A practitioner cuts through the job title confusion with some real talk about the role.
Product designers blend UX research, visual design, and strategic thinking about business goals and technical constraints. The role differs from UX designers who focus on research and flows, or UI designers who specialize in visual polish, by owning end-to-end product decisions.
Honest look at why the gap between Figma and browser is often the designer's problem to fix.
The article identifies missing hover states, inconsistent spacing tokens, unclear responsive behavior, and ambiguous type scales as common handoff failures. Most problems stem from designers not annotating edge cases or testing how components behave in real browsers and different viewport sizes.
Industrial design history holds lessons digital designers still haven't fully absorbed.
Industrial designers pioneered user research, iterative prototyping, and designing for manufacturing constraints decades before digital products. The article highlights how Bauhaus principles, Dieter Rams' design axioms, and ergonomic testing methods translate directly to interface work but are often rediscovered rather than studied.
Concrete guidance on telling the story of your design process in a case study.
Strong case studies frame the problem clearly, show your specific contributions versus team work, and walk through research insights that shaped design decisions. Include measurable outcomes, explain tradeoffs you made, and use visuals that demonstrate process—not just polished final screens—to prove your thinking.
A practitioner steps back to assess where AI assistants actually stand today.
Current AI assistants excel at narrow, scripted tasks but fail at context-switching, proactive help, and understanding ambiguous requests. The essay argues most assistants are still glorified search interfaces, and true utility requires better memory, reasoning across sessions, and integration with real workflows.
A career-switcher applies real UX process to her own portfolio — eating the dog food.
The designer conducted user interviews with hiring managers, tested navigation patterns with card sorting, and iterated on layouts based on feedback about readability and project hierarchy. The case study documents research findings, wireframe evolution, and how critique sessions shaped the final portfolio structure.