That’s it. I’ve always liked working with small companies because of the greater freedom and much less bureaucracy. Now, with AI, it’s just not doable anymore. All processes are bulldozed by the devs, and the entire user experience along with the effort to deliver the best possible outcome for the user, has been replaced by shipping, shipping, and shipping. It feels like even basic UI mistakes that a junior wouldn’t make have become the standard.

I’m simply fed up. I think I’ll have to go back to the bureaucracy of a large company.

Inspired by current events at the job I'm very grateful to have and would rather not lose. Sorry if this is the wrong flair to use.

Dear PM,

Software design is, if you boil it down, about creating a tool. Users approach software because they have one or more problems they need to solve, and they expect to use your software as a tool to solve that problem. Software is, in that way, much like other tools in the world such as hammers or vaccuums or what have you that people buy to perform a task. When people go out looking to buy a hammer, how often do you think they care about how long that hammer took to design? How quickly that hammer got to market?

They don't.

People looking to buy a tool to solve a problem will judge it based on three criteria: whether it 1. solves their problem, 2. is easy to use, and 3. is built to last. They don't give a shit about how long it took to design your tool. Maybe your bosses do, but they're not the ones buying the tool. Your users, if you are able to get any at all, will start judging your software on the three criteria as soon as they lay their eyes on it. If they are not able to solve their problems, or aren't able to do so easily, you have not only wasted everyone's time in the name of "speed", you've eroded your users' trust in your company's ability to solve their problems. You have created code for the sake of creating code, and without users it is useless.

If you don't want this to happen, you need to stop putting your own ego at the forefront of this project and start listening. Listen to developers, listen to designers, and most importantly of all, listen to your users. Listen to your user proxies, if you don't have users yet. Let them tell you what their problems are. Let your UX designers and researchers listen to them too so they understand the actual problem and don't have to depend on a game of telephone to get to the heart of the problem. And for god's sake don't change your application on a whim. If you take your time and back every decision with research, iterative research, you will find out somewhat paradoxically that you have both saved time and made a better product at the end.

The fruits of thoughtful software design don't end there, though. By allowing users to speak to your designers, you have also created a brain trust of sorts- UX personnel that can speak intelligently to users and may even develop an intuition about what problems your users will face and how to solve them more quickly. You've made happy developers who don't have to redevelop feature 96 for the fifth time in as many months. And most importantly, you've created a connection with your users who see their input directly fed into the software and can now trust that your software is in fact a tool you've made to solve their problems rather than code for code's sake.

This is ridiculously satisfying.

Bookmark it for your next spark of inspiration.

I’m curious how other UX designers are experiencing the shift brought by AI, especially those currently working in product teams.

My workflow has changed dramatically over the past year. I haven’t opened Figma in months, but I regularly have 2–5 terminals running Codex or Claude Code, designing, building, and shipping things that I previously would have needed an entire team to deliver.

What’s interesting is that I don’t feel like I’m doing less design work. If anything, product thinking, UX judgment, and the ability to make good decisions matter more than ever. It’s just that the boundaries of what I can actually build have expanded enormously.
And that’s made me wonder whether the traditional “UX Designer” title will eventually become too narrow to describe what we do.

I’ve been out of a traditional company environment for a few months, so I’m particularly curious to hear from designers currently working on product teams:
Are you seeing designers take on more responsibility for actually building and shipping products, rather than just designing them?

Are the boundaries between designers, engineers, PMs, and even data analysts starting to blur at your company?

Do you see roles like “UX Builder” or “Product Builder” becoming more common, or do you think traditional roles will largely remain intact?

I’m not suggesting everyone needs to become a developer, or that specialized design skills are going away. I’m genuinely curious whether this shift is happening inside established companies, or whether it’s still mostly something experienced by people building independently.

Would love to hear what you’re seeing.

Are you rebuilding screens, removing elements, enhancing designs and/or creating completely new designs when building out your portfolio? If so, what are you doing? Is that generally accepted/recommended?

A few days ago, I was chatting with a designer about working on my portfolio. In passing they asked if I recreated the screens already. It took me by surprise.

I know it’s common to do this for NDA work.

A bit of a location specific question and I don't know where else to ask.

I've noticed that Ashby has constantly has open design/eng postings, for as long as I was at my last job for almost 2 years, they've had 2-3 postings for my location. They currently have 55 positions open just in Canada on Linkedin, as a 200 person company.

These are ghost postings right?

I have been hearing here and there from a handful of designers I know that they haven’t touched figma in 2 months. Currently I am unemployed. So I’m kinda nervous I am getting left behind in effectively incorporating AI in my workflow and dont know the reality situation in companies. Mind you, I have a paid claude subscription and I keep learning things on it on my own, I dunno if that’s enough though.

Anyway my question is, how much AI are you realistically using and where exactly? Everyone who haven’t touched figma in weeks, where do you keep your designs then? Elaborate on this as much as you want.

I just wanna know the reality of the situation. Thanks!

Like the title says, I interviewed with an AI bot. My first time ever experience with this and I’m not sure how I feel. I think disappointed is the right word.

I had applied to this role a month and a half ago and they just now called me back.

Has anyone had experience interviewing with an AI bot and can tell me what the outcome was? Did you get moved to the next round? If so, did you talk to a human?

I have LinkedIn Premium and can see what experience level people have that have applied. 1% of applicants are CXO and the other 1% are VP level. This is crazy to me. Do design companies actually hire people who are beyond the role’s experience level? If so, I might be cooked for ever breaking in this industry 🫠

I've done a lot of UX reviews for client sites, and for years the report opened with a number. "Your site is a 72." Clients liked it. It felt like progress.

The trouble was what the number hid. A checkout that quietly adds delivery costs at the last step would sit next to ten small things like inconsistent button labels, and the average still looked fine. Teams fixed the easy items, the score went up, and the thing that cost them sales stayed.

So we stopped. Now every finding gets a severity (critical, high, medium or low), judged once against a written rubric, and the report is just sorted worst first. No total, no percentage. The conversation with clients changed from "how do we get to 80" to "what do we fix this week".

It has costs. Clients can't compare this quarter to last quarter with one number, and some of them really want that. We haven't found a perfect answer to that yet.

Curious how others handle this

Do you score audits or heuristic reviews? If so, how do you stop the average hiding the one thing that matters?

If you dropped scores, what did you give stakeholders instead?

(Disclosure: I run Rubric, a tool for agencies that does UX audits this way. Happy to share how we write the severity rubric if anyone's interested, but I'm more interested in how you do it.)

I'm working on a learning product. The paid plan has 20 full lessons a month, plus 3 suggested topics every day that you can open or skip.

My worry: if I show "14 of 20 left", people start saving them and use it less. If I hide the counter, they get surprised when it runs out.

Options I'm weighing:

- Show nothing until 5 are left.

- Show progress ("6 lessons this month") instead of what's remaining.

- Soft cap: ask before going over instead of blocking.

Has anyone tested something like this? Especially in products where you want people to use the thing more, not less.

Hey fellow Redditors!

I love designing mobile apps, but I had a question about your subscription cancellation flow. Do you answer questions like "Why did you leave?" honestly, or do you just answer "Other" or something random? I can't offer a discount on this flow because my app is already very cheap: $5, and it's an annual plan. Do you have any other advice for me?

1st screenshot is the final version.

2nd one is the AI-Built first version.

I think AI is really bad in compacting information, everything is always stuffed with information and even Opus 5.5 has little sense of minimalism and building a proper visual hierarchy.

For context; It's an overview page for a Website management tool I am building (basically have editor, analytics and booking system in one place for multiple sites).

This site is the overview page, once you select a Website in your portfolio.

Most importantly, what AI never really get's right - what do I actually want to see and a web admin first?

- Image of the live hero instantly tells me, if the site generally looks good and also I instantly know which site it is, in case I have sites with similar names.

- Then I want to see if everything is running, so there's status indicators, is the site online, are all the different tools working properly?

- Next is open edit requests of customers. In case i set it so a client can't publish himself, I have to confirm a requested change. This one has some urgency, since the client probably wants the change to be confirmed asap. This is why it has a slightly coloured background.

- History of previous chnages is hidden behind the button, since it's not too relevant for usual operation.

- Next one is analytics, which has probably already been scanned by now - just a quick feedback, if the website is performing well or if it's breaking in

- Booking is last, since for one, a lot of sites might not have a booking system implemented and secondly, apart from being functional, I as a web admin don't really care too much about the booking performance, but it's still nice to see some stats here.

Also, as many can probably tell, the header is indeed inspired by Vercel.
Hope these insights give some value.

Would also love to get your feedback on the current state, does everything feel right to you?

Made 260k a year. I have a 6700 dollar mortgage with 2550 rent coming in. I spend about 4k-5k on credit card a month.

I probably have to go back to ux, but maybe there's another way to make money? I wanna be a therapist but school would be Hella expensive and it's years of school

I make music actively but that doesn't make me any money.

I just hate corporate. Doesn't help that I have autism and I notice all the fake bs and politics. I don't want to play the game.

But hi if I've worked with you