The line between design and engineering is becoming blurrier. In some companies, designers ship code to production daily. In others, engineers refine micro-interactions and update design systems in Figma.
As a result, some people move into a design engineering role — a beaut...
Good decisions often need time to emerge. They aren't the outcome of fast-paced experiments, chase for efficiency or velocity of shipping. They are the outcome of a slow, uncomfortable, sometimes painful independent thinking.
Too often teams rush too into brainstorming sessi...
Every product design team struggles with AI drifting. You might have a truly sophisticated, well-documented design system, but as you apply AI to generate design or UI components into it, it's only a matter of time until things start falling through the cracks.
The output mi...
Different people think and experience the world differently. Some people perceive it in a "typical", expected way. Others experience a vastly more confusing, challenging and noisy world — e.g. people with ADHD, dyslexia or dyscalculia.
After all these years, there are still ...
The "3-clicks rule." The "7±2 rule." The assumption that people don't scroll. Our work is packed with strong beliefs, confusing misconceptions, and random myths. So what's actually reasonable — and what should we take with a grain of salt?
Let's get to the bottom of how peop...
Ah, phone input UX. Confusing formatting presets, wrong assumptions about country codes, blocked copy-and-pasting — entering a phone number in a form is often more difficult than it should be. So what can we do to design better, more reliable phone input UX? Let's take a clo...
Neurodivergent needs are often treated as an edge case — something that doesn't quite fit into the common user journeys and flows we design for. Neurodiversity tends to get overlooked early in the process, and tackled later, if there's enough time left for it at all.
But peo...
Children are rarely invited to take part in design. But to truly grasp their needs and perspectives, we need to engage with their thinking and behavior — through activities, games, safe environment and trusted conversations. That means involving children in co-designing digi...
Stakeholder interviews aren't just about gathering requirements or aligning expectations. They are rare opportunities to minimize the risk of things going sideways. Surely it's about understanding needs, key goals, perspectives — and everything that is needed to keep them on...
What icon is the most reliable to show expansion and collapsing for accordions? Is there really any noticeable difference between carets, chevrons, arrows and triangles?
Well, research from NN/g shows that there is some difference indeed. But what's more interesting is that ...
Big-bang legacy relaunch is usually the worst way to improve legacy UX. It's painfully expensive, risky, time-consuming — and typically attracts too much attention from everywhere, as everybody has stakes in the project.
Legacy is often business-critical, with many dependenc...
There's been a lot of confusion and panic this week about "huge fines", "drastic measures" and "sweeping new AI rules" in the EU. In reality, it's a lot more narrow — and a lot more sensible. And mostly it's about making AI more obvious when it actually needs to be obvious —...
Chances are high that you are working on a challenging, complex product. Workplaces with deep organizational hierarchy, domain complexity, entrenched culture, legacy, and a wide array of conflicting priorities from opinionated stakeholders at every turn.
How do you thrive an...
AI-generated prototypes often don't deliver consistently decent results because of tiny inconsistencies scattered all across a design system. It's decisions made but not documented, hard-coded values never cleaned up, or relying too much on AI making sense of mock-ups or des...
What's the real source of truth in your design system — the components in Figma, or the code in Storybook? In theory, they should both be the same thing. In practice, they almost never stay that way for long, and AI in the loop tends to widen that gap rather than close it.
T...
When you work in B2B or Enterprise, typically you can't freely speak about a project you've spent years on — not the client, not the findings, not a single screenshot. But how do we show it in a portfolio or use it as a case study in a job interview?
It depends on the specif...
Every other week I hear from colleagues that they've just had their first job interview run entirely by AI. Sometimes disclosed ahead of time, often ambushed in a call, and at times not even mentioned during the conversation — with AI pretending to be human, and failing mise...
There's so much talk about AI and productivity these days. Everything is about efficiency, speed and getting more done. It seems like we are all racing to optimize and maximize everything — from how we write to how we think to how we make decisions.
So are we actually gettin...
Many companies silently assume that everybody wants more AI in their lives. That people are craving for new AI features, new AI products, new AI workflows — that would all magically replace all existing outdated practices and broken ways of working.
But in reality, it seems ...
Not every modal is the same. They can be useful, e.g. when sending users to another page is disruptive, or when they are in the middle of a complex flow. They also help maintain multiple contexts at the same time, e.g. perform related actions without interrupting current sta...
Good design needs a good taste and a strong point of view. When everyone can build and design anything, having a good judgement about what to design and build is what makes all the difference. That's what separates generic from great.
As it turns out, we can borrow expertise...
How do we display data in our products? Typically, we decide between a list, table, card or data grid. They might appear quite similar at first, but they all differ, and each serves a distinct purpose — depending on user tasks and data density.
Recently I stumbled upon the C...
Earlier this week I was pointed towards Jamie Mill's excellent new Free Product Design Skills AI Pack, a helpful little AI skills pack to direct AI tools to walk through all seven layers of product design, so the decisions underneath the screen actually get made — from reali...
Many companies think they know fairly well what their users want and need, and how they make their decisions. Yet most of the time these are merely big assumptions and big hunches — with little real evidence to support them. In practice, obvious reasons might be true, but th...
Imagine that you need to improve the UX of a legacy system. A system that has been silently working in the background for almost a decade. It’s slow, half-broken, unreliable and severely outdated — a sort of “black box” that everyone relies upon, but nobody really knows what...
We often see design principles as rigid guidelines that dictate design decisions. But actually, they are an incredible tool to rally the team around a shared purpose — and document the values and beliefs that an organization embodies.
They align teams and inform decision-mak...
We often assume that the safest way to build user trust is through transparency. We show users what happens, we explain the rationale behind decisions, we break down outcomes into step-by-step instructions that make sense. That's how we make products feel more reliable and t...
As designers, often we can't speed up interactions for technical reasons. But we can reduce the perceived waiting time, which is often way more important than the actual duration.
But how do we reduce the frustration of waiting? Let's explore a couple of options and UX guide...
So what's the difference between combobox, multiselect, listbox and dropdown? While all these UI components might appear similar, they serve different purposes. The choice often comes down to the number of available options and their visibility.
Let's see how they differ, wh...
Design is often an exercise in resilience. Our products must work for people in any life situations they find themselves. A path there always lies through accessible, inclusive design — that makes it more difficult to make mistakes.
One frequently overlooked condition is dem...
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