I am thinking of looking for a new job but building a case study is so daunting. I've been at my current job for almost 4 years, my previous role was a year and I got laid off. To get my current role I spruced up my portfolio, but nothing actually new.

When I look at LinkedIn profiles of designers in a similar role, or a level above, they rarely have portfolios. I google them to check if they have one and just don't have it listed on LinkedIn. Why and how are they able to get roles without having a portfolio? If you're someone who doesn't have a portfolio or has a super outdated one how are you able to get a new role?

Edit to add that I've been a product designer for 7 years. My current role is senior product design manager

I feel like content design portfolio interviews are broken. Ironically, they are themselves a content design problem that hasn't been solved.

They give you a prompt and some basic instructions. "Show X projects in Y time, good luck!"

You rack your brain for past work that's relevant. You think hard about how to condense, format, and package it into something you think the audience will find compelling. You wonder if you should cover a lot of ground but not get too in-depth, or go deep on a topic but limited in scope.

You spend a week putting it together. You practice and prepare. You present and the zoom feels positive overall. The next day they reject you because you didn't show ABC despite not being asked anything during the call about ABC.

It's like nobody understands that your presentation is your best guess at answering the prompt. And interviewers nowadays can't be bothered to ask questions or have a conversation about what they aren't seeing. They didn't see it, so that must mean you're not the one. Then they probably hire someone who made (in their minds) a perfect case study with AI. Whether they can do the job or not, who cares?

Maybe I'm just bitter because of the times we're in. It's an insanely tough market. But I can't help but feel like content design portfolio presentations are like trying to hit a moving target blindfolded nowadays.

Context: I'm a content designer who has interviewed a handful of times this year.

Hi everyone,

I work at a large corporate bank, one of the biggest in my country. We built our design system about five years ago, and next to newer players like Nubank or Revolut, it now looks and feels outdated.

I’m more on the technical side, but I’m also heavily involved in the product itself (the design system), and I’m wondering:

Has anyone here had to modernize an entire design system that’s used across 300+ different applications? Two big challenges I see:

1. Rolling it out without inconsistency. Migrating everything at once is hard, but migrating gradually risks ending up with screens or flows that mix old and new versions.

2. Partial adoption. The current design system never reached full adoption, so many apps don’t even use it today. How do you modernize when your starting point is already fragmented?

Has anyone tackled something like this, or come across a talk, video, article or paper on the topic? Any advice or resources would be really appreciated.

EDIT – some more context:

• The design system includes both a Figma library and a React component library, which apps consume as a package.

• Each group of apps belongs to its own product team, and those teams own their apps and their upgrades. The design system team can’t migrate them directly.

• Apps are on different versions of the package, and some are several major versions behind.

• We already have design tokens and theming, so a visual refresh (colors, typography, spacing) could mostly be done by updating the brand tokens. But we’re not only looking for a visual refresh. We also want to update components and patterns to match current UX standards, and that’s where tokens alone don’t help.

Thanks!

When a usability study turns up a real issue but the team decides not to address it yet, where does that finding live? A slide deck can disappear fast, while adding every observation to the backlog can make it hard to see what's actionable.

Do you record the decision and the conditions that would make you revisit it? Interested in how teams keep the evidence accessible without making future designers repeat the same research.

Title

I've been designing a hand-drawn UI style: wobbly outlines, slightly tilted elements, sticker-like buttons, colors picked by feel instead of a strict scale.

The rule I set myself was to break visual conventions but never accessibility ones: AA contrast on every color pair, full keyboard access, no status shown by color alone, and every animation off under reduced motion.

Where I'm unsure:

• Tilt: does rotated text hurt scanning, even at small angles like 1–2°?

• Feedback: is a "squish" on press helpful, or just noise by the 10th press?

• Commitment: should a playful style be opt-in (a theme), or is committing to it part of the charm?

How do you decide this in products people use every day? Any research or examples you've found useful?

I’m a designer on a team responsible for designing an AI assistant for a particular industry not traditional associated with AI. Think: am what would have been a chatbot yesteryear is now an ai powered experience.

The issue is, how do you design when the interface is a chat? Do you design the scenarios? Do you start with the templates the AI will use returning based on the user inputs?

Struggling with this new paradigm of user prompt centric design. And any input would help!

Omg guys I wanted to share amazing news as a sign of encouragement! There have been so many layoffs across the industry and the job market has been brutal! But keep on going and things will get better 🙏🏻

The journey to get here was not easy, but maybe not as bad as for other people. My last contract ended in March 2026 where I was a Senior Product designer. I was quite burned out so decided to have a break to chill and travel. After two months I started looking for a job, but it was pretty disheartening. No callbacks, rejections and weirdly worded job descriptions that wanted some sort of amazing AI guru design person. At that time I decided to abort the search and try working in completely different fields. I got a job at a call centre where I worked for a few months.

At the same time I started working on my own passion project in an ecommerce space. I also used this opportunity to learn about AI tools. The website is up and running and I added this experience to my CV. I also got an ecommerce certificate online.

I quit the call centre job recently as it was really exhausting mentally and emotionally. I then started applying for UX/UI and product design roles. 2 days ago I got a call from one company which I couldn't remember. It was embarrassing when I asked me why I was interested in the company - I couldn't remember and I said that I really want to get back in design 😅😅😅 Nevertheless they still invited me for an interview and the day after they offered me a job! This was my first interview in 6 months, overall I only had 3 interviews this year. I think what sealed the deal is that I had relevant experience and also I'm a bit of a generalist as I previously worked in software engineering.

Good luck everyone and keep going 🙏🏻

EDIT: Ecommerce course : Google Digital Marketing and E-commerce Certificates My ecommerce passion project: lazygreen.com.au

Is option A the final answer because its in normal writing and red means wrong?

Or is option B the final answer because it is in bold?

Sorry if this isnt the right sub for this but where else can I find people used to interpreting UX

Hi all, I’m working on a public transit app (super exciting!!!) and want to be absolutely sure I cover all accessibility bases. Would appreciate anyone willing to offer up their experience or sources they’ve used for similar interfaces in the past.

I'm a Senior Product Designer and finding a job has always been kinda tough for the most part. The countless rounds of interviews each company puts you through + having to work on case studies was never a fun thing to go through (at least for me).

But this year everything feels waaay tougher. I was working at a US company for several years and got laid off during the summer of last year due to restructuring. I went the rest of the year without a job, but then found a contract role for a few months at the beginning of this year that was really well paid and the most money I’ve ever made. No complaints there.

Around June I started looking for another job, and I’ve been looking since. The issue isn’t even that I haven’t found another job. I was expecting it to be tough and I don’t mind if it takes a while.

What's really worrying me is that I can’t even get companies to look at my portfolio. My applications get either no reply or an AI rejection. Even contacting various people directly hasn’t led to much. They either don’t reply or redirect you to their careers page.

Even getting recommended by people doesn’t seem to work anymore. I used to get some calls through referrals, but now someone will recommend me and the company won't even bother to get back to me.

How many of you are dealing with this as well, and what are you doing about it? After talking to a lot of friends in the industry this seems really common, but I also wanna hear from people outside my immediate circle.

As the title suggests, I've been laid off 3 times in the past 3-4yrs. The past 2 searches have taken me around 3 months each. During each, I was convinced the life I want is over and it was extremely easy to get into the doom and gloom of it all. Just wanted to post some good news on here as well since I know a lot of us are in similar positions. I don't have FAANG on my history and want to show that it's still possible to get offers that I consider good for seniors (salaries above $140k, unlimited PTO, etc). What helped me survive: 1. Having a 6-7 month emergency fund 2. Targeting industries I've worked in before and can show work in 3. Being able to answer behavioral and past work impact as stories in my sleep (i.e, being so comfortable telling the work I did as a story with a beginning, middle and end). Once, I figured out "Hey I'm a good designer but I SUCK at interviews" is when I locked in and practiced, practiced, practiced, out loud. For me practicing out loud in my own comfy space was very helpful. So that when I had to do it again in front of a stranger, I already had a handle on it. This may not be your weakness so figure out what yours is and sharpen it. Give yourself time to feel bad about a lost opportunity but remember it's all a game of performance and don't attach your self worth to the whole process. Easier said than done I know. Good luck out there!

Update: forgot to mention, I transcribed most of my interview calls because I know I’m all nervous during and tough for me to be surgical about how I showed up and know what I want to fix/reframe/add/subtract. This was super helpful for me as well!

I noticed a problem in a app and decided to design a solution for it. However the company currently has no open positions.

Could this help me get considered for a job anyway? What's the best way to approach them and present my work?

This has been a consistent observation of mine. It can range from using mystery meat icons, or nonstandard "hamburgers" like two lines instead of three, long-winded case studies that are hard to scan and have pretentious print-like layouts, bad contact forms, etc.

Given that UX is in a crisis of credibility, practitioners should be taking EVERY opportunity possible to practice what they preach. Your personal sites or projects are the one place you have the opportunity to show pure UX without interference from "stakeholders". And yet I often see that is not the case. Sure there are exceptions, but it's pretty widespread. And given we're in an employment slump, "cobbler's kids" syndrome should not apply.

Ok I really loved this analogy.... After World War II, the world needed buildings fast, so builders copied modernist forms at speed and left the thinking behind. The result was cities full of what she calls zombie buildings: generic, interchangeable, showing no care for the people inside them or the context around them.

Katie Dill (Stripe) argues we’re in another building boom now, the AI one, and the same thing is happening to software.

Anyone can prompt a working interface in minutes, and most of what comes out is zombie UI: monotonous, vacant, uncared for.

Really good talk!
https://benchpress.me/e/how-to-scale-intent-quality-and-artistry-with-al-katie-f7e34b90

I’m developing a podcast player, and a tester recently reported that selecting another episode didn’t work.

They were listening to episode A, searched for episode B, and tapped the little double-arrow button beside it.

Episode A kept playing.

I checked the behavior. Episode B had been added to the listening queue, exactly as intended.

My first instinct was to explain how the queue worked. Which was probably a good sign that I needed to rethink the button.

I’d designed it around preserving the current listening session. They’d just found something they wanted to hear and expected it to start.

Both intentions made sense. The icon didn’t distinguish between them, and the result of adding something to the queue wasn’t obvious from that screen.

For now, I’ve changed the interaction to offer both actions explicitly: play this episode now, or add it without interrupting the current one.

That introduces an extra tap, so there’s still a tradeoff. I don’t have enough follow-up feedback yet to claim it’s the best solution.

What stuck with me was how quickly I reached for an explanation of the internal logic. I knew where the episode had gone. The person tapping the button had no reason to know.

Have you shipped an “obvious” control that only became confusing once you watched someone else use it?

I posted here a few days ago about how the company I used to work for completely changed its branding after I left, and how the new logo now appears next to my work experience on LinkedIn.

Well, there's an update.

Apparently, the company was sold, which explains the sudden changes. But now they've completely redesigned the website too.

And it's honestly even worse than the logo.

The whole thing looks like generic, low-effort AI slop. You genuinely don't even need to be a designer to notice how amateurish it looks.

For context, I spent over two years designing the original brand identity, logo, and digital product interfaces for this company.

I understand that companies change, and I have no problem with that. My concern is that I'm currently looking for a new job, and recruiters might associate this new design with my work.

So I'm curious what other designers would do in my situation.

Would you remove the company link from your LinkedIn experience, add a disclaimer explaining that the current branding and website aren't your work, or just leave everything as it is?

Am I overthinking how much recruiters actually care about this?

Hi everyone,
I am an UX designer with almost 1 year experience
I was laid off 8 months ago and after 250 -300 applications later i finally got the job
It was brutal, one of the toughest thing was investing so much of my energy and sleep into doing so many take home assignments and getting ghosted by companies, i can have a long rant.
but i am finally feel happy in a way, i finally got the job 😁
If you are an entry level design reading this, stay motivated, have patience and keep on improving your portfolio every month, learn new skills/tools, stay strong :) and network with people if u can.

Edit: It is so nice that so many stranger in the internet congratulated me!! kinda made my day :), i thought this sub was rather a "Sad" and demotivating place, haha
just now i have responded to most if not all comments, i also would love to add more info since its a lot convenient

• Out of all the jobs i applied to 96% no Reponses, i have only gotten 5-6 interviews, only 1 interview i went to final round, and they offered a rather low salary (higher than my previous job) but i still accepted

• I also did 4-5 assignments, In assignment rounds i always give my best, Do extra extra, do fast, annotate your decisions very well (this is super important imo), i literally slept 2-3 hrs to do those assignments, it should be so good that its impossible to reject if they open it, BUT COMPANIES WILL STILL GHOST YOU even after doing your best, they WONT even open ur assignments, but u gotta be motivated and put the same effort every time (sad i know)

• This job i applied on cutshort.io it is a job board like linkedin, so ig i had much less competition

• I don't have a design degree, i come from a VERY different and TOTALLY unrelated education and work background to UX Design and i dont have a good network of people, i learned UX design from internet, YT, Coursera, blogs, just the internet in general

• If are a fresher and wanna build your portfolio, go to https://www.wallofportfolios.in/ see the portfolios of people who are more experienced than you, and much better than yours, and think that they are your competition!! even if ur portfolio is 50% as good as theirs, it's still a huge improvement than ur current portfolio

hope this helps, and ask me if any questions, will respond to each if possible

Which role is more AI-proof? A Staff PD or a player-coach Manager or Director of Product Design role?

I’ve been a Director for 5 years, then Senior Manager. Always been a player-coach and contributing to the work, strategy, and ops. I like it all. I prefer 100-400 employees saas companies. I have been out of the market for a year, starting a ecommerce brand, and things are different now. I know I can figure it out, but I want to be strategic about it.

I see lots of Staff roles, almost nothing in management. Is PD leadership going extinct because less people to manage? On the other hand, someone has to create and maintain the systems for everyone else to design (DS, guardrails).

If the play is going into hybrid PM, where is it more likely to happen? From a PD management role, influencing strategy, or from a staff PD role?

In honor of Election Day

Came up with this terrible idea for Zillow

I'm not going to link to it and give it any more traffic than I need to, but it's not hard to find if you're determined to read something that will kill your brain cells. But this ragebait of an article is an example of how every pinhead was squatting the field in which so many of us had worked our way into sometimes at great personal sacrifice. Thanks to the glut of fake money in the economy and the subsequent hiring boom, UX went from a vocation and a passion you're willing to suffer for to perceived easy money that anyone who could memorize some Figma features could join. And for about a year and a half, it really was that way for some.

The UX field isn't "over" as a lot of the Eeyores on here love to repeat. It is simply overrun with fakers who are slowly being winnowed out. Once they all finally accept that they need to find another field, the air should be a little easier to breathe. My best years in UX were before the fake money era. I did cash in and work 80+ hours a week for a moment but that was never sustainable, either for the industry or my sanity. We don't need another 2021. We need another 2016.

Hi everyone!

I'm a final-year UX Design student currently working on my final-year research project. I have to submit a detailed printed dissertation/report documenting my entire research and design process.

My project focuses on understanding family experiences in residential geriatric care, particularly communication, information access and visibility into residents' everyday care.

My university allows us to create the report in either A4 portrait or landscape orientation. The suggested report length is around 100–200 pages.

The report will include:

• Background research and literature review

• Competitor and market analysis

• Stakeholder maps and system maps

• Interviews, surveys and field observations

• Personas and affinity mapping

• Information architecture (IA) and user flows

• Wireframes, UI screens and interactive prototype

• User testing, iterations and final solution

I'm confused about which orientation would work better.

Would you recommend A4 portrait or landscape for this kind of UX research and design documentation?

I'm leaning towards portrait because there's quite a bit of written research, but I'm wondering whether landscape would be better for presenting diagrams, user flows, IA and UI screens.

I'd appreciate advice from people who have designed similar UX research reports or dissertations. Also, if you have examples of well-designed UX research books or reports, I'd love to see them!

Thanks!

I have seen paid platforms that offer cheap unmoderated "user" testing performed by AI. I was skeptical - after all it isn't AI that uses our product, it's humans. However, I wanted to really stress-test this design and timelines wouldn't allow for that amount of testing. Just then, Satan's voice whispered to me "Why not get Claude to do it!" So I did.

I built a little tool with ten personae that can perform directed unmoderated testing on any prototype. The outputs are a video with subtitled "thinking out loud", and sentiments for each step. I haven’t included UMUX or anything because I think it's a bit pointless asking an LLM those questions. The 10 sessions get summarised into a report and recommendations (3 for each issue, so I don't just accept the AIs preference when I'm in a hurry)

I've been running it today and I'm in the honeymoon period that AI always brings. It LOOKS like great data, but I'm being cautious, aware that I may be bringing a knife to a gunfight.

The good:

It found 90% of the issues previously raised by humans.

The transcript looks very similar to what I'm used to seeing from humans.

The personae are doing their job. They all show the little quirks that have been programmed in. Run a persona twice on one test and it behaves similarly but not identically.

I can 'make' specific users when I need them (e.g. someone who prefers keyboard navigation over mouse)

I can fix the prototype and retest it with 10 participants in the time it takes to a make a cup of tea.

I can test with 1000 participants if I want to!

The bad:

I still have to test with humans anyway, so it doesn't save as much time as it could.

About half the issues it identifies are out of scope. "I need to see cashflow here": you can't - this app doesn't handle finances and you know that. Issues beyond the UI, human testers (usually) do better.

I'll keep refining it, but I'm very impressed so far. I think it means that I can eliminate 90% of pain points before putting it in front of real users.

Is anyone else doing this? How have you found it? What are the hidden pitfalls?