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u/CombatWombat1212

▲ 8 r/uxcareerquestions

Lacking Career Direction [X-Post from r/UXDesign]

I've recently been laid off and i'm struggling to find direction. I'm sad that my niche might not exist anymore and i'm looking for some support and advice if possible.

My Background

- 4 Year Bachelors in interaction design from a good school.
- 4 month UX internship during school, small start-up
- 1 year frontend dev with some ui/ux responsibilities, small start-up, in crypto
- 2 Years at a design agency, ui/ux/frontend designing and building wordpress-killer type sites with next and headless CMSs. Nothing super feature-driven in a backend sense, more content driven with a focus on brand presence, aesthetics, clear communication, scalability and a self-serve future for the client.

The Problem

I feel like I'm at a crossroads right now where I'm being told by some of my peers that I might have to make a choice between my coding skills and my design skills. Which for me would mean dropping frontend dev. I'm just not interested in becoming full stack, I'm more interested in design.

They tell me that UX/Frontend is a less important niche now than broader ux/design skills, or deeper dev skills. But then I have others telling me that being multidisciplinary between dev and design can be very desirable for agencies with more creative work!

Outside of my career I love 3D art and visuals, producing music, and human connection/mental health.

Interests

In that last job I was the whole web creation pipeline in one person. From client interviews, to distilling findings, to wireframing, to presentations and critiques, to hi fi design, to final development and launch. Everything except supporting UI design with my team's graphics and brand designer. Sadly that means all of my design research was just competitor analysis and secondary research. But despite not being able to user test, I still applied my UX thinking and design methods all the time to stay sharp and interested in my work. I mostly focused them on clear language writing, info arch / section mapping, interaction design, and of course final dev feel.

I liked that. Quite a lot actually. The cycles between design and dev kept my life interesting. Dev was fun and relaxing with interesting problem solving. Design pushed me in a lot of ways to always want to be better and impress the client with something flashy and useable. It always made me happy to make a client happy.

I love:

- Info arch, section mapping
- Good storytelling through both language and visuals
- Creative problem solving
- Finding fun or interesting ways to elevate a brand's presence
- Unique custom components
- Executing those components in the frontend
- Creative and unique websites
- Working with different brands with new aesthetics and requirements

Dislikes

What I don't like is feeling like a big fish in a small pond. No one around me did what I did. In my whole career I've never had true peers to guide me with code or design review and I'm kinda sick of it. I feel its making me atrophy.

I also hate AI deeply. I avoid it like the plague for the critical thinking side of UX like research interview prep, research synthesis, or design first-passes. I only reach for it to find design reference, add ideas after the design foundation has been laid, accelerate development, prototype and test designs, other mindless stuff, etc.

I hate being my own boss. I really don't want to freelance without gaining more real world industry experience. I feel I'm only learning from myself right now and I want to learn from others.

What Now

I'm scared my niche might not exist anymore. I'm worried I might not be strong enough of a UX/UI designer to excel solely in that, and that my value came from being more of a UX thinker with ui and strong frontend skills. Maybe I'm being hard on myself, but I know things are competitive out there.

Pivoting to pure UX or UX Research could be cool, it was my original passion before finding myself in frontend jobs because I was good at them. But I just don't know anymore. This is coming from a bit of a low point mental health-wise but I just see a future of my brain atrophying with AI if I stay in this industry. I'm here for interesting problems to solve and critical thinking. I want to become a master of my craft and be proud of what I make.

If you have any thoughts or insights on a direction I should lean, or a way to market myself that could help me find the work I'm interested in, or any other general advice, then your help and input is massively appreciated.

Thank you so much for your time even if you just skimmed, and good luck to everyone out there feeling lost right now. I see you, and I know we'll figure it out.

reddit.com
u/CombatWombat1212 — 2 days ago
▲ 12 r/UXDesign

Lacking Career Direction

I've recently been laid off and i'm struggling to find direction. I'm sad that my niche might not exist anymore and i'm looking for some support and advice if possible.

My Background

- 4 Year Bachelors in interaction design from a good school.
- 4 month UX internship during school, small start-up
- 1 year frontend dev with some ui/ux responsibilities, small start-up, in crypto
- 2 Years at a design agency, ui/ux/frontend designing and building wordpress-killer type sites with next and headless CMSs. Nothing super feature-driven in a backend sense, more content driven with a focus on brand presence, aesthetics, clear communication, scalability and a self-serve future for the client.

The Problem

I feel like I'm at a crossroads right now where I'm being told by some of my peers that I might have to make a choice between my coding skills and my design skills. Which for me would mean dropping frontend dev. I'm just not interested in becoming full stack, I'm more interested in design.

They tell me that UX/Frontend is a less important niche now than broader ux/design skills, or deeper dev skills. But then I have others telling me that being multidisciplinary between dev and design can be very desirable for agencies with more creative work!

Outside of my career I love 3D art and visuals, producing music, and human connection/mental health.

Interests

In that last job I was the whole web creation pipeline in one person. From client interviews, to distilling findings, to wireframing, to presentations and critiques, to hi fi design, to final development and launch. Everything except supporting UI design with my team's graphics and brand designer. Sadly that means all of my design research was just competitor analysis and secondary research. But despite not being able to user test, I still applied my UX thinking and design methods all the time to stay sharp and interested in my work. I mostly focused them on clear language writing, info arch / section mapping, interaction design, and of course final dev feel.

I liked that. Quite a lot actually. The cycles between design and dev kept my life interesting. Dev was fun and relaxing with interesting problem solving. Design pushed me in a lot of ways to always want to be better and impress the client with something flashy and useable. It always made me happy to make a client happy.

I love:

- Info arch, section mapping
- Good storytelling through both language and visuals
- Creative problem solving
- Finding fun or interesting ways to elevate a brand's presence
- Unique custom components
- Executing those components in the frontend
- Creative and unique websites
- Working with different brands with new aesthetics and requirements

Dislikes

What I don't like is feeling like a big fish in a small pond. No one around me did what I did. In my whole career I've never had true peers to guide me with code or design review and I'm kinda sick of it. I feel its making me atrophy.

I also hate AI deeply. I avoid it like the plague for the critical thinking side of UX like research interview prep, research synthesis, or design first-passes. I only reach for it to find design reference, add ideas after the design foundation has been laid, accelerate development, prototype and test designs, other mindless stuff, etc.

I hate being my own boss. I really don't want to freelance without gaining more real world industry experience. I feel I'm only learning from myself right now and I want to learn from others.

What Now

I'm scared my niche might not exist anymore. I'm worried I might not be strong enough of a UX/UI designer to excel solely in that, and that my value came from being more of a UX thinker with ui and strong frontend skills. Maybe I'm being hard on myself, but I know things are competitive out there.

Pivoting to pure UX or UX Research could be cool, it was my original passion before finding myself in frontend jobs because I was good at them. But I just don't know anymore. This is coming from a bit of a low point mental health-wise but I just see a future of my brain atrophying with AI if I stay in this industry. I'm here for interesting problems to solve and critical thinking. I want to become a master of my craft and be proud of what I make.

If you have any thoughts or insights on a direction I should lean, or a way to market myself that could help me find the work I'm interested in, or any other general advice, then your help and input is massively appreciated.

Thank you so much for your time even if you just skimmed, and good luck to everyone out there feeling lost right now. I see you, and I know we'll figure it out.

reddit.com
u/CombatWombat1212 — 2 days ago
▲ 3 r/PayloadCMS

Hey y'all! Trying my best to avoid a page flicker with Payload and Posthog. Its been such a headache. Any help would be hugely appreciated. Thanks so much for your time.

I'm using posthog to conduct A/B testing. I'm using Payload CMS 3.0. In my page.tsx route i'm grabbing the cookie like this:

const cookieStore = await cookies()
const phProjectAPIKey = env.NEXT_PUBLIC_POSTHOG_KEY as string
const phCookieName = `ph_${phProjectAPIKey}_posthog`
const phCookie = cookieStore.get(phCookieName)
console.log(phCookie)

Just as a simple check to see what i'm getting. But if i manually delete the cookie in my browser to simulate a new visitor, then on initial run the cookie is undefined. This is a problem because later I rely on their distinct_id in order to pull which A/B variant to use. If its undefined, and i have no distinct_id then i'm just creating a new one with crypto.randomUUID();

like this:

if (!distinctId) {
    newDistinctIdGenerated = crypto.randomUUID();
    distinctId = newDistinctIdGenerated // Use the newly generated ID for flag evaluation
    ;
}
// Build person properties with request context for proper release condition evaluation
const personProperties = {};
// Add request context properties that PostHog uses for release conditions
if (context) {
    // Add URL-related properties
    if (context.url) {
        const urlObj = new URL(context.url);
        personProperties['$current_url'] = context.url;
        personProperties['$host'] = urlObj.hostname;
        personProperties['$pathname'] = urlObj.pathname;
    } else {
        if (context.host) personProperties['$host'] = context.host;
        if (context.pathname) personProperties['$pathname'] = context.pathname;
    }
    // Add any custom headers that might be used in release conditions
    if (context.headers) {
        Object.entries(context.headers).forEach(([key, value])=>{
            personProperties[`$header_${key.toLowerCase().replace(/-/g, '_')}`] = value;
        });
    }
}

So i generate a new distinct_id for them, and move on to create their person and its properties. Right now this is essentially coming straight from a community made Payload CMS plugin for A/B testing which you can find here: https://www.jsdelivr.com/package/npm/payload-ab.

So, on first draw its undefined and we create a random id for the user, and then we get back a flag response based on their id:

const flagResponse = await posthogClient.getFeatureFlag(featureFlagKey, distinctId, {
    personProperties,
    groups: {}
});

My problem though is because of some logic in my layout.tsx, the page route renders more than once when the page starts up. So, first its undefined, and we create a new random ID. Then we get the data back based on that, and it might say 'control' or 'variant' for example. But then since the page component renders more than once, we get a content flicker. On the second draw the page either now has a cookie, or generates a new one again, and either way we run the risk of the new content being swapped out and the full page flickering because we're rolling the dice twice on which A/B variant to load, because we're sending in two different distinct_id's.

The issue comes from the fact that my page.tsx is a server component, but the posthog cookie doesn't get initialized until it mounts here, as suggested by the docs:

export function PostHogProvider({ children }: { children: React.ReactNode }) {
  useEffect(() => {
    posthog.init(process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_POSTHOG_KEY as string, {
      api_host: '/relay-zXAU',
      ui_host: 'https://us.posthog.com',
      person_profiles: 'identified_only',
      defaults: '2025-05-24',
    })
  }, [])


  return <PHProvider client={posthog}>{children}</PHProvider>
}

On every subsequent visit there's no problem because we're able to get a consistent answer back with a consistent distinct_id.

So my question is, what's the way around this? How can I get a consistent distinct_id? Or taking a step back, how can i avoid a content flicker when A/B testing in this situation?

  1. I think because of the logic on my layout.tsx I won't be able to avoid the page rendering twice. So I could cache the distinct id I generate and then, what? Force posthog to use that one rather than making its own? that seems wrong.
  2. I somehow initialize posthog and create the cookie before my A/B code runs? That seems impossible because the docs recommend running it inside of an empty useEffect in a provider, so i assume it needs `window` or something.
  3. I could cache the result I'm getting back so that even if it runs more than once I get the same result? But that's no good because I don't have any kind of identifier to use to save the cached result because having a consistent unique identifier for the user is the whole problem
  4. Delay my page load until the cookie is ready? No one wants to have to do that...

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've tried to include what's relevant but please let me know if you need to see more code. Thanks so much for your time!

u/CombatWombat1212 — 20 days ago