Men and Shop Women, For Him and For Her. But product-based categorisation as such is an approach that aids in inclusive practices.These are some other fashion brands that go with product-based categories.Product-based categories |LovaeijProduct-based categories | Aware WolfApparelAnd heres an Indian brand that shows size and gender-inclusive representation along with product-based categories.Product-based categories | NorBlackNorWhiteI like how theres no assumption of pronouns or limited gender options. Mriga Kapadiya and Amrit Kumar, Co-founders of this brand- NorBlack NorWhite, believe that people rarely fall into prescriptive boxes. They exist within the grey, and this notion of the spectrum and a rejection of the binary has led them to create their vivid line and the conceptual thinking behind it (Apparel resources, nd).As said by former editor at LBB- Sunaina PatnaikThe best kind of fashion is the one that defies all labels. Fashion is no longer about asking yourself Is this made for my gender? or Can I even wear this?in fact, fashion is becoming inclusive, and some Indian labels are spearheading this awesome and revolutionary movement.As UX designers, we know that were not designing something solely for aesthetic appeal but to prioritise better functionality, usability, and experience. Were not adding a button here randomly or rounding corners because why not? Nope. The bottom line is that we understand that we dont do something just because; every design decision is made consciously to fulfil apurpose.What do UXers do? | Designed by Author onCanvaThats where we learn to question; the WHYs. Why do we need to know their gender? Is it to personalise? Can it be eliminated? Can we maybe do an AB test to see which is really working to provide the potential user with a better experience?The WHYs | Designed by Author on Figma andCanvaIf any of this got you thinking, hold that thought- Ive got more things to add. Lets look atAlgorithmic Gender-BiasAlgorithmic gender bias in e-retail platforms occurs when the algorithms that drive product recommendations to you, that target advertisements and search results, reflect and perpetuate gender biases present in the data that they were trained on (economictimes.indiatimes.com, May2024).A 2021 study by USWITCH, revealed that automated suggestions on predicted text are often gender biased. Uswitch, a comparison and switching service, tested a series of adjectives on smartphones including the Samsung Galaxy S21 and iPhone 12, using this phrase to determine results:Youre a/an *insertword*.Of the 236 adjectives tested, 72% suggested a gender-biased response overall. On iOS, almost two-thirds of words generated a male-biased response (Maddyness, July2021).Another example is that Princeton University researchers used off-the-shelf machine learning AI software to analyse and link 2.2 million words. They found that the words woman and girl were more likely to be associated with the arts instead of science and math, which were most likely connected to males*, (*By which I think they meant men) (brookings.edu, May2019).Lets observe a similar bias in word associations, but on clothing platforms.Heres a screenshot of a search on a popular Indian e-commerce platform for fashion and lifestyle products.Search for unisex products | Screenshot byauthorOut of curiosity, I searched for unisexitems.Search resultsfor unisex products | Screenshot byauthorOf the 15,418 items tagged Unisex- about 4000 are Caps, 20-something are Baby Shower Caps, 8 are Shower Caps and Headbands, but 0 are clothes to put on thebody.This was out of curiosity. But Unisex is probably not a common search, so I went with some commonly searched products; not to see what shows up in the search results, but in the auto-complete predictions.I searched for trousers, dresses, and T-shirts. It was interesting to see how gendered the auto-complete predictions are:Autocomplete predictions | Screenshot byauthorNote how normalised it is to gender trousers, T-shirts and dresses. How we have Trousers For Women and Trousers for Men, and that its not typically what we would expect to find under anything tagged gender-neutral and/or unisex. How we have 6,844 Photo Frames tagged Unisex, before 4,057 Capsbut still 0clothes.Limiting choice, representation, and inclusivity, such categorisation of commonly used popular online shopping platforms reinforces the gender binary. This often leaves those who identify beyond the binary feeling invisible.This not only impacts user satisfaction but also limits the potential customer base for businesses; because people buying from Myntra, Amazon, Zara, Ajio, and several other fashion and apparel platforms online arent just men and women, or girls and boys, or those who go with he/him and she/her pronouns.Socio-cultural, Indian and globalcontext:Its important to understand the socio-cultural context of where these inherent biases comefrom.According to a 2018 report on LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion in the UK by Stonewall, about 31 per cent of non-binary people and 18 per cent of trans people didnt feel able to wear work attire representing their gender expression (Stonewall, 2018).From an Indian e-commerce context, (that doesnt exclusively target a young millennial and GenZ audience), most product marketing advertently or inadvertently reinforces the gender binary. Undoubtedly, a lot of it stems from accepted social norms, and cultural norms; where a binary understanding of gender is prevalent.Men-women, girls-boysthats how weve been conditioned to think, and anything beyond that seems out of the norm, making it harder to comprehend, especially for those who identify within the binary- and/ or probably didnt see mainstream media representing gender diversity enough. It also makes many of us who identify out of the binary question our feelings.This, fortunately, is changing. When looking at the Gen-Z age bracket specifically, around 50% of online shoppers globally have purchased fashion outside of their gender identity, and around 70% of consumers say they are interested in buying gender-fluid fashion in the future (Klarna and Dynata, Statista, 22)Changing norms | Designed by author onCanvaWhile I could gather some global stats on gender-neutral clothing consumption, you must have noticed the lack of relevant data in the Indian context. This is due to the binary format used in official surveys, unfortunately making it difficult to obtain accurate statistics on gender-neutral fashion consumption in India. I do hope thatchanges.Speaking of change, and on a brighter note, despite the current data gap, change is underway. I believe that the digital age can be revolutionary in pushing for inclusive design practices. With every passing day, we learn more about our shared experiences with people from the world over; people with diverse backgrounds and cultural environments.I think its a great time to become a designer, to be in the design space, where you and I have a powerful voice, the power to influence, and to do so for the better. I think today, more than ever, we live in a world that is kinder to, more understanding of and more respectful of the experiences of those we find different from ourselves. Having that empathy is what makes us realise that users arent merely users of your product, they are people using it. It is that empathy that makes us good designers.It really is in the little things, you know, that we apply these sensibilities, we acknowledge and accommodate for the new and the previously less talked ofthings.Something as small as seeing the they/them option feels validating. Seeing Instagram say- theyve replied, feels good. Im sitting, scrolling through my feed, thinking that- hey, somebody on their design team has tried to put themselves in my shoes while designing this. Theyve been considerate of and have accounted for my experiences and my preferences. Seeing the pronouns I go with while filling out application forms for jobs feelsgood.The use of gender-neutral pronouns | Designed by author on Figma andCanvaMaking one feel seen and feel heard, can be so validating.And I think this comes from me being a designer as well as a consumer- that I feel that- that validation shouldnt be something that feels extraordinary to experience. It should be normal. Inclusivity shouldnt be an afterthought. Or something that brands suddenly market themselves practising during pridemonth.Inclusivity shouldnt be an afterthought | Designed by author onCanvaMy intention isnt to call out any of these brands that I took examples from today. They were probably designed by and for a different world they account for. I intend to discuss what weve left out while designing these experiencesor rather, WHO weve left out, and how we can do bettertoday.These words by Sr. Product Owner at Adidas, Alexandra Popova, sum up my talk so far beautifully-Today, the majority of millennials and Gen Z see gender as a spectrum, rather than binary, something that would have been hard to imagine a decade ago. Now, our responsibility as a workplace, business, and part of a community is to reimagine our lives with this new understanding (Contentsquare, 2022).UN SDGsPractising an inclusive approach in design supports the UN Sustainable Development Goals, such as Gender Equality and Reduced Inequalities. By creating inclusive digital environments, we can promote social and economic inclusion, drive sustainable growth, building a more inclusive e-retail experience for everyone.We design on the principle of familiarity in UX, right? The Principle ofPrinciple of Familiarity in UX | Designed by author onCanvaWhile seeing binary options may feel familiar because were so used to it, we must question what that familiarity rests on. Negligence, perhaps? Overlooking the experience of a significant part of consumers? Must we keep on with it?Why?One may think- why complicate things? Its fine the way it is. Its fine for some, but not quite for some alike. And if it feels complicated, simplifying it is our job, isntit?Id like to leave you with these words by writer Luke Christou:People want to be seen, heard, and most of all, represented. An authentic understanding of what representation truly means, and how it relates to the struggle for inclusion and diversity, is most likely what fashion can do to be more inclusive (3dlook.ai, 2024).As a fresh design graduate, right out of the oven, I took to writing thought pieces on sustainable design, diversity, and inclusivity, among other things I enjoy. Im glad to have had the UXIndia24 platform to advocate for gender-inclusive design practices with this talk on Gender Inclusive UX in E-retail and engage with gems in the design community.References:Understanding nonbinary people how to be respectful and supportiveA gradual UX approach to design gender-inclusive formsApparelresources.comAlgorithms help people see and correct their biases, studyshowsStudy reveals gender bias in predictive text algorithmsAlgorithmic bias detection and mitigation: Best practices and policies to reduce consumerharmslgbt britain work report-2018U.S. Leads the Way With Gender-Neutral FashionGender-Inclusivity and Retail: 4 Ways To Build a More Gender-Neutral BrandUN_Sustainable Development GoalsInclusivity inFashionFurther Reading:A Guide To Gender Identity TermsSOCIAL MEDIA AS A CATALYST IN MAKING INCLUSIVE FASHIONINDUSTRYGender: Why Are You Asking AboutIt?Algorithms propagate gender bias in the marketplacewith consumers cooperationShe, her, he, and him arent the only ones buying clothes was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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