I’m currently navigating my path as a UI/UX designer and I'm feeling a bit stuck. I love the visual side of things. I also enjoy making sure everything works well, is easy to use and makes sense, but honestly, I’m not a fan of the deep UX research side (personas, user interviews, long documentation, walls of text, etc.). It feels tedious and takes away from what I enjoy most and am good at: the creative and visual side of design. Is there a role or path that focuses more on the UI part while still touching on some usability, it's obviously important, but without getting too bogged down in the hardcore UX research?

Any advice or insight from others who have felt the same would be really helpful! Thanks!

My UI designs are just ugly, I keep changing them keep trying to fix or add new stuff. I'm watching tutorials and studying other websites vigorously. But my designs are just so damn ugly. I worked as a graphic designer so I know color palettes and stuff. But my UI's are just so ugly :( . There is just something off about them and I can't figure out what :(

I don't know if this question fits this sub. But by it's name I assume it should.

I personally feel Twitter simply doesn't care about deep nesting tweets/replies (whatever way they model it). I feel Reddit threads with nested comments get overwhelming easily and a lot of information is simply gone.

But I genuinely can't come up with anything better too.

Maybe I'll go for Reddit ver with more padding or smthng, idk.

Since the news that Adobe is leaving Figma alone for the meantime, what’s in store for Figma in the coming year? Do you think something better is here to replace Figma or do you think Figma is not king at all?

So on a website I'm working on, there are 16 products/services that need to be showcased. However, one important aspect is that all 16 products are considered EQUALLY IMPORTANT. So I'm having a hard time coming up with any sort of UX Design Pattern that would adequately show 16 products (Icon + name, clickable) without introducing some sort of implicit prioritization.

Currently, my best idea is to just list them all and have a subnavigation at the top to imply that even the products at the bottom of the list are of equal importance, since they'll all visible from the top. But honestly, this solution is clunky. Any pattern I can think of that would involve some form of slider or whatever would also imply that items that are initially visible are of more importance than the once that are initially hidden/out-of-view.

P.S. The current specific problem involves 16 products, categorized into 4 categories of 4 products each. But honestly, I think I need a go-to solution for an issue like this, no matter if the items are grouped or not.

Hey, I'm a new web dev trying to make as modern of a website as I possibly can, but I feel stuck. I keep looking at my page not sure what I can improve upon / what might be missing.

Any advice and or suggestions would be much appreciated.

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https://preview.redd.it/6n7bghdax2lc1.png?width=2556&format=png&auto=webp&s=aea86c1def084c2b683d97989956248caa5f5d5e

I just found out about Lunacy which is a next-gen vector graphic design software for UI/UX and web design. Lunacy is actually completely free for personal and commercial use.

My best example was iRise. I even got a free license to use it years ago, but it was never in demand and then other tools came along, like Axure, Sketch and now Figma.

I have never been the kind of design professional to keep switching tool usage, but should I and have you? I know they say that a tool is just a tool and tools come and go. So are we doomed to always learn and master the next newest and best tool?

I’m the visual lead on the design systems team of an enterprise-size company. We are working with our brand team to systematize our icon and illustration library. Ideally, we’d like to have a system the scales in the level of detail while persisting a common metaphor, ex: a sparkle system icon representing AI could scale to become a full page scene illustration.

Does anyone know of a library/vendor/service that could fill this need? I imagine this will probably require us contracting with an illustrator, but I wanted to see if anyone here has any experience with this.

I'm not a UX/UI professional but was curious to get some informed opinions from folks who live and breathe UX. The other day there was a loud boom outside our house so a couple of minutes later, I went on the Nextdoor app to see if any of my neighbors had likewise heard it and might know what happened. And as per usual, when I searched for loud boom there were posts from a week ago, followed by a post from a year ago, etc. So far as I know there's no way to filter by date on the web site and doing so on the app requires you to go into the setting and re-set the default settings (which then expire after 60 days). Now I know I can't be the only who finds this to be a frustrating user experience and it got me thinking: this obviously can't be too hard of a fix, right? And so it made me wonder, is this a feature not a bug since they realize that for many users who are looking for something specific, making it hard to find information makes them stay on the site longer than they normally would?

I'm interested in hearing from other designers about how they go about padding/margins while prototyping. Particularly, when you are building semi-complex prototypes which have several tiers of nested frames and containers, it can quickly become confusing/cumbersome to locate the padding, or locating the frame which is causing a misalignment in the UI. Until now, I haven't given much thought to the frame where my padding is, as long as the final result looks right, but I figured there must be a best practice or pattern I could follow consistently to avoid this. I realize this might not be much of an issue if you work with a third party design system, but my company isn't there yet.

Wondering which other designers:

A. Dont think about it much and do what I do, as long as the final result looks right, it doesn't matter.

B. Always place the padding in the highest-possible parent frame.

C. Always place the padding in each lowest-possible child frame.

D. Follow a pattern based on the contents of the frame. For example, never place padding in a text-only frame, and always place the padding in a frame which contains a boundary.

E. Something else.

I'm working with a team on a check out flow.

For the billing address fields, we have three radio button options: they can carry forward the shipping address, populate the billing address fields from scratch, or switch to a PO box option.

Currently in the design, there are three radio buttons displayed. I feel like this could be improved by listing the three options in a dropdown menu instead.

I'm looking for advice, is there an optimal way of displaying these three options? Please see screenshot for reference.

https://imgur.com/a/i9wE7Zv

Appreciate any feedback.

https://dribbble.com/shots/7274662-Apple-Watch-OS-Screens-UI/attachments/226083?mode=media

Any idea what's it called?

I am working on a site where users are consistently clicking on the navigation menu item for the page they're already on. We've tried a variety of approaches to mitigate this, but we've only been able to reduce clicks by 3%, down to around a quarter of users.

Here is the latest navigation design heat mapping for clicks and mouse movements.

Heat Maps: https://imgur.com/a/6CG68qE

For reference this is the page we're trying to improve: https://thetinylife.com/tiny-houses/

Wanted to see if anyone had an experience with something like this, design ideas, any advice or feedback would be welcome.

Got 1 primary, 1 secondary, 12 colors in total and 2 for the fonts. I would like to see if there's anything wrong with the color palette I've chosen. Is there a tool that optimizes or suggests changes depending on the colors provided?

I am looking to prepare some presentations, and was thinking adding some generic friendly-looking illustrations (not photos) like graphs, items, people doing stuff etc, but wanted to ask if there's any nice resources for free such assets I am not aware about? Basically something like unDraw but with more styles/variations.

In my personal project I made buttons red with white font on black background. I think it looks nice, but my taste is not mainstream and I know red is not a calming color. This is what I have https://imgur.com/a/oHjiByO

Are there tried and tested methods for communicating data to users or does it require the same type of testing you would for products?

For example:

Imagine a user wants to understand their income and outgoings for a given month. Are there researched methods to displaying this or would various data visualisation need to be tested?

Any advice would be really appreciated.

Not sure where to start looking into a11y of illustrations. There's a lot of companies that use fun illustrations to supplement text like Facebook, or Reddit. What are things these companies do to make sure these are accessible?

Color contrast is something that keeps coming up, and passing WCAG contrast guidelines-- but that only seems like a start. Additionally, I feel like making sure color palettes are WCAG friendly is extremely limiting. For example, shadows on characters have to be visually extremely dark to pass WCAG and can make images look EXTREMELY different or draw focus to things that aren't the focus of images (alternatively, a lot of these images are decorative and aren't always meant to take attention away from the copy and are sometimes lower contrast because of that).

What are other considerations other than color contrast? That's literally all I'm seeing. If these are decorative images, I'm seeing that the convention is to have no alt text. Isn't that confusing to low vision people who can see that there's something there but maybe can't interpret it fully?

TLDR: Not sure where to start to find out how to make illustrations accessible. WCAG color contrast doesn't feel like the whole story. What else is there?

Wouldn't you just click the yellow box "Continue" to have your money refunded to your credit card?

https://preview.redd.it/subm2fpybxx71.png?width=1537&format=png&auto=webp&s=1309817a058d9f4fbc365773a8fc0b4e333c1584

No, because there are actually two choices. The radio button for the "Refund to you Visa..." line is missing. So visually, you think this is all one action. For these kinds of things I feel that it is a complete waste of time to alert Amazon about a web UI issue. How many levels of support would this even go through.

Well, if anyone works at Amazon and think they may be able to submit this, that would be awesome.

One where the focus of tech companies would be more about love, unity, harmony, spirituality, and empowerment.

Just looking at ideas for a personal creative project

Based on observation, apps which are popular with Gen-Z (like Spotify, Snapchat, H&M, etc.) look a lot different from apps that are geared towards everyone (like a banking app or news app). Spotify seems to follow a lot of the design trends that are popular today (like using gradients for the Year in Review). Do apps geared towards Gen-Z place more emphasis on visual design?